is making an extenal usb cooling plate possible?

so i was thinking lately how cool it would be to design an external cooling plate that could go on the back of your laptop and have fans screwed on it to use as a cooling station then program soft ware to operate the fans. can any one tell me if this is possible and if anyone has done this before show me your design.

i allso thought of totally removing the back plate of my lap top and making a copper plate and use that as the new laptop back plate and put metal heat sinks around the plate on the out side then install fans near the open portions of the CPU and video card. this way making a the lap top completely open to the fans.

of course the new copper plate would be netted like the fans installations on a desktop case. this way you can screw the fans in any ware. but this is just an idea i have no tools or supplies yet but if anyone has done something like this before let me know. thanks

 

There isn't a lot of point to making it USB, unless your USB ports are getting hot.

I think your 2nd idea is a great one and could work very well implemented correctly. You would not need fans to see a big improvement in temps if you make an entire backplate out of copper.
This is almost perfect:
Copper Expanded Metal Mesh Screen 18G 5/8" - 12" X 96" | eBay

But I think you need something denser.
If you think about it, you don't actually need a mesh, you just need holes where the laptop fans are. So, its probably a good idea to use a thick sheet of copper and cut just a few holes in it. The only place you really need to put external fans is under the laptop fans intakes.

There is another element you've overlooked thats needed for it to be truly effective however. You'd need to actually connect the copper to the heatsinks somehow. If you could find copper blocks of the right thickness, you could solder one side to the inside of the copper backplate, and use thermal pads directly on top of the heatsinks to connect it.
I think this is a GREAT idea as a matter of fact. You could see a HUGE difference in temps and get some major overclocking headroom.

As far as people having done this before, yes people have definitely bought aluminum mesh to replace their backplates. But, its always been thin mesh and not connected to the heatsink therefore not used for actual thermal dissipation.

 

About the USB fan cooler, this has been done before and there are a lot of retail products like that out there: Amazon.ca: usb notebook cooler
Although they aren't controllable by software >.<

The copper back plate is a great idea, but it would probably be very expensive to do a thick enough plate out of solid copper. Aluminum would likely be a lot cheaper.

 

I was thinking about copper back plate and connecting it to the heatsink sometime ago, but I scratched the idea, since I'm too afraid of static electricity (I don't want to risk any of the components) This, and I couldn't find properly sized sheet. Though I think, that even if it's not connected, it would still bring some improvement (I'm still afraid of static electricity even in this case). Someone should bring some light about this, I think that it would be useful for the OP as well.

 

well that is a understandable reason to be nervous about doing this but if the back plate was made well to the point were it was able to screw into the laptop the right way. so if it was possible to make a cage like material that you could screw fans on static electricity could only come from an outside source and according to Michael Faraday this concept of being afraid of static electricity shouldn't be a problem since the back plate is caged.

 

yah thanks for the submission but you inspired me a little. now what you do you think if per say make depending on how a plastic back plate reacts to hot liquid wax. you could make a mold of your back plate then use the wax mold to forge a copper back plate conter part of the origional plastic back plate and thier you have it a professionally made copper copyd now all you need is a thousand dollar kiln and some tools and a ton of wax oh and not to mention some metal working skill of year of experience. lol

 

My homebrew solution.

Seriously though, just raising the rear of the notebook so that your existing vents have more breathing room does wonders (if your notebook has bottom vents/fans like mine). No need to get all fancy with fans.