About Notebook cooling
17 Feb 2025 15:58:11 UTC
Topic 232105
(moderation:
Maybe this is interesting for some people:
In winter I let boinc run on my notebook too. I own it for 3 years. Now human memory is tricky, in my mind it always reached the thermal limit despite very good cooling and I assumed that's just a laptop thing.
Then I noticed it has thermal issues and shortly after cooling failed completely, I called support and they sent me a new heatsink with fans.
When replacing I noticed: the thermal paste was rock hard. Maybe just replacing it had solved the issue, but since I had a brand new replacement part I installed that. After installing the replacement part temperatures dropped 30-40°C, even under full load drawing 180 watts from the power socket it will not go above 70°C. Insane numbers for a notebook.
Was a big surprise for me. I know thermal paste should be replaced from time to time but somehow I didn't connect that knowledge to mobile cooling.
But besides me remembering wrong there is also the option that out of factory the original heatsink didn't work properly. There are quite some articles of people who got their temperatures down - also with GPUs - when replacing the original heat paste with better quality self applied one.
So if you let your laptop run under heavy load for long times, maybe check on and do maintenance on the cooling now and then.
You should have not used
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You should have not used thermal paste in a laptop. You'll just experience the same issue in a short while. Thermal paste gets hard and cracked as the volatiles leak out or flash off. A process called 'pump-out" happens also.
The current best solutions for laptop cooling is to use either a synthetic graphene pad or a phase change pad like Honeywell PTM7950 which won't lose volatiles or suffer from pump out.
Thermal Grizzly has both types of thermal pad solutions for example. These products will never dry out, crack or pump out in the life of the unit.
https://www.thermal-grizzly.com/en/products/thermal-pads/
Thank you for the suggestion,
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Thank you for the suggestion, I forgot about these. I guess I can use them for my desktop GPU as well since I see deteriorating thermals there too?
Do you have experience with the thermal conductivity? Is it the same to thermal paste?
Like for example the Duronaut?
https://www.thermal-grizzly.com/en/duronaut/s-tg-d
Well, the thermal paste is the factory solution, the replacement part had it pre-applied, so I guess I'll replace it soon.
The thermal pads have much
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The thermal pads have much the same thermal conductivity as the best pastes. Not as much as liquid metal but that is an entirely different discussion.
Don't know anything about the new Duronaut product, brand new. No discussions or reviews yet with the only information from the new product page.
Whether it really does not suffer from pump out is unknown, or maybe just to not as much affect over their traditional pastes.
The pads I described don't have ANY pump out. The phase change pad is non-conductive like pastes. The graphene pad IS conductive so you have to keep it away from components on the cpu substrate. Either make sure you don't displace the pad during installation or use Kapton tape to mask any components on the cpu substrate.
Both pads are basically one-time use. The phase change product can theoretically be used after you remove the heatsink and then replaced. The graphene pad is one-time usage.
But the whole point of those products is apply once, never need to change or fuss with again.
All laptops I run, uses
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All laptops I run, uses freeware app Tthrottle, which monitors the CPU & GPU temps in order to control them. So far, after some 10y of using it on desktop (from 240GT) to current use of parents laptops - no issues have been found! & none of the laptops overheated, even with dust in cooler.
Also, compared to desktops which I usually run at ~80% of CPU Tjun & ~70% of GPU Tjun...for laptops I use lesser setting of 60~70% of CPU Tjunc & up to 50~60% of GPU Tjunc. Why? Well, just those settings were best practice for me & Tthtrottle can just limit the temperature in °C based on Tjunc numbers.
Even with dust getting into the laptop & getting cloggy, I have managed to keep the temps down enough that there is no overheat of laptop. So this is the best what I can offer for you...
Then again, I do own a MacBook for my personal laptop & I do NOT run BOINC on it. B)
non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU
.... you are/were just lucky
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.... you are/were just lucky until now ....
Many, including me, have made different findings.
Happy crunching !
sfv
San-Fernando-Valley
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Luck had nothing to do with it...as several of burned Nvidia were an issue, so installed a program to control the max.temp of the GPU...turned out to be also for CPU!
From there on:
Hope you also use some BOINC managment apps to do similar work! B)
non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU
KLiK wrote: All laptops I
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Thank you very much for that. I was searching for something like that when I switched to Windows but couldn't find anything. It's great for very compact laptops that have limited cooling capacity.
Although now I don't need it, I use a Z-Book Fury, one of those thick workstation laptops that still have plenty of space for an adequate cooling solution as well as some space for air to flow around in the case. So that laptop in general can take much more load. And then I pop that bottom off when it's stationary, have a 30cm noctua fan mounted to the laptop stand so the laptops own fans don't even spin up much when it's at full load.
But yes, I burned up 3 MacBooks, and that not only with boinc but just general high workload. And I wouldn't allow a Laptop that is not repairable to reach it's thermal limit for long, if you can't control temperature like with this app they all fail at one point.
As long as the temperature is within moderate range all is save and the hardware can run for years and years and years under load.
B.I.G wrote: KLiK
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Exactly...just put the app running & if sthg fails, it will not overcook! B)
non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU
KLiK
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You didn't mention that.
Which changes the whole situation.
Otherwise you would have had some problems.
sfv