My Y500 mod

Among the things I did.

1) Fixed trackpad by adding some spongy tape
2) Increased CPU backplate pressure by using some spongy washers from a broken HD 6850
3) Replaced all stock thermal pad with Koolance thermal pad.
4) Repasted thermal paste
5) Added a heatpipe to the main heatsink.

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I bought a heatsink from Ebay and had to use plyer and hammer to get the heatpipe out. Then I use a lighter to heat up and soften the heatpipe, and shaped it carefully using the hammer.

The final heatpipe position is a bit shifted because it wouldn't fit at first. Also, I took out all the copper chips because it was actually making the laptop's palm-rest real hot by dissipating all the heat inside the laptop. I would have put another huge VRAM heatsink inside but unfortunately there's just no space. There's absolutely no space at all to fit another heatpipe in the Ultrabay GPU. I just replaced all the thermal pads.

Also, there's 4 VRAM chips under the backplate of the main GPU. I guess Lenovo has to put it there because the mainboard is just too cramped. Those VRAM are not cooled properly, so that might explain why main GPU might get unstable if the VRAM is overclocked too much. I put some thermal pads there.

Y500 has problem with heat seeping through the keyboard. Although not shown in the pics, I have put some spongy tape on the keyboard behind the CPU to prevent some heat from seeping through. Since it's made of aluminum, the left side of the keyboard also get scorching hot, so I put some spongy tape under there to prevent the heatsink from touching it.

I am running 1250MHz (+200MHz) on both 750m GPU, with VRAM at 2925MHz (+425MHz offset). Both GPU has modified BIOS. The screen refresh rate is increased to 75Hz, just so I can Vsync at higher fps.

Even with the mod, CPU still gets hot but the main GPU stays below 90C all the time. I prob have a bad bin. Or it's just that Intel's CPU heat density is getting off the chart.

 

i wonder how much heat is reduce by that added heat pipe.

in my opinion, a hot palm rest is also a good thing, considering some of the heat inside are sent somewhere, thus reducing a few C in cpu gpu temps. correct me if i'm wrong though.

 

It's good for dissipating some heat but I don't like sweaty palm. I also don't like toasted skin syndrome.

You don't reduce heat by adding heatpipe. Adding heatpipe in parallel will speed up heat transfer and thus the dissipation of it as it increases the gradient of heat at the heatsink. I am prob hitting the heatsink dissipation limit, and to solve it we'll prob need bigger heatsink or higher fan speed.

 

Yikes. If your GPU is getting close to 90C your CPU must be close to 100C then? Cause an overclocked GPU will also make the CPU run hotter in this machine. Unless you've disabled Turbo Boost. 105 C is the CPU thermal shutdown temperature for this machine. I have the lower-voltage and cooler 650M SLI at 1125/2250 and my CPU will exceed 95C in BF3 unless I'm using a cooling pad. I am using ThrottleStop to make sure the CPU never throttles though.

 

You are a braver man than I am.

Usually, laptops and "hammer" in the same sentence make me turn around and run away.

 

For some reasons the temp difference between the CPU and the GPU is not that big. I'd say during gaming the CPU stays close to or below 90C all the time, while the GPU is in the 80s range. It's prob the heatpipe working. I am thinking to swap the 3630QM for a 3632QM...hopefully the lower TDP would reduce the heat. I don't mind too much if the CPU runs close to 100C, since thermal shutdown is at 115C, and I have disabled BD Prochot.

All I want is just a cold palm rest :|

 

Oh right I forgot about your heatpipe. That must be working then. Also, thermal shutdown for the i7-3630QM in this machine is at 105C not 115C. You can test it out if you don't believe me.

This machine doesn't use BD PROCHOT so changing that setting in ThrottleStop or in the BIOS does nothing. You have to set the Turbo multiplier in ThrottleStop to prevent the CPU from disabling Turbo Boost when the GPU is at full load.

 

Did you mod the ultrabay? mine hits 93-99c and thats only 135+ and 300+ on memory so yours should be HIGH.. Ez way to lower the temps is take a 80mm fan and put them next to the vents will knock down the temps a lot. Really wish someone could hack the dust removal program so we can set that on and fans would run at 100% while gaming..

 

I don't really have any good idea regarding modding the Ultrabay. The heapipe on it seems too small for the GPU. But there's just no space in there to fit another one, if not I'd have tried to fit another one in. And like you, I have problem with the Ultrabay running too hot. Right now what I am doing is limiting the temp target in Nvid Inspector to 91C. Anything more than that is unstable for me.

