HELP! P4 Cooling questions

Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
edited August 2003 in Hardware
So my laptop is a P4 (yea, yea, I know... stfu :D) 2.4 Northwood. It runs a bit warm, and since the warranty is void now anyhow, I'm looking @ how to improve the cooling.

1. Does removing the IHS (that would be Integrated Heat Spreader for those of you that don't believe in acronyms) help?
2. Would lapping the P4's IHS be more beneficial than removing it?

I know I'm going to lap the laptop's heatsink, that's a given... I'm just not sure what, if anything, can be done to the CPU itself to help with cooling...

Any ideas?

Comments

  • BlackHawkBlackHawk Bible music connoisseur There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    Just blabbering but maybe some AS3 and modding some fans :D
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited August 2003
    well lapping the IHS and the sink will only work assuming both of them are actually flat ... not a given. however, i've found that if you are gonna use some thermal paste, go for something other than arctic silver, something thick like the radio shack stuff
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    I use Ceramique on my P4. And on my client's P4 boxes. Works very well. Arctic Silver Alumina (not the adhesive) is also nice and dense for this, but the Ceramique is not electrically conductive.
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited August 2003
    It's got Ceramique on it now... the warranty is void because I had to take it apart a few weeks ago... I don't use Arctic Silver any more, except if it's on POS systems or if I have nothing else sitting around. Ceramique is cheaper, safer, and works better.

    TheBaron; the point of lapping is to make them flat. My grandparents own a machine shop. We've got granite blocks that are guaranteed to be flat to plus or minus like 0.001"... I'm in the office as I type this on my laptop. All I have to do is unscrew 6 screws for the CPU cover, 5 for the heatsink, 6 more for the 2 fans, walk down the street and lap it... And we've got sandpaper that goes all the way down to 1um (1 micron), which is equivalent to god only knows what grit of typical sandpaper- the stuff feels like silk, not abrasive paper.
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited August 2003
    damn, i want those kind of resources
  • mcwcmcwc Vancouver, BC Member
    edited August 2003
    Geeky1 said
    My grandparents own a machine shop. We've got granite blocks that are guaranteed to be flat to plus or minus like 0.001"... I'm in the office as I type this on my laptop. All I have to do is unscrew 6 screws for the CPU cover, 5 for the heatsink, 6 more for the 2 fans, walk down the street and lap it... And we've got sandpaper that goes all the way down to 1um (1 micron), which is equivalent to god only knows what grit of typical sandpaper- the stuff feels like silk, not abrasive paper.
    Umm....Can I move in next to you Geeky?








    j/k.

    Can you find out want grit that paper is? Probably be impossible to find it at the local hardware store because it may be an insanely high grit paper.
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    1000 Grit wet\dry metal sandpaper is decent, I use the black carbide grit 3M kind of paper.
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited August 2003
    mcwc... this stuff doesn't HAVE a grit rating. 240/400 grit sandpaper is like very fine sand. As I recall, the finest paper we had the last time I looked was around 1um... I KNOW we have at least 50um and 25um stuff... A human hair is between 50 and 100 microns across (not from root to tip, from one side of the hair to the other). So this sandpaper has particles that are 1/50-1/100 of the width of a human hair. The grit rating is off the chart... it's made by 3m, and it's most likely not available except in bulk direct from 3m or one of their suppliers.

    You don't need to go that fine though. besides, do you know how fast copper clogs sandpaper? Try using this stuff- it's virtually worthless after only a few passes, and I doubt this stuff was cheap. Also, you'd be there all f**king week if you wanted to use this stuff... I mean once you got up to 2000 grit or so, you could go to 100um, to 75, to 50, to 25, to 5, to 1.... and when you start getting that fine, you're talking as much as an hour of sanding between grits simply because they remove so little material per pass... For all intents and purposes, all you need to go to is 600; 1200 is overkill (not in a bad way) and anything higher won't hurt. I went up to 2000 on my SLK-800, but it's not necessary.

    Btw, I lapped it, so now the nickel plating is gone. I'm running F@H @ 100% load and it took the cpu fans like 5 minutes to come on, and the air coming out is damn hot.... ya know what? Lemme go grab my probe... just a sec (so I'm treating this like an IM... sue me)

    It's been running F@H @ 100% now for about 15 minutes with no extra cooling, the air coming out the exhaust vent is reading around 132*F/56*C, which is a good thing. Why is having the air coming out of the heatsink that hot good? it means it's working. The hotter the heatsink gets before the fans kick in (they operate based on the cpu temp afaik), the more heat is going into the heatsink, and that's a good thing. I don't want the cpu to be hot, but I want the heatsink to be hot in this case. The only time a heatsink should be cool to the touch is when it's drastically overpowered for the device it's cooling. The fact that it gets hotter before the CPU fans turn on simply means it's absorbing the heat faster than it was before.

    However, I had to use a massive amount of thermal compound on this thing. Not because the heatsink isn't flat (it's flat to 0.0003, if I recall the calibration certification on the side of this particular granite block correctly), but because the heatspreader isn't flat. I'd do something about that, but I know what metal shavings do to electronics, so I'll probably leave it...
  • mcwcmcwc Vancouver, BC Member
    edited August 2003
    I did some searching and if I can remember correctly, 2000 grit is under 10micron. I couldn't find the rating for 1micron, so I'm guessing it'll be around 4000 grit. 3M only sells up to 2000 to the retail market.
  • Geeky1Geeky1 University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA, USA)
    edited August 2003
    hmm... didn't know that. @ any rate, you don't really need to go past 600...

    Now that I've lapped it tho, it runs a lot cooler- the heatsink itself is just lukewarm at idle and the fans almost never run unless it's running F@H with no external cooling or something...
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