Dell Latitude 3540 Cooling Mod

Hello Everyone!

I hope this is the right place for this but I have a Dell Latitude 3540 that was severely overheating. I was quickly reaching thermal limits and shutting off Inn the middle of gaming. It would run for about 30 min before shutting off all the way and would reach temps of over 98-100 degrees C. So I decided to do this mod to the laptop.


Cooling Mod for the Dell Latitude 3540:


Please let me know your thoughts!

 

The paste was a great idea, but I think the holes doesn't do as much help as you think. After you drilled the holes, the whole internal will be hotter. Only the CPU/GPU is cooler than before. The original airflow went through the HDD/RAM area, the wifi card and then the whole motherboard. The notebook stand is a must have now to provide the active airflow for the mentioned components.

edit.: if you are playing with less CPU intensive games then you could try to use ThrottleStop to disable the CPU's Turbo function. It gives you much better temps and more cooling to the AMD card.

 

Hi Kirrr,

Thanks for responding! That makes sense then as to why my idle temps were higher. Was there a better way I could have done it so that I do not run into the overall higher temps? I am not worried about needing the cooling stand for all gaming but I am curious as to how I could have lowered the temps. I have done 1 re-pasting before and after half a year I was back here again and wanted to do something a little more to aid in cooling. I will say though that even without the cooling pad this laptop is much cooler when it is under full load.

Are there other cooling mods that can be done to bring down temps as well other than cutting a hole(s) in the bottom of the laptop? The only reason why I knew about a mod like this was because of my experience on this forum with my old Asus K53TA where people did the same thing. My concern is as well is right now there isn't enough room in the laptop for much other mods like extra heatsinks.

Any feedback is appreciated.

On a side note I am using throttlestop along with MSI Afterburner to bring out the max performance on this laptop. Otherwise I get hit hard with throttling that most of my games drop to an unplayable FPS.

 

With my past notebooks I used external coolers, holes on bottom and even using my machine without the complete bottom cover. There's not much you can do at this stage. The ultimate cooling will be a fan sized hole under the fan with a direkt external fan under that. And some more fan under the original intakes. Once I used a Cooler Master Notepal U3 an arrange the fans in the mentioned way. That gave me nearly rock stable overclock on my [email protected]

 

I've seen a notebook work better/cooler while standing open on it's side (w/ an external monitor) - some Natural Convection at work, I think.

 

Ahh I see so what you are saying is that this is more of just an FYI. Like if you did this mod you should expect this.

 

Please do share! I talked to you a bit from the other Dell Latitude 3540 thread and I am very interested to see everyone's mods.

 

This was a friend's notebook, years ago in college. Nothing complicated.

He opened the screen ~90 degrees and stood the laptop up on its side, and it ran slightly cooler.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

The cooling is more efficient if the notebook is laying flat on its own feet. Any angle weakens the efficiency of the cooling heatpipes. Fresh air is never a problem, but if there's no intake on the bottom, then any notebook cooler is pointless.

 

Hi Kirrr,

I think Alex is saying that his friend took the laptop without any cooling mods or stands and just stood it up on its side. Which I think would make sense if there wasn't any other mods. The heatsink on the laptop is facing up it would let the hot air up.