Pre-Dell M17-R1 copper mod

Good morning everybody,

I wanted to share with you the copper mod i did for the Alienware M17-R1 which should be efficient enough with a bottom panel mod and a cooler pad, especially when you have 2 x ATI HD 4850's like i do.

The whole mod was done mostly by hand and a few power tools from copper pipes that have been cut on their length then bent back straight, some more bending to create the heatsinks from U-shaped pieces, then using a hot stove to solder the copper heatsink parts together, and the final step, grinding them to size and shape and gluing them together with thermally conductive silicone adhesive to the original heatsink.

Because they are ATI 4850's and have 1GB memory, they have IC's on both sides of the board, so i have used some 0.8 mm rubber gaskets between the motherboard and a copper plate against which the video card memory IC's thermally conductive pads are pressed, thus offering a passive cooling to the memory on the opposite side of the board as well. (will follow up with pictures which can explain better).

Unfortunately my master video card arrived faulty, displaying artifacts and instead of white color it displays yellow, works for a few minutes then hangs the system, so i had no choice but to move the vbios eeprom from the faulty master card to the slave one at least to get the little monster partially going.

I have been trying to get another master card for some time now but nobody seems to have it in stock any more, so there's only one way left, and that is to reball the one that i have right now in hope that a cracked solder ball is causing the malfunctioning.

For now it's just a picture of the mod, i will follow up with temperature readings at idle and under stress when i get my main card working or find another one.

The present specs of the laptop are:

Intel QX9300 2.53 GHz (planning on OC it to 3.06 GHz)
8 GB DDR3 1066 MHz
1 x ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850 (slave card running as master)
2 x 256 GB Crucial m4 SSD hard drives running in RAID0
Windows 7 x64 Professional
Windows experience index rating 7.1 (lowest score on the video card)

 

Looking nice! Will be waiting for some temp results. Could you make a before and after for the temps?

 

It looks great! thank you for sharing!

 

That looks like a lot of hard work. I am also looking forward very much to some before and after temperature readings.

 

Here is the Aluminum bottom panel mod i did by drilling holes through the aluminum metal sheet, straightened it up with hammer work cut it down to right size and then reheated the sheet with a propane torch until it became a yellowish brown color to rearrange the aluminum crystals and make the material more plastic rather than elastic. Last step, applied two coats of near matte black paint and voila, you can see it in the picture.

 

Are you planning on making a before and after temps?

 

Before and after what? I am still looking for a second video card for X-Fire

 

Before the mod and after the mod. Good luck finding the card, I had two of them in watch list on eBay and they are gone now

 

Well, since the copper mod i did is permanent, i can't do a before the mod test unless i use an unmodded one, which i don't have. But you can compare a similar M17-R1 setup (2x4850 XFIRE) with the temps that i will post.

I will have three categories of temperature readings: the first one would be a classic one without a cooler pad and with the modded aluminum panel in place

Then two more, both with cooler pad but one with the aluminum panel on and the other with it off, which would be the best result as i stated before, but i might still be surprised by the results.

All tests will be done at a room temperature of 22-23 degrees Celsius, in a controlled environment idle and under stress.

 

Perfect, will be waiting for those temps.

 

OFF TOPIC


After a tedious trudging to the whole internet, pulling my hair and getting disappointed because i cannot find this rare video card, i resorted to looking for the original dell part numbers:

So here they are, i hope i will help other people that are looking for these master and slave video cards:

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850 1GB Master (MXM 2.1 Type HE) MOBL-VM981GBMST
Dell Part Number ALWH-40GAB044T-C00M (exclude the ALWH for better results)

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850 1GB Slave (MXM 2.1 Type III) MOBL-VM981GBSLV
Dell Part Number ALWH-40GAB0449-D00S (exclude the ALWH for better results)

At this time there are a few masters available for reasonable prices, i encourage you to ask for quotes.

I haven't looked for the slave because i already have one.

 

Funny thing is that I have asked for a quote in a lot of places and they all tell me that they are out of stock. But thanks for the part numbers!

 

Before the ATI 4850 Master card arrives i want to share with you the copper mod i talked about in post #1 about the bottom memory chips copper plate, which is resting against rubber gaskets as you can see in the pictures.



I am planning on soldering some L shaped copper appendices to the plates (where the plates are marked with red), and, in so doing, making the bottom memory plate touch a thermal pad that is connected to the rest of the cooling system and thus actively cooling the bottom plate (it's only passive cooled at present).

I will follow up with more pictures as i progress with the mod.

 

And here are the modified bottom memory plates

 

Do you have some pics of the finished product? I'm super excited about this one.

 

As you can see in this thread, i am having problems with my slave card, and convinced it's a hardware issue, i decided to purchase another slave card, and that's what i am waiting for at the moment.

As to the copper mod, everything is finished, i also used copper shims between the bottom plates and the rest of the cooling system instead of using thermal pads, overall i am very pleased with the efficiency and how it came out to be, i am also excited of the temperature readings in all the tests i will perform as i stated earlier in this thread.

 

Finally, after one year since i ordered the M17-R1 laptop off ebay, and spending over $1500 on malfunctioning video cards, i finally decided to buy a master ATI Radeon 4850 and flash it with the slave bios, and it works like a charm together with the master one, although i had to cut a piece of plastic from the bottom half panel so that the HE tab would fit, now the corssfire works perfectly and i am getting really good temperatures.

I had to take the aluminium modded bottom panel off so that the air from the cooler pad would blow directly onto the copper surface and thus increasing the heat dissipation efficiency, i really worked hard on that panel, but in the end it proved to be an inconvenience and since i don't move the laptop from its location almost at all, i keep the panel off.

I bought a CoolerMaster Notepal U3 and three extra fans for it, i modified it as you can observe in the attached picture to increase the airflow output to the laptop, i also increased the distance between the cooler pad and the laptop bottom by using some rubber spacers about one cm thick.

Now the temperatures don't go over 50 deg C at idle or simple tasks such as web browsing, movies, music etc. Also, stuttering is a thing of the past, and i got best results with the SLIC 2.1 B14 BIOS although it lacks the unlocked multiplier menu (working on a way to unlock it myself), it would have been nice to get the QX9300 up to 3.2 GHz...

I will post detailed temperature charts at idle and under stress in two different states for a better comparison of the efficiency of my copper mod:

1) no cooler pad but with the laptop raised a little bit from the table's platform
2) with the cooler pad at full throttle and the one cm spacers

You can imagine the temperature differentials between the two states will be quite high...

There is also another picture showing the crossfire cable modification i did so that it would not be in the way of the airflow. I have taken the metallic thread fabric off the cable so i can shape and direct it under the plastic bottom panel and heatsink elements. You can also see the HE tab from the converted-to-slave master card as well as the copper shims that join the copper plates under the video cards with the rest of the video cooling system.

 

Here are the two test results i have mentioned in the previous post, the software i used to read the temperatures is HWiNFO

The idle tests were done with the cooler pad off and then on for a duration of 20 minutes each

The stress tests were done using Blizzard's Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm at 1920x1200 with Ultra video settings, for 20 minutes each, by playing the game

I shall let you decide the efficiency of my copper mod, the most relevant temperatures are the ones on the Maximum column



From left to right:

1 - Idle test - No cooler pad
2 - Stress test - No cooler pad
3 - Idle test - With cooler pad
4 - Stress test - With cooler pad