Soldato
- Joined
- 14 Nov 2002
- Posts
- 7,711
- Location
- Under the Hill
so decided to sort the overheating problem with my m1330 myself.
In January I wasted £18 on calls to dell to arrange a replacement fan after it failed.
Since then, I have had consistent problems with the machine crashing randomly. On top of that it would not play games for more than 10 minutes without freezing. After 2 hours on the phone, dell still had not agreed on what the problem was and refused to send an engineer until we had narrowed it down.
At this point I gave up. I opened the machine and removed the heatsink/fan which covered the cpu, northbridge and gpu. Although the contact with the cpu was fine, the gpu and northbridge was done with crappy thermal pads due to what i can only assume was poor design which left a large distance between the heatsink and the chips.
So, I was a bit stumped as to what to do. The gap was about 1.5mm and I was reluctant to use another thermal pad. This overheating and crashing has been a common problem with the m1330 so I decided to introduce a copper shim between the chip and heatsink.
Cue me raiding the piggy bank.... not for money to pay for a machined piece, but for 2 pennies.
So, half an hour with some wet and dry and I had two nice smooth copper* discs to insert in place of the thermal pads. Arctic Silver between the gpu and pennies and some more between the pennies and cores and we were good to go.
Once re-assembled I ran rivatuner to check my peak core temp while under load. It had dropped from 97c to 82c. I have not had a crash since this morning ie/ after it was repaired.
Once again, poor design being fobbed off on the consumer as if it was acceptable. A Dell technician actually claimed that I shouldn't expect to be able to play a game on my machine without it crashing because it was just a laptop
In January I wasted £18 on calls to dell to arrange a replacement fan after it failed.
Since then, I have had consistent problems with the machine crashing randomly. On top of that it would not play games for more than 10 minutes without freezing. After 2 hours on the phone, dell still had not agreed on what the problem was and refused to send an engineer until we had narrowed it down.
At this point I gave up. I opened the machine and removed the heatsink/fan which covered the cpu, northbridge and gpu. Although the contact with the cpu was fine, the gpu and northbridge was done with crappy thermal pads due to what i can only assume was poor design which left a large distance between the heatsink and the chips.
So, I was a bit stumped as to what to do. The gap was about 1.5mm and I was reluctant to use another thermal pad. This overheating and crashing has been a common problem with the m1330 so I decided to introduce a copper shim between the chip and heatsink.
Cue me raiding the piggy bank.... not for money to pay for a machined piece, but for 2 pennies.
So, half an hour with some wet and dry and I had two nice smooth copper* discs to insert in place of the thermal pads. Arctic Silver between the gpu and pennies and some more between the pennies and cores and we were good to go.
Once re-assembled I ran rivatuner to check my peak core temp while under load. It had dropped from 97c to 82c. I have not had a crash since this morning ie/ after it was repaired.
Once again, poor design being fobbed off on the consumer as if it was acceptable. A Dell technician actually claimed that I shouldn't expect to be able to play a game on my machine without it crashing because it was just a laptop
Have to applaud you for having a go at fixing it yourself, although 82 degrees still sounds a bit hot to me for an 8400M. That's purely guesswork from me though, I don't know if GPUs in laptops run much hotter due to lack of good cooling/airflow.