Has anyone reapplied thermal paste yet? (envy 14)

Hello everyone.

I recently reapplied thermal paste (ICdiamond) to my Envy 14 CPU, GPU, and northbridge.

However, while inside and taking things apart I noticed there was a gap between the northbridge and the heatsink, where HP put a nasty thermal pad that I removed.

So I ordered some Arctic Silver adhesive and a copper shim from ebay to try to modify the heatsink and give it better contact with the northbridge.

Has anyone else gone down this road yet or am I the first? Any tips would be helpful before I reopen my laptop again.

If no one has done it I guess I will document it when I do it next week to try to help out other brave people.

 

I think someone did it like way way waaay back when the envy 14 first came out, but we never really heard back from him.


So yeah, tell us how it goes

 

When I get my copper shim and adhesive I will take some pictures of the process.... hope it works out.

I don't know why HP would feel it necessary to use a thermal pad on a premium laptop

 

I have some arctic silver in my IT case .. aka: Fishing tackle box (works for fishing stuff or keeping your cables/ IT tools and extra screws, etc...

I've been thinking of putting some on the CPU, didn't think about the northbridge.

I just don't want to mess anything up, and I'm idling around 30C. so maybe I'll wait.

 

I bought some Arctic Silver 5 while I was waiting for my E14 to ship in anticipation of putting it in the Envy, but the Envy 14's cooling is pretty terrific anyway, so I haven't seen any reason to get around to it yet. Also, the screws in the Envy are pretty tiny, and my smallest Philips isn't quite small enough, and living in China it's a lot harder to find a specialty item like that - even the computer shops couldn't manage to find me a small enough one...

 

you need a PH000 screwdriver for most of the stuff.

which is tiiiny

 

Yeah, luckily I had a set of tiny screwdrivers laying around... some of the screws can be taken out with a bigger philips head, but most are small.

 

Consider using IC Diamond ... it is impressive.

Bronsky

 

Will be waiting to see those pictures, I have been reading for quite a while that HP doesn't properly applies thermal paste, so I will like to see how it is suppose to be.

 

Did you see any improvement in temps from reapplying thermal paste on the CPU and GPU, especially the CPU temps? What were your temps at idle before and after putting on the new thermal paste? What were they at light usage (surfing, Youtube, etc.) before and after?

Also, please keep us up to date with how the Northbridge work goes. Thanks.

 

I wonder about this myself.
I`m using this baby for pretty much everything, and wonder if re-doing this will get my lower temps ...
I do have to unscrew like the whole f. thing
The question is: is it worth it?

 

Unfortunately I did not get good temp readings before installing the new paste but I can tell you think. Before idle on CPU was around 20, after it is the same.

HOWEVER, under load I was hitting upwards of 85C before and now after hours of gaming its 75C max.

Unfortunately I did not look at GPU temps yet. Next time I play some games I will look and see.

I am not sure what the northbridge temp is supposed to be and HWmonitor says it is pretty high, hence me opening it back up to install a copper shim to fill the gap from the old thermal pad. It shipped from ebay today, so hopefully I can do it this weekend and see how it goes.

PS.- opening it up is actually really easy if you have ever worked on a desktop, I have never opened a laptop, but it went fine.

 

I did it a while back but I never got around to posting the pics I took for reference, give me a few minutes and I'll post them.

Edit: Pics

I don't know where I saved the originals so I just grabbed the low-res/quality ones I had posted elsewhere

First off everything I used to disassemble I think I used 4 screwdrivers total, 3 to undo screws and one flathead to pry the keyboard off since that thing is jammed on tight.



The chips on the motherboard naked. Middle is Cpu/integrated gpu, left I believe is southbridge, right is the 5650



The heatsink itself. Looking at it you can see just how much they added on. I left the thermal pad in place since I didn't have a copper shim anywhere but I think I can grab a small slab of aluminum from school and slide it in.



I used MX-2 on the chips, about the size of a grain of rice for the cpu/integrated gpu and a slightly larger dab for the 5650.

 

Did you get good results? Wondering if its worth it to reapply the paste

 

Thanks for the info. Do you have to remove the entire motherboard just to replace the CPU/thermal paste? I'm thinking of replacing the CPU.

 

To be honest, the difference was pretty minor in the long run. I lost the screenshots but I ran furmark + prime95 with the dedicated gpu and I remember both of them maxing around 80 degrees. It's just that the one with mx-2 took longer to do it. It also idled about 2-3 degrees cooler on the cpu although it doesn't help at all with the heating of the right side of the chassis

Yes you have to remove the entire motherboard since although it's kind of hard to see, the edges of the heatsink are stuck underneath the edges of the laptop and the heatsink can't be taken out without removal of the keyboard + motherboard

This is a pic of the laptop from the bottom.

 

Ok I installed the shim as well at IC diamond on the northbridge, CPU, and GPU.

I have been running prime 95 for about an hour now and it seems the max temp is 76C on both cores, but it took awhile to hit that.

Not sure if the mod was worth it, but I just wanted to try it out.

Also bent my heatsink a bit in the process, it is quite delicate, so that may also effect the numbers a little, however they are slightly lower than pre-install.

 

Great instructions / pictures Lmui. +Rep.

 

Say...where does one purchase ICD7 or "OCZ Freeze"? I keep hearing about them, but can't seem to locate any stores that sell 'em. Fry's only has AC5 and sh*tty Shin-Etsu.