E6410 Owner's Thread

I have an i5 and my temps are about the same. I think Dell did not appropriately beef up the cooling in the e6410.

I would return it, but honestly I don't think there are better options. A similar thinkpad would be $300 more and still lack some of my favorite dell features.

Maybe there is a way to make the heatsink/fan more effective, but other than replacing the thermal paste I am at a loss as to how I might go about that.

 

You try to add thermal paste where the areas where the base of the laptop and heatsink touches. It won't be something significant, but it should help a bit.

 

That's a great idea actually. And it shouldn't void the warranty, since you're not removing any part of the cooling that originally came with the laptop.

A more thorough approach would be to do a copper mod, but that voids your warranty.

 

Hm, but what`s with the GPU heatsink? Normally its not thermal paste, it`s a thermal pad (and that probaply loses quality if you take the whole heatsink away - or am I wrong here?)

I also have idle temps between 35-55 °C (regards on what you mean with idle, surfing causes more temperature than doing nothing). But I also have no higher temps than 80-80 °C with full load - so where is the problem. Sure my Desktop i7 is cooler, but it`s louder, too.

I`m really happy that the E6410 is quite quiet AND it`s not too hot outside. So I`m not really understanding where the problem with the idle temps is?

 

For this laptop, Dell used:
- For the CPU, thermal paste was used
- For the Northbridge, somesort of rubber silicon like sustains, but doesn't reshape is deformed, and contains an strange oil like substance
- For the GPU it's the same thing, but using a purple sponge like pad instead.

If the heatsink is removed, new thermal paste needs to be place. as for the others, it's not needed, as long as you work in a clean environment, and that your laptop inside is also clean.

If you get a heatsink replacement from Dell, it will have all 3 pads pre-applied for you.

 

Can you throttle back the voltage on the 6410 to stretch the battery life longer?

 

You can disable Speedstep and Turboboost in the BIOS settings. Windows 7 automatically throttles down the cpu in idle to 1.3 GHz and throttles it up to 2.4 GHz under load (2.9 with Turboboost), on my e6410 with an i5-520m.

 

about how many extra minutes (hours?) will that solution add to the battery life, Frapp?

 

except the reason i dont like the heat is because it makes my lap sweat. i honestly dont care if the cpu gets to 95C as long as theres no heat coming out of the bottom

the idea behind beefing up the HSF is to get more heat out the side and less out the bottom.

 

Ok. Well then you'll complain on why the fan goes at full speed under idle.
And then I'll say after that: call Intel and complain that their first generation Core i series for laptop heat too much.

Me too I wish I could have a nice Geforce GTX 480 triple SLI, or ATI 5950 crossfire, on a 12/13 inch laptop with a octo-core processor, all by having 12 hours of battery life out of a 4-cell battery under load, and all by being very light and thin. Oh and heats up at only 30C under super heavy load.
But, sadly, our current technology limit us from having such a thing... :/