dv5 and overheating - a little nice trick

Hi all,

The problem:

as many dv5 owners know, this HP series has a little problem with overheating.
The laptop has a small aperture for air circulation just below the exhaust vent: the fan takes fresh air from the aperture and then push out warm air.

Many people noted that the aperture is too small but its position is also problematic because when you put the laptop on a desk, the air stream is reduced so much that the heat cannot be dissipated correctly. This leads to very high temperatures under high loads that sometimes causes the laptop to shutdown itself to prevent damage.

Now one solution is to raise the laptop a bit, to allow better cooling.

My findings:

Dissecting my laptop I found a very interesting thing.
In the upper left corner of the laptop there's the fan that cools down the whole thing. The fan is very near to the upper left corner of the keyboard too, and the notebook chassis has a hole to let the fan aspire more air from the upside.

You may say that's good, the fan is getting fresh air from the keyboard too, right? Wrong. The keyboard on its back has a thin plastic coverage that prevents the air flow!

The solution:

So, armed wih a cutter, I delicately made a cut on this plastic coverage film near the upper left angle and then I removed the cutted piece from the back of the keyboard (there are some glue strips that fix it for better adherence).
To be precise, when I say "upper left angle" I suppose you have your keyboard in front of you (near the ESC key to be pratical). Since you need to cut the *rear* coverage plastic, it becomes the upper right angle. Just always take the ESC key as a placeholder!

This trick doesn't need you open your whole computer, you just need to remove the keyboard, that's pretty easy if you follow the service manual available on google for HP dv5.

Result on my laptop

The result in my case are pretty nice!
I have a Turion ZM-80 2.1 Ghz processor (someway undervolted) and a hd3450 video card.
Before the invervention, my processor easily reach 99-100°C (with 20°C ambient temp) under 64bit prime95 load. After the intervention, temperatures won't go over 92-93°C.

Then I changed the thermal grease compound on the processor (but to do this you need to dismantle your laptop completely), and I reached a very nice maximum temperature of 86°C under the same test, that is pretty good also because the fan doesn't spin at its maximum! If I also raise the laptop from the desk, the temperature goes down to 80-81 °C, that is pretty stunning considering the fact that I made no "hard" modding to the heatspread or the chassis.

 

Very nice discovery!

If you want to drop temps even further, you can consider undervolting the CPU.

The program is called GriffinControlService.

You can find it along with tutorial here: AMD family 17 CPU p-state control

GriffinControlService description

Works exceptionally well on my TX2500 with ZM-80 processor.

 

Hehe, my zm-80 is already undervolted (core 0: 1.0375v, core 1: 1.050v), but I got those temperatures with almost non undervolted processor (both cores were at 1.0875v).

Anyway I think this trick is really useful also for people who has a power hungry video card (like 9600M GT). My hd3450 doesn't go over 60°C even after very long gaming sessions.

PS: Thank you for suggesting me GriffinControlService, but since I'm the author of TurionPowerControl, I prefer to use my own software

 

Hey, nice to meet you! A very excellent program that TurionPowerControl is.

 

Me too! and thank you!

 

Good discovery, though you should be aware that the plastic behind the keyboard is there for a reason in case of a water spill.
I use GriffinControlService and also disabled fan always on option in the bios. The older versions of bios didn't have that feature enabled, even though the option was always there.

I going to have to check out TurionPowerControl as I never heard of it.

 

Yes, I know the plastic is there for some sort of protection, but anyway I think that if someone spills a decent amount of liquid on the keyboard, it will go anyway inside the computer since the keyboard has a little raised edge, but it is really tiny.

Anyway I got the idea looking to an older hp notebook. Its keyboard has the same protective film as dv5's, but its keyboard has also a shaped cut right over the fan, just to allow air flowing.

HP could be blamed too because there's the drilled bezel, which could be a fresh air source, but they put a black plastic film just below the drills!

 

I agree with you on the spill and overall cooling problem.
Most likely pre-drilled holes were covered to lower fan noise and to compensate for the temperature rise as fan always on option couldn't be disabled in older versions of bios.
Though despite obvious design flaws DV-5 is still by far my favourite notebook design. I can not stand the new 16:9 aspect ratio. The touchpad that is shifted to left (expect pain in the back as you have to be always curved to use it) because of some stupid numeric keybad. Numeric keypad is fine if you have 17" or bigger desktop replacement laptop, but not for 15.4-15.6" models (IMHO).

 

On the 16:9 i agree, but i have no problem with the shifted touchpad on my dv9000. It actually makes it easier to use the scrollbar IMO.

 

i suffered alot from HP heating problems , i reached 70s on idle , while other laptops idled at 40c , so i bought arctic silver 5 and replaced the thermal paste , i found the old thermal paste toasted on the processor after 1 year only , while i didn't even needed to change thermal paste on any of my other laptops , i also followed this guide YouTube - reply4reply's Channel