There's prob ways to change the fans or make the fan run faster. I will try looking into it.

 

I can guarantee it cannot be that difficult for a seasoned hacker to allow us full fan control in this laptop..
Imagine what the temps would be at 85% fan speed.

 

#1. Use better quality Thermal Paste
#2. Get a laptop cooler pad
#3. Install 256GB Samsung SSD

Why?

#1. cheap paste bad results
#2. More air lower temps
#3. heat generated by HDD a few + degrees C elimate them by using a new Samsung SSD or INtel SSD

Waiting for my SLI 750 Y500, glad I waited I see alot of 650 haters who are jelly of 750 and the first batches of SLI 750's have GC issues like loud fans and GPU memory issues.

 

#1 checked. I will prob try out some Shin Etsu paste. Still have to work on figuring out a way to increase backplate pressure on the Ultrabay.
#2 checked.
#3 256GB runs out quickly if you're like me, installing all sorts of new games in the Y500.

With a bit more tweaking I got the SLI 750m running at 1268MHz @ core and 2915MHz @ VRAM. It's stable in Uningine. GPU0 @ 1.175V @ 81C max. GPU1 @ 1.125V @ 83C max. I couldn't get a screen shot in Unigine but the score were in the range of 580-590, with average FPS in the range of 22<=23<=24. What's weird is the voltage. GPU1 runs hot with lower voltage, but is stable at higher clock. GPU0 needs more juice but runs colder, prob because of my heatpipe mod.

I also have the CPU power draw limited at 36W. For gaming since I don't really see any FPS difference I usually disable Turbo, dropping the CPU wattage to below 20W.

The temps are high but I am more of a push to the limit guy rather than the play safe guy. It used to be 90C, but now with a bit voltage tweaking it dropped 10C. But then the room temp is slightly lower at night. It's about 20C (68F) here right now.
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Lol.. jealous???!!! Are u serious.? Why should we feel jealous when there is no point to feel jealous atleast.
Only thing we dont have on our 650m's till now is 750m's voltage(a bit higher)..now its arrived too..there is 0.xxx% difference between two cards. just the name matters if u flash new modded bios... ..
Do u know this?
650m even can overvolted upto1.2v which is greater than past 750m(1.138) voltage.. now 650m got more beefed up with modding..no offence
750m may have this support in future. But currently this mod is only for 650m


Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

^^^ Now you are starting a war. They will not spare you

 

Shouldn't of said that last comment... inb4 flame war

 

Nah the 750m is mostly like the 650m, but if have done IC design before, you will know that things are not as simple as it looks to the outsiders. There are many parameters that TSMC have probably tweaked to improve yield, reduce heat, reduce transistor leakage, etc etc. The process corners have probably been tightened near optimal point, so there's less variation.

I don't work for Nvidia so I don't know too much about it, but I have experience with designing ICs and all I can say is, the 750m should have the same architecture as the 650m, but there's probably some fabrication optimization that have been done.

And AFAIK, YMMV though, putting 1.2V on the gpu core (either the 650m and 750m on the Y500) will most likely make it run close to 100C at full load, at which point instability will become a problem.

 

I was considering doing the same as you and overvolting my 650M SLI while throttling the CPU back so that I can get over 1200 MHz on the GPU core, but after doing some testing I realized that this would actually decrease my gaming performance in some games. What I mean is that the games that perform the worst for me are CPU-limited ones such as Tribes: Ascend, Red Orchestra 2, and especially Planetside 2, even though I've cranked all the settings to max to try to shift the load to the GPU. I lose a huge chunk of FPS and large battles get <30 FPS and become unplayable with Turbo Boost disabled because Planetside 2 has extremely poor optimization and only runs on one core. What happens when they are a lot of units on screen is that one core shoots up to 100% and GPU usage drops to 50-70% and my FPS takes a nosedive. This is why overclocking my GPU or changing video settings has little to no effect on how this games performs when thing get busy. As far as Tribes: Ascend and Red Orchestra 2 are concerned those are DirectX 9 games running on an older build of Unreal Engine 3 and have their own share of CPU bottleneck issues but nowhere near as bad as Planetside 2.

This juliant guy just likes asking for it. His MO is to jump into threads and post provocative comments with no intention of actually being helpful or staying relevant to the discussion.

