HP ProBook 4720s hot spot under touchpad

Hai.
I recently bought HP proBook 4720s and I have noticed, that there is a spot under touchpad that gets pretty hot when playing some games for a while. I checked Aida64, but no temperatures are higher than 60C.

Anyway, I opened my laptop a little, GPU and CPU cooler is seperated from this hotspot. I kinda think its chipset that heating down there, but I wanted to ask - is there any chance of getting tempreratures down? I just wanna be sure that nothing wil heat up and break any soldering or something.

Maybe someone have opened this model and can provide me with pictures or smth with whats under the hood down there?

 

i guess the hard disk is under there

 

Nope, hard disk is few inches to the right from the hotspot.

 

So, noone have disassembled 4720s yet?

 

Same problem here.

The hotspot under the touchpad.

It works fine, until suddenly fan starts spinning like crazy.
I run the SpeedFan monitoring and it revealed "Temp3" being 85 deg. C.

Questions:
Does anyone know what exactly is under the touchpad?
What 'temp3' is referring to?

mku

 

What specs u have?
Mine comes with i3 380M, and there is no problem with any temps. Maybe the problems is that u got i5, which consumes more power and need more cooling.

 

>>Mine comes with i3 380M
Mine is i3 330M

IMHO hotspot does not have much common with the processor - processor is located under 'QWAS' keys.

Sometimes the sudden fan burst manages to cool the 'Temp3' to 50C, but often it stays on 85C despite fan spinning 100% and the temperature of air blown outside dropping to lukewarm after 10-15 seconds.

 

The hotspot is chipset - at least thats what I thought after 70% disassembling my 4720s. Its heatsink isnt connected with fan in any way - palmrest and laptops bottom panel is used as a heatsink to cool chipset. Mine never goes higher than 60C - even after 8 hours of playing World of Warcraft or Gothic III.

 

Hello again. I still havent resolved this problem.
I'm not 100% sure that it's really a problem, but having constant 50-60C on my chipset (HM57) is kinda worrying me.
Its not very high, but still - remembering the old crappy Pavilions that used to pass out after a year and a half while having same 60C temperatures is what made me think of this - these ProBooks arent so old so I can clearly know that nothing gonna happen.
Is there any chance of getting the temperatures down? CPU temperature isnt really worrying me - its not that high, but chipset, even while idleing is keeping the temperature at ~55C.
I have looked around for a while, but I havent found any chipset updates that could resolve this.
Basically disassembling the laptop and changing thermal grease wouldnt do much good imo, -5C is max I could get even if I use some of high end thermal greases.
Any ideas how should I act? I would really like to get the temps down to ~40C as it normally is in other laptops with same chipset.

 

i disassemble my 4720s couple of timed to replace the hard drive and memory.

once u take off the switch cover, keyboard and palm rest, u will see that spot...

it seems like that is where chipset is located. it has its own heatsink which is not connected to the cpu and graphic heatsink pipe. i think thats why that spot usually feels very hot but only at the bottom...

 

Ya I kinda though of that. Anyway 60C seems a lot for a chipset.

 

Disassembled.
Chipset's heatsink looks like from a desktop motherboard. Small aluminium crap over chipset. Changed thermal grease from original "made in China" thermal pad to Zalman STG2 - will change it to Coollaboratory Ultra, ICD7 or smth in that level, when I'll get one.
Difference between default thermal pad and Zalman STG2 is about 3C when stress test have been running for an hour. Kinda crappy result imo.

 

So, a little bump from me.
Situation still havent changed. Hotspot is still hot and I got basically no idea where to look for specific temperatures, cuz Aida64 (a.k.a Everest) says that highest temp I got is 55C and its some kind of unnamed device.
I still know, that 55 or 65C isnt deadly, but still I have seen loads of overheated and dead Pavilions, so I kinda want to make my ProBook as cool as possible.

Maybe any other users have found any solutions? I guess that 4520s users can also share, because motherboards are almost identical (if not completely identical).

P.S. My ProBook 4720s came with i3 380M and ATI 6370M.

 

In addition - few days ago, after pretty long Skyrim maraton I noticed, that Aida64 shows some additional temperatures. I didnt look into it and after system reboot they were gone - I saw only thos usual sensors.
I was like
Any ideas what were thos sensors and why cant I see them normally? I have an idea that maybe there are some additional sensors which are in sleep mode and wakes up when temperatures are raised more than normally, but I dunno about this, because I have retried this Skyrim maraton few times and no additional sensors appeared.

 

your SMBUS controller isn't happy with something.

you can 'probe' them (oo-er) with speedfan to make them be re-recognised by windows, but they will be gone next reboot.

I get this behaviour with the 8740W the intel smbus controller disappears from the system hardware list on device manager.

Sio

 

Ok, thanks for info, will look into it asap. Any ideas of making this re-recognised effect permanent?

 

well it was broken by a bios update, and still hasn't been fixed, so no permanent ones as of yet, sadly.

the bios will still listen to the temp readings on the SMBUS, so don't worry about thermal destruction, it will still shutdown before it kills the chip.

Sio

 

So, after some heavy work in Xubuntu, I rebooted in Win7 and Aida showed me 2 new sensors - PCH and IMC. PCH seemed to be stuck on 64C - is it posible that PCH sensor was triggered because it heated too much? I guess the PCH is the hotspot under the touchpad.
Also, I checked Intel's page and saw, that PCH can handle temperatures up to 111C, so 64C shouldnt be that much right? But, since the sensor seemed to be stuck on 64C, isnt it possible, that PCH might heat up to 111C without BIOS (and the stuck sensor) noticing it? If that might be true, overheating might kill PCH chip, right?

 

And once again - bump.

Anyone have some new info on this matter?
Tbh, now I'm kinda afraid to work in Xubuntu, cuz the heating up is huge (temp sensors still say ~60-70C, but when I touch the bottom, I feel that its way hotter than while working in Windows), and I dont want to kill any chips.

 

As u can see in attached file, PCH sensor hits 64C (its stuck on that temperature). PCH and IMC sensors appeared only after I worked in Linux for a while and the bottom heated up more than it does while working in Windows.
Meanwhile, PCH sensor have appeared in PC Wizard as well, the difference is, that its 0C there.

I'm pissed off cuz of this crap - any chances of making temps appear normally? What if BIOS also thinks PCH is 64C but actually it heats up to whatever the max temp is and dies? Seems that HP dont give a crap - BIOS updates have stopped at last year's september.