Clevo N960KR Cooling Mod

Hello guys.

I was able to tame the temperatures of my Clevo N960KR equipped with an RTX3070 (115W, no dynamic boost) and i9-11900 with a few rather simple mods; total investment was abt. 60 €. Pictures can be found below. Before the mod, the main problems were that the CPU loads its heat onto the GPU heatsink via the shared heatpipe and that the GPU fan cannot breath properly.

First, I bought a second bottom cover and cut additional venting holes into it to let the GPU fan breathe. Alternatively, it should be possible to use the cover of the N960TD (RTX2060 model) as it seems to be exactly the same, however, this already has venting holes for the GPU fan; this would definetely look more professional but I wasn't able to find one To make my future life easier, I also removed the small plastic bridge beneath the shared heatpipe (red circle) so I can access the GPU fan without having to remove the CPU heatsink every time. This mod helped temps mainly in GPU only workloads.

Then I added three heatpipes (2x 150mm*12mm*1mm and 1x 10mm*9mm*1mm); these are flat enough to fit in the chassis without having to modify it. So far I did not fix them permanently but they are working fine using some adhesive tape and TIM. Finally, I added a few copper heatsinks to the CPU heatsink next to the heatpipe and on the part that covers the VRM. Now some heat can dissipate from there directly without stressing the heatpipes. This shoud work fine as there are venting holes in the cover in this area. These mods help with CPU only and combined (GPU+CPU) workloads.

Temperatures are now 6-10 °C lower on GPU and CPU. No matter what I did, I could not bring the GPU to thermal thottling, not even when CPU and GPU were under full load at the same time (hottest recorded GPU temp was 84 °C after hours of gaming; often it stays in the 70s; high 60s in GPU only workloads). I liftet the long term power limit of the CPU from 65 W to 70 W and peak temps were 90 °C max which was only hit occasionally for a short time when GPU and CPU were under full load for a longer time. Most of the time temps were in the high 70s or low to mid 80s. I also got 200-300 MHz higher average clocks on the CPU.

Too bad I can not additionally undervolt the CPU as undervolting is locked . I tried both, ThrottleStop and Intel XTU.




Worst case scenario after abt. 2 hrs of GTA V gameplay @ 2k and then watching this scene for 15 min (GPU was at 112-116 W all the time, CPU stayed at ~ 70 W).

 

Interesting results with the extra heat pipes.

 

You did a really cool job there, @LaptopLife
Congrats!

I just got my N960KR barebone yesterday, added the rest of the stuff inside of it (i9-10900, SSDs, RAM), everything seemed to be fine till I installed Windows.
With a fresh Windows install, the CPU seems to be capped at its base clock speed (2.81GHz as displayed in Task Manager).
On top of that, Windows Power Options seem to be totally crippled.
Initially, just the Balanced plan was available. Created a custom High-performance plan, but under "Processor power management" there's no Min/Max CPU power state option. The only available option here is "System cooling policy".
The BIOS also looks even more crippled than on the N960SF1 and, as there are no CPU-related options there, I left everything on default.

Any idea about why am I experiencing these weird issues with mine and how could I solve them?

 

Hi

sorry for the late response. That's weird, I didn't have issues with the 10900 (had this before going to 11900), it was boosting correctly if needed, e.g., during gaming. Did you accidently set a power saving profile in the Clevo Control Center? Power options were also crippled with my Windows, could be an Intel thing with 10th and 11th gen, possibly part of the plundervolt fix as undervolting isn't available as well. You could also try using Throttlestop and play around with the Speedshift SST value. I found that with 10th and 11th gen, too high values prevent the CPU from boosting and set it to 80 from the default 128 for the highest power profile. You also want to uncheck SpeedStep and instead check SpeedShift - EPP.

 

Could be a bad windows install?