M11x Heatsink Mod on the R3

So, I finally went ahead and followed the steps to complete some guy's (literally his name on this forum) heatsink mod for the M11x. A link for the curious.

His unit was an R1 while mine is an R3, and as you can see in the images below, the board setup is slightly different. The biggest difference that I noticed was the fact that I ended up using significantly more of the Enzotech heatsinks than he did (2 packs of 10 for him, 3 pack of 10 for me), I didn't end up using any of the copper shims that I ordered, and I ended up using some larger ramsinks on parts of the copper piping. I did not buy any complete coverage ramsinks either.









Here is a link to the full album.

 

Nice clean work there, so does the R3 suffer from heat soak? as l could not see if you had removed the outer side casing of the fan assembly. What temps are you getting now with normal day stuff and or high usage applications?

Regards.

C.

 

In terms of heat soak, I don't think so. All the numbers I'm about to list came from SpeedFan readings, so there may be some inaccuracy based on either its reported temperatures or my reading of said temperatures. The unmodified cooling system inside the R3 always did a pretty great job of getting rid of excess heat. I was sitting at a standard operating temperature of about 45C - 47C and it would jump to about 65C - 70C at maximum load. However, once the game or other application was turned off, the computer would drop back down to the 40s quite quickly.

In terms of the fan assembly, I didn't do anything to it. I went as far as pulling the main and secondary boards so I could access the heatsinks, but I did not do anything to the fan. I tried to follow some guy's 'guide' for the mod itself, and as he mentioned nothing about fan mods, I did not try to do anything to it as I'd rather not have killed any hardware. He did mention cutting out a small section of the plastic body above the RAM slots to improve airflow, but I found it unnecessary (and not doable, really, I had limited tools) as I did not use the copper shims like he did.

In terms of temperatures, I will have to update this post later today as after spending a good 3 hours on the mod itself, all I did was made sure the thing was still alive and ran off to fix my parent's computer instead.

 

Update on temperatures.

It seems that the heatsinks do a pretty good job of cooling the the GPU and CPU. The temperature will climb to about 70C or so after about 5 to 10 minutes of gameplay, and when the fan kicks in on full, it quickly drops to the low to mid 50s. The heatisnks don't do much on their own, but with the fan blowing, they certainly cut the cooling time down significantly.

I'll have to try with more games and fan settings, but so far, the results look promising.

 

Sweet.

Good to see it is working well.

 

Looks pretty cool, thanks for sharing! +1Rep

 

Nice mod! How did you cut the heatsinks btw?

 

I used a rather substandard wire cutter. While it did the job well enough, it took upwards of an hour to cut them all down and afterwards my hands were shaking from the strain.