 

I see. I don't really play any games that's CPU limited for now
Also, with my triple heatpipe setup even under load the CPU don't really go over 90C now. I have hotkeys for different profiles in ThrottleStop which lets me choose if I want to have Turboboost or not. Either way, I think the main reason that my CPU temp is lower now is because I limited the TDP to 36W.

The next thing for me to do is to find a non engineering sample (ES) 3632QM on some website. I will also redo the thermal pad on the Ultrabay with 0.7mm or 0.5mm thermal pad instead of the thick 1mm thermal pad that I am using now. I will also re-do the thermal paste with this: MASSCOOL G751 Thermal Compound - Newegg.com.

There is not much of other improvements that could be made without using more heatpipes and bigger fins on the heatsink.

By the way, last night I replaced the heatsink screws on the Ultrabay GPU with the screws that was on the HD6850. Those screws have stronger springs, and I guess it increased the pressure on the GPU core slightly. Now the Ultrabay's temp is 1-2C closer to the main GPU's temp.

 

What are you going to do about it? Because you and the other guys from all the threads I see, is to proof that actually your system with 650m SLi is if not the same, actually better than the 750m. Who cares about it?! Just enjoy your machine and make the best out of it!

It is not like we can do much about those systems, they are low budget machine and no matter what mod anyone is trying to make on them, it is not going to change much on anything because of the limitation of the space / quality + everyone knows that Lenovo has manufactured for a number of years now this model and tried to improve all those things. In my personal opinion, the Y400/Y500 quality has decreased immensely compare to the previous version Y480/Y580.

So octiceps, stop being behind my back and mind your own business and if you do not like what I write, ignore it!

 

I will agree with this statement, I t just seems like a vibe on the forums of people who are jelly of the 750 will go out of their way to prove the 650 over clocked is just as good. I could care less, even a 650 SLI is great, but everyone knows from the hundreds if not thousands of people returning 650's for 750's that they are jelly.

Why because SLI 650's Max out current gen games.
in 2 years you will need SLI 750's to Max out Next gen games or even newer games. And lets just imagine Overclocked SLI 750's

I will inspect my Y500 for Quality and build issues, in the past, Lenovo has given up to YMMV 20% off discount because of quality and build issues. That why I waited to buy the 2 Year Warranty for $79.99 til after I get a decent system.

 

I am the maker of the 1.2v mod for the 650M. I could confirm reaching 1.4GHz on my 650M. I obviously don't use it for daily usage. It was a showcase.

I noticed going from 1.025 to 1.1v resulted in 10-15C temp increase.

Did repasting work out for you ? Did it make any difference ? I'm considering IC Diamond

 

It was definitely alarming when I saw the temperatures jump after flashing to 1.1v. I couldn't run Furmark without it reaching 97c and throttling the gpu. I could only imagine what 1.2v would result!!!! LOL

To add on to the conversation about thermal paste, I'm running AS5 and I am not impressed with the results at all. Seems with laptop, it would be better to get a thicker paste since I think the heatsink moves around as the laptop flexes when being moved around and it loses it's full contact as a result. Does this theory make sense? Is that why IC Diamond is a better choice?

 

Traditionally, going from generic thermal paste to high-end name brand thermal pastes brings a temperature difference of 3C - 5C improvement.

In general, minimizing laptop temperatures has practically zero real-world benefit. The only times I've seen people bother with thermal pastes (in either desktops or laptops) are:

(1) They are overclockers, and want to maximize an overclock.
(2) They are obsessive-compulsive about maximizing benchmarks and measurements, and want their temperatures as low as possible just for the personal satisfaction of knowing they maximized their hardware.

So, if you're going to re-paste, realize that you're probably doing it for personal satisfaction; and that you should not realistically expect any real-world performance gain by doing so.

 

That is so me!!!!!

 

unless they're already borderline.

My Y580 was borderline often, and logs showed throttling. This is when everything is clean and dust-free.

Airflow is the only thing that will help reduce these lenovo temps.

 

Sup lads it's been a while. Woot so now someone is putting 1.2V on the GPU. My GPU temp still stay relatively low and gosh this 3630QM runs hot. It could reach 105C if I run full load of Folding @ Home, with overclocked, overvolted GPU.

djjonastybe, could you run Furmark and Prime95 (or Folding @ Home) with unthrottled CPU and GPU @ 1.2V and still maintain stability? I dare not to run my GPU at max overclock when I am running Folding @ Home, it just gets too hot.

And by the way, I am going to place an order for an Alienware 18 soon.

I will either sell the Y500 or give it to my brother.