Gonna cut holes in my laptop - Asus N53SV

Lope · 2 May 2014 at 11:00

Before modding
This is how the bottom chassis looks now. No vents.

The laptop currently overheats (86C) and shuts down every time the CPU is loaded more than 40% for more than about 2 minutes.

Reason to cut holes
When I put 6 fans around the laptop (under and around) the situation improves by less than 5%.

Simulated better airflow
When doing open chassis testing, I can load the laptop 100% without any additional fans or active cooling etc with a max core temp of 72C.

Need to replace thermal grease
I've checked with an IR thermometer and I suspect the thermal contact is not very good.
With a sustained core temp of 72C the highest temp I can see anywhere on the square copper piece of the heatpipe is 42C. I think a temperature differential of 30C is too much.

If I see massive improvement after replacing the thermal grease I may think twice about cutting holes. But when I take the CPU cooler off that will void the warranty, so I might as well improve the cooling.

More pics
These are the holes I'd like to cut. I just hope it doesn't weaken the rigidity too much. I'll pay attention to rigidity with each cut and might adjust my cutting strategy.

GIMP'd image showing the cooler in position on the bottom chassis (but in this pic it's upside down)

The motherboard

Feedback
Suggestions? Comments?

Lope · 2 May 2014 at 11:19

I've released the 4 screws on the CPU and 4 screws on the GPU heatsinks, and I'm rotating the heatpipes slightlly clockwise and anti clockwise to try release them. The shim on the north bridge has released but the CPU and GPU are still holding on.

Any tips?

Lope · 2 May 2014 at 11:36

About a minute with a hairdryer made very light work of it

Lope · 2 May 2014 at 21:39

I didn't feel like opening my laptop again soon, so decided some vents would delay the need for it's next service, and help overall with CPU intensive work and using it during hot weather.

My 5 star workshop

"Machining" (more like ghetto hole hacking) in my workshop turned out to be more challenging and less precise than I expected, and the plastic also turned out to be a lot stronger than I expected. So I decided cut fewer bigger holes.

It's holy

Peekaboo, I see you

The fan hole looks a little bit misaligned... it is slightly, but the camera angle makes it look worse than it is.

Purgatory:
My laptop has the i7 2670QM CPU, which is the best CPU available for this particular model laptop.
A lot of people recommended doing a warranty claim on my laptop, and even though I have 1 year left I decided not to for these reasons:
* I really like the laptop.
* I chose this laptop specifically because it's upgradable to 32GB RAM (4x8GB). 4 mem slots is rare on a laptop.
* No laptop will run the intense prolonged 100% CPU loads happily on hot South African days (ambient can get to 40C)
* There would be no gain, only possible loss of max memory capacity.
* I'd have to reinstall
* I'd be without a laptop for a while
* I can fix it myself *G* (look how well I fixed it ^-^ *G* )

Dust
I got some stainless steel mesh (a cannibalized kitchen strainer (sieve)). The holes are bigger than ladies stockings, (probably 1-2mm holes) which will provide more airflow, EMI protection (whoop whoop) and more protection from accidental cables or fingers poking into the chassis.
Plus I don't have stockings.

Cleaning
Now that we're on the subject of dust... disassembling this laptop (as is any laptop) a ballache. I'm hoping that I'll be able to clean the dust out most of the time using my powerful 1800W vacuum cleaner.
If I really wanted to make it easy to clean I'd just tape the mesh on from the outside. But that will get sticky, dirty and gross... and the SS mesh would scratch and rip up bags etc.

Restraint
* I almost cut another hole under the exhaust heatsink, but decided not to to keep max structural strength near the left hinge.
* I considered cutting open the exhaust hole on the left, but decided not to because it probably wouldn't be a perfectly clean cut and I'd rather keep the laptop looking sharp from the sides and top.

Mods still to come tomorrow
* SS mesh to cover the holes, epoxied to the inside of the chassis.
* Custom heatsinks made of 2 or 3mm aluminium. (I considered copper but it's much heavier, and I've got loads of scrap aluminium already)
* I might open up the vents that cover the RAM (there is already mesh)

Lope · 2 May 2014 at 22:15

d_brennen:
Haha dude, better temps are guaranteed. In my testing (running it with open chassis) better airflow makes all the difference.
You make a good point about misc hot parts not getting the same airflow because I've optimized cooling of the CPU here. I'm aware of airflow design and I did consider this. That's why I didn't just cut a hole under the fan's intake. I decided to cut holes in many places. My intention is to run the laptop on a cooling pad for 99% of it's life. And on the odd occasion where I'm mobile the usage won't be very long (on battery) or involve intense CPU usage. So, it's all good. I have thought of adding in a little 40mm fan somewhere to help with this issue and increase the active air cooling, but that can come later if necessary and if there's space.

Lope · 3 May 2014 at 22:10

Purgatory:
That's a nice and neat mod my friend.
Because of the limitations of my workshop (picture above) it's both a lot of effort to do anything and extremely difficult to do anything neat. And these holes are UNDER my laptop, which nobody is gonna see, so I don't give a crap about what my laptop looks like underneath

Okay I've finished my mods for now.

