New 'heatsinks' on XPS? Pics inside

So the first XPS 1530 I received on 7/2. I had some problems with it, and put in for an exchange. I received the new on on 7/22. I was switching out my RAM, and noticed the heat sink seemed heftier on the new one.

The Nvidia problems came out in between these building of these two laptops, but maybe its nothing.

First XPS, built at the end of June.


Second XPS, build on July 20th.

 

I would think the first one would be better due to the usage of copper at the base to transfer the heat from the GPU to the heatpipes instead of aluminum.

 

I kinda thought that too, thought maybe more surface area might mean more heat dissipation. I cant figure why I would get a worse build now, but its possible.

Ill do some heat tests tomorrow. I recorded the results from the first one. They were pretty good. Never above 74 for the GPU or 69 for the CPU.

 

Yeah I thought about the surface area thing too, but inside a laptop, there isn't much air to dissipate the heat to hence the heatpipes to bring it to a heatsink to carry the heat outside. And if the casing is like the M1330, I find that the coating on the bottom kind of insulates the heat rather than dissipates it. I would think they're cutting back on cost? But you never know until you try.

 

Well, a quick 3Dmark06 run shot my GPU up to 78(675/880 overclock), so 4 degrees higher than my old lappy.

But, I the 74 was with an undervolt. So I will try that tomorrow. Off to bed

 

interesting observation....nice job

 

Looks like they put an IHS on the two lower chips (the Northbridge and GPU I think), while the CPU die is still exposed.

If the die is exposed it becomes quite easy to crush it if you're not careful putting it together.

 

The fan also has more wings??

 

What you see is not an IHS you can tell that the Aluminum plates are attached to the heatsink assembly and not the chip itself. All chip dice would still be exposed once the heatsink assembly is removed. Yes it is a heat spreader but the size of it doesn't really matter because both cover the full area of the core and both contact the heatpipe the same amount, but the usage of aluminum is a very poor choice compared to copper as copper would definitely transfer the heat away from the chip to the copper heat pipes much better. I can only think that the newer assembly is worse than the older one due to the usage of aluminum.

 

wow, Dell save a little for not putting wings on thair copper

 

I noticed this as well with my replacement and I was about to swap the two but then I realized that the fan on the new one had less of a whine so I kept it.

As for the aluminum blocks on the new heatpipe, it's not aluminum all the way; if you look on the bottom, there's a square of copper that I assume connects to the heatpipe so the rest of the aluminum, hopefully, acts as mini heat sinks. I might just be too optimistic about this, but the new system is working fairly well for me, gpu idles at 48, cpu at 40, and chipset at 44 (this is with A09; before it was GPU: 55, CPU:47)

 

Would you mind telling us your specs and maybe your video driver number? That is a nice GPU temp!

 

If there is a copper core then I would have to say that the newer heatsink is better because it also has a larger surface area to possibly help put some of that heat into the air now.

 

Copper is a bit expensive, compared to aluminum, and they have been using copper-cored aluminum HS for many years. Copper is probably 75% better at thermal conductivity than Aluminum (google thermal conductivity aluminum copper and you'll get a few good hits comparing all metals.) Silver is about 15-20% better than copper, but we know how expensive a silver HS would probably be!


T

 

Diamond wins by like 3x-5x more thermal conductivity than any other precious metal. A diamond heatsink will only cost you a few million dollars

Read the copper mod thread, i have posted the thermal conductivities and thermal expansions of metals.

EDIT: nvm this is a m1530 not m1330

 

The important specs are:
GPU: 8600m GT // DR: 169.09
CPU: T9300 (they share the same pipe so I thought adding the CPU would be important as well)

I'm also using Arctic Silver 5 but I'm not sure how much of an effect it has on temps.

 

It has everything to do with the price of metals, copper in particular. Copper is actually stolen quite a bit these days so Dell is just cutting cost as always.