Extremely Effective cooling mod

I wanted to share my experience updating my laptop's cooling system that shaved off around 28 degrees C. I have a Dell D630 from 2008 with the Nvidia 135m (replaced in 2010 under warranty). It ran about 80-100C on load temps and would often throttle.

A year ago, I opened up the laptop and re-applied the thermal paste to the CPU, GPU, and Memory controller (or Northbridge or whatever it's called). I also removed the thermal pad between the heatpipe and GPU and replaced it with a pre 1982 penny (flattened slightly to fit). This got temps to the high 70's under load.

Recently, I opened the comp up to see if the penny had slipped off the GPU. It hadn't slipped (the thermal grease along with the compression of the heatsink held the penny in place well) but I got a little crazy with cooling mods. I cut some of the case away on the bottom for more airflow to the intake of the fan. I also added a penny to the memory controller and removed the thermal pad. I reapplied new thermal grease. I taped up the large, circular opening on the top of the fan along with some vents (small ones that would allow less air to pass through the radiator fins). I also did this
View attachment 103000
That is a 92mm (if I recall) fan taped to the bottom of the comp over the air intake (another method for securing the fan may be used if this actually proves worthy in the long run). To compare specs, the Dell's fan pushes a little more than 5 cfm. This fan pushes 50cfm. The problem is that this fan is 12v so must be run off of another power source (right now a cable and fan controller from a desktop computer). Although impractical for travel the results are impressive when under load via Prime95
View attachment 103001
The temps rose to 64C then the laptop's cooling fan kicked in and they steadied at 58C for the CPU. That's a significant drop in temps and under normal use the laptop's fan doesn't even kick in. Thoughts, comments, criticism welcome.

I have a 19V power adapter from an old laptop and was wondering if I could use that to power the fan (overclocked fan?)

 

Attachment doesnt work Really wanna see what you did though..
Damn, a penny? Good job though, it's so interesting to mod your laptop to lower temp.
But I think I'm gonna stay on the safer side

 

Oh, I didn't take pictures of the inside with the heatsink and the pennies because I didn't think it would work as well as it did. One of the pics shows the 92mm fan electrical taped (a more permanent but also detachable solution in the works) to the base of the laptop over the 40mm hole for the laptop's intake fan (I offset the larger fan because I think most of the airflow is caused by the middle of the fan blade rather than near the hub). The pre-82 penny works because I think before '82, pennies were like 95% copper. The factory had heatpads instead which is good because this heatsink has 3 components it must cool so it's important to have contact on all 3 (easier to achieve with heatpads) but bad because copper I bet is more thermally conductive. The second pic is a shot of HWMonitor and Prime95 running with the stable temps. I'll undervolt the laptop and maybe lock it in dual IDA mode and we'll see if the temps go even lower.

ill try attaching pics again

 

Your laptop looks like some kind of Frankenstein monster, but never the less it's impressive that you were able to drop the temps that much.

 

@yallol7
Hi yallol7,

Very cool idea :thumbsup:!
I can’t imagine if you have a silver dollar …

Just be careful not destroy the laptop case. Also I like the idea about airflow improvement.

Good work!

 

Thanks Duhai and Tech. Yeah i bet a silver dollar will give me 100x better performance Yeah I know what you mean about not destroying the case, after all a laptop is still supposed to be portable. The nice thing about the D630 is that the case is aluminum so it's pretty strong even with the 40mm hole in it (and actually, the fan is recessed enough that i have yet to have fingers or cloth or something hit the fan while using the laptop). I have done a few more mods to make the whole set up a little cleaner. First off, I powered the 92 mm fan that forces air through the bottom off of a regular computer power supply (using a paperclip to jump the green power wire to ground). I attached a fan controller to the +12v and -12v lines so the fan can run at 24v instead of the normal 12. It's really loud at that speed. I used a combination of Velcro and rubber bands to secure the fan after the initial test that used electric tape. The Velcro and rubber bands are ok but i could get a tighter seal which would force more air through the opening (on a side note, since the main fan is a blower type fan, the blades do not spin when the external fan is operating and the motherboard has not turned the pc fan on. This is good cause I was worried the spinning fan would generate power and harm the motherboard) if I could find a way to screw in some nuts or glue some nuts to the bottom of the case, thereby creating a solid attachment point for the fan...a work in progress/any ideas? second, I opened up my laptop again to see how many mpcie slots i had for future DIY egpu setup. with wifi card removal, there would be 2 free ports. However, while i had the keyboard up I placed several heatsinks at various points along the heatpipes. Without using thermal paste for better conduction, the heatsinks (from a P4 cpu heatsink to northbridge heatsinks even another laptop's heatpipe) were largely ineffective to the point that when I took them off, they were not even warm even though the heatpipe beneath was really warm. I think that's probably due to the effectiveness and design of the heatpipes. Even directly on top of the chip, the heatsinks were still on top of the heatpipe to some degree. Using the same powersupply running the fan on the bottom, i hooked up another fan (42 cfm at 12V however it was hooked up to the +12 and -3.3V lines) that blew air over the heatpipe at an angle. This was surprisingly effective resulting in temps that were in the high 30's for the cpu and mid 40's for the gpu when under load. Next time i open it up, ill try and remember to take pictures. Now all i need is a hacked d630 bios for overclocking or a cheap x9000. The other cool thing is that the nvidia 135m inside runs at stock 400mhz clock, 594 mhz memory, and 800 mhz shader. B/c of the cooling capacity, I can O/C it to 677 mhz, 892 mhz, and 1354 mhz respectively and the temp doesnt rise much. (this results in 35-70 fps in DOTA2 at lowest settings). I think a volt mod is required to go much higher.

 

That is the limit for that gpu, I got three 630s my self and even the desktop version of that gpu doesn't oc much beyond that without vmods. Didn't need to mod the body but instead went stealthy, good for school use lol but choppy for world of tanks.

 

Is there a volt mod for the d630 that you know of?