I thought about different ways I could use the heatsink, what thickness, material etc. Ultimately I decided to use a very thin piece of aluminium so that it would be easy to get a lot of surface area by cutting it with scissors and also easy to bend to fit the heatpipe, and easy to bend once in place for adjustments rather than having to take it off and carefully/tediously grind/drill etc.
So I traded thermal conductivity (thicker aluminium) for surface area, ease of modding (quicker, lower risk etc)

Here are the pics...

Cutting the extra heatsink

The finished heatsink

After sanding and coating both with 5 minute steel filled high-temp epoxy I put them in my high tech clamps (pictured here) for 5 minites

Stainless steel mesh cutting

It went kind of like this

But then when I tried to put the motherboard back in with the new monster heatsink AND test fit with the SS mesh taped in place: it didn't fit immediately (kind of obvious)
Then I realized I was making the challenge 2x as hard. I decided I should first get the mobo with the extra heatsink to fit in the case and THEN add the SS mesh.

So I did the necessary tweaks to get the new heatsink to fit (just making sure there was enough clearance here and there, mostly just bending this and that.

Then I started playing around with the SS mesh and did some test fits etc, and just decided I didn't want to mess with the SS mesh idea. I was kind of over the mod at this point and just wanted to get done with it.
Opening laptops is something I hate doing so I'd rather just leave some nice fat holes underneath so I can easily clean my laptop with a paintbrush and a vacuum cleaner.
I'll just make sure I put something flat (cardboard/plastic/aluminium) in a sleeve if I ever carry my laptop in just a sleeve, but my backpack has a flat back anyways, so the whole mesh thing is really superflous. My laptop cooling pad has mesh so that should pre-filter the air just the same as any mesh would.

The completed extra heatsinks (it's actually two separate pieces because the heatpipe bends down to where the northbridge is)

Low profile view

Almost done

This is how the HDD/RAM cover looked before I pulled the mesh off and cut the holes open, then epoxied the mesh back on.
This time I cut the holes with a jig saw because I had had enough of burning plastic and ultra fine plastic powder to clean up.

I messed some epoxy on it :/

The completed mod.

Thanks for tuning in. I've not used my laptop much yet. Just booted up and checked the CPU temp. Was 37C idle. I think it idled at 45C before. That's irrelevant. The main thing I'm interested in is how it handles high CPU load. I'm just cleaning up before I set up and test again.

Lope · 3 May 2014 at 23:05

This is #$(*#$*(! awesome

I'm just using a weak little USB powered coolermaster laptop cooling pad. (instead of the 8 powerful 120MM fans I was running before with the unmodified laptop when it was overheating)

Firstly Idle temps dropped to 35C.

When I did a load test the cooling setup just laughed at me like "is that all you've got?"
The temp sat at around 48C and slowly gradually climbed for a minute or two up to 69-71C where it's been for 10 minutes.

Closing thoughts
* Take care of your lungs. Powdered plastic and metal is horrible stuff. 5 minute epoxy fumes are horrible also. (BTW I used to have "45 minute steel filled epoxy" that didn't seem to make any noticeable smell)
* I need a proper workshop.
* Well done self! * pat pat *. I'm happy, it was fun, but also a mission.
* I won't bother using SS mesh on a laptop or any device with such tight clearances. It's horrible to work with. I'd rather use some plastic mesh, like what came with my laptop. Ebay has some stuff that looks kind of similar.
* Speaking of ebay I went on a little ebay shopping spree a few minutes ago. Picked up some burrs, small diamond cutting discs, and cutting saw wheels 1 2 (I don't have any of those yet, looking forward to trying them) fun fun fun
* I thought of painting the heatsink and heatpipes black to increase the emissivity, but only thought of it once I had already mostly assembled the laptop. Maybe next time I open it or have it upside down I'll colour in a bit of the heatsink with a black permanent marker.

Lope · 2 Jun 2014 at 17:49

The mod has been working great. The vast majority of the time my temps are good when I've loaded all cores (talking about real world work, not stress tests).
I've also changed the position of my laptop and cooler with the cooler rotated 90 degrees. It's not working very nicely.
Very occasionally it still hits 80C and my software throttles it back to avoid the 86C shutdown temperature of my laptop.

My 2nd order of heatsinks with thermal tape on them arrived about 10 days ago. I got some aluminium ones that are about 10mm tall, and some shorter copper ramsinks. I used the copper ones so that they do not protrude beyond the chassis.

So I've finally finished my mod. And rearranged my laptop so that it's sitting on the cooler properly again.

Here is the underside of my completed mod

What was cool is I didn't even have to take the whole thing apart to install the new copper heatsinks.
I noticed afterwards I could have probably fit 4 heatsinks over the CPU instead of 3... oh well. The main thing is I've got one right over the CPU core.

Lope · 11 Aug 2014 at 19:20

Thanks guys.
After a few months I'm very happy with the mod.
Murphy's law struck though. My hard drive developed problems and when I contacted Asus's repair contractor they wanted my entire laptop. I tried to offer to give them just the drive from my laptop, but they weren't interested. I've still got 2 more of their contractors I can ask.

Regarding performance. The difference is amazing.
My CPU usage graph used to look like spaghetti, now it can peg at 100%. I've been compiling HHVM now for a few minutes with 8 threads utilized, and CPU temp is sitting at a safe 75C.