Yet another (useful) heatsink mod

Hi everyone,

I decided to post my heatsink mod here - hopefully others will find it useful and adapt it for their own laptops.

The idea is simple: extend the heatsink's surface, so more of it is cooled by air (i.e. incoming air is used more effectively).

Basically, I drilled a copper sheet, polished the surface at the contact point (where it will be joined with the heatsink fins using thermal paste), and placed it in front of the fan (this is important - otherwise it's pointless, since you'd be shuffling hot air inside the laptop for little gain).

I've also added more copper on the CPU, GPU and VRAM - it's not all that useful on its own (since the heat still remains in the laptop), but in this case it helps conduct the heat away faster (it's one heatpipe for all components, and it's obviously overloaded).

With the mod, I finally don't need undervolting for the CPU and GPU to get normal temperatures, although I still undervolt the CPU since the system board just can't provide enough power and it throttles (it wasn't even designed for a quad core in the first place, but it runs fine /*knock on wood* ).

Larger (and more) pics with description are here: Laptop cooling mod - Imgur

Here's a summary of the important stuff:

The heatsink with thermal paste applied to the fins (and copper sheets for the CPU and GPU):


The heatsink extension itself (plus more copper sheets). It's dual layer, although only one layer has direct contact with the heatsink fins. In case you can't tell, the air intake is right underneath it, the fan goes right on top of it.


And here's the heatsink installed - notice how the heatsink fins and the drilled copper sheet have direct contact via thermal paste.


The air first passes through the copper sheet, which is why it's important to have appropriately sized holes - in this case they're 3mm, 2.8mm and 2mm at the edges - should've done it right the first time, but I thought 2mm would be good enough - it wasn't and I had to make them larger. 3.0mm seems like the perfect choice.

There are a few small pieces of thermal paste under the copper sheet keeping it firmly pressed against the heatsink fins (and also transferring some heat to the chassis, but it's minimal).

And another heatsink extension, now single layer and with more uniform holes (drilling them with a big power drill is pretty hard, lol):



That's about it. I did not record any benchmarks cause I didn't have time, but the difference is large.

Thermal paste is Arctic MX4 (the best), thermal pads for VRAM and North Bridge are 1mm Fujipoly from FrozenCPU.

Copper is 26 gauge/0.4mm sheet - you could use a thicker sheet if it fits inside your laptop - in my case 0.5mm is all I could fit between the case and the heatsink fins.

I'll do this kind of mod for every laptop I'll own from now on (should be especially useful for keeping Turbo levels at maximum!).

 

Interesting mod.

Have you noticed a decrease in your temps because of this? I'd think that even though you have the holes drilled, you're still reducing air flow a bit which despite the increased contact surface might mitigate any cooling gains.

 

That's why hole size is important - too small and it blocks the air, too large and it's less effective. Basically, make them as large as the original holes in the chassis (if they didn't block air, the copper sheet won't, either).

The contact between the heatsink fins and the copper sheet must be good, as well - first time I did this mod, it was kinda loose so it was less effective. Now it's very tight and the results are as good as they get - temperatures don't go above ~76 degrees, and that's excellent for the Elitebook 8530w's cooling system (one heatpipe for everything). With the standard heatsink, it would climb to 90 quickly.

I'm expecting the temps to increase slightly once the paste hardens - it happened the first time. I need to run some benchmarks - summer will be the perfect time for it, as I have some benchmarks with the standard heatsink made in July.

 

Sounds good. Make sure to post back with the results during summer.

 

The only problem I see is that there is little pressure between the heatsink and copper sheets. Pressure between them will improve heat transfer immensely. It might not change your temps much at first, but you won't have all this thermal paste drying out issue. Also MX4 isn't the best, but it is good. Otherwise, really nice job with what you have done! You should be proud.

 

The first time I did it, there was no pressure - I've fixed that when I redid the mod by placing thermal pads under the copper sheet to push it into the heatsink fins. And you're right, there was a noticeable improvement in temps.