Asus K53SV and Samsung NP300 cooling mods questions

Hi people! I have these two laptops with the same chipset. Here are the specs:

Asus K53SV: i7 2860qm (bought on Ebay), 8GB of RAM (taken from the samsung laptop), GT540M 1GB, 128GB Kingstone SSD, 750GB HDD (taken from the samsung laptop).

Samsung NP300: i7 2630qm (taken from the Asus laptop), 4GB od RAM (taken from the asus laptop), GT520MX 1GB, 128GB Kingdian SSD, 250GB HDD (taken from an older laptop).

Let's start from the Samsung notebook.

It previously had an i5 CPU. I have checked with an AIDA64 stress test and the temperatures are exactly the same I get with the i7 2630qm. The thermal paste is fresh and the heatsink is clean. I used some MX-2. I got something like 90°C as a Tmax and the system used to stay around 85 during the whole bench. The laptop is sitting on 4 rubber feet to improve air ventilation on the bottom.

I decided to drill a nice hole just above the cpu fan and heatsink. A clean job with a nice dust filter to close the hole. I got an improvement, but not as nice as you could imagine. 5 degrees.

Now let's move to the Asus laptop. I took the motherboard off and I'm building a small enclosure to use it as an HTPC and retrogaming PC (from MAME to Dolphin), just like many people have already done. Its temperatures, when the mobo was inside its original shell were comparable with the ones I got on the Samsung laptop, around 90-92°C of Tmax. The thermal paste used is till the same MX-2.

Well, after taking the mobo out of the laptop, letting it stand on some 2cm high standoffs, the Tmax went down to 80°C and the system during the AIDA64 benche was staying around 75°C.

What I decided to do?? I bought on aliexpress this cooler: 100x8x40mm and 100x8x20mm. I placed both over the CPU heatpipes with some thermal paste and re-benched the system. I got an improvement of 5°C, with both of them, regardless the differences in size.

You guys are ways more skilled than me so what I'm asking is: do these results make sense? Is it possible to achieve some better cooling or those two CPUs (execially the i7 2860qm) are hopelessy hot no matter what I should try?

I was thinking to add a 5v 80mm or 120mm fan that I already have at home above the cooler but I don't know if this could make a difference.

Last thing: for both the laptops the idle temperature still seats around 40-50°C.

Since I ran out of MX-2, there's already some MX-4 thermal paste on the way. Some years ago I had the chance to test the Kryonaut on the Asus laptop (with the i7 2630qm) and the improvement was around 1°C.

 

The K53SV should perform a little bit better, but it depends if your heatsink has the CPU contact plate made of aluminium or cooper, not all K53SV had the cooper contact plate, if yours is aluminium, grabbing one with a cooper plate might improve your temps a little bit, but its more or less the expected temps.

For example:
https://www.aliexpress.com/i/32826058728.html

A new heatsink assembly might also help, due to the age a new heatsink and fan might perform a little bit better as well.

The heatsink that you added is aluminium as well, and with only 8mm thickness and what looks like around 5mm of fin thickness its normal that it doesn't help all that much.

I would try with a thicker all copper heatsink and a nice big 120mm fan on top of it to lower temps and make it run quieter, because that heatsink for now isn't doing much given that there is minimal to no air flow.

 

Hello! I have the all copper heatsink on the K53SV

I tried to install the thinner heatsink on top with some MX-4 and then place a 120mm fan on top of it. Well, during a full load Aida64 test, with the fan at full speed, the temp went down around 60 degrees. Not bad at all. Since I will be powering the fan via USB, I might assume that its speed will be halved. That's why I tested the system with the same fan at around half of its speed and the temperature did't get past 65

I can call this a nice improvement