Suggestions for my hot running modded laptop please?

[wildlaser]

Hi there all!

A while back on here I found a post about modding a DELL INSPIRON 9400 / E1705, I purchased one with an ATI x1400, and seperately purchased a GEFORCE 7900 GS GO DUAL Heat Sink card.

(2 GHZ T7200), 2 GB RAM.

I installed the card myself, (had to send it back to DELL due to one GPU screw refusing to come out), and didn't even play the one game I bought the system for, due to life circumstance. (how things go sometimes).

Since then I've noticed, the system runs hot, I have l8kfangui, fans turn on often, I do use the Island Breeze Arctic (I think it's called) cooler that you prop it up on in back, and it blows underneath (2 BLUE LED fans that blow air underneath).

I will still be at temps of 70+ degrees (just now checking, no gaming, the peak overnight is 78 with cooler off, on CPU, 57 GPU), not sure what overheats first but playing some games such as Mass Effect, I will get visual artifiacts, and as it heats up more, crashing of the system, (moreso in that one demon slaying RPG game where you have long hair and look sort of like a warlock, oh yeah, "Witcher" .

I have read other people getting WAY better temps. I have blown out the fans with compressed air.

What else can I do? Add thermal paste? Could my heat sinks be installed improperly? I chipped out the "extra" material that was in this one, and had to open it up again to make it fit nice. The underside gets HOT. Playing those games I need FULL fans on externally and internally.. And even then it's not enough sometimes....

[InspectahACE]

it's possible the heatsink might not be installed correctly..it's the only thing I can think of

[wildlaser]

Hmmm, I've had it 2 years now, could that still be the case?

everything seemed to go in seamlessly.... It's been so long though, maybe I should open her up and blow out with air, lap/sand/thermal paste anyways...

[InspectahACE]

2 years? I might have said somethin else if I had known that one..I'd do as you said and take it apart and check it out..who knows, it could just be the dust in it

[wildlaser]

Well, it's hard to say how hot it ran before that, since I didn't do any serious gaming for a period of time.... It still got pretty hot I believe.. and I have blown it out without taking it apart (through the vents, etc).

Could use some brushing up on some technical areas.

I saw a thread on a google search where people's temps were way better, even idle temps. (right now I am in a hot setting with no AC but with fan on full, I get a 73 degrees reading).

I'll try the suggestion though, is it worth adding thermal paste, what about lapping?

[skier]

new thermal paste would help a little bit, but you can't lapp laptops usually they don't have integrated heat spreader over their chips die(as normal desktop processors have)

[wildlaser]

what about lapping/paste on the heat spreader on the 7900 GS GO GPU?

[skier]

again, i can't say if it will help much even if you can lap it but new thermal paste is always good(for GPU's you need paste in the rhealm of Ceramique, as it lasts longer)

[stopthekilling77]

new thermal paste would help a little bit, but you can't lapp laptops usually they don't have integrated heat spreader over their chips die(as normal desktop processors have)

+1 vote for reseating the cooler. Fresh thermal paste and a quality reseating might fix your issue, but as for lapping, i don't think the effort to return ratio is worth it, and I've lapped my old Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme cooler. If this had been a tower instead of a laptop I'd say go for it but thats just how I see it.

[i_timotheus]

I agree with stopthekilling77 . Test after to see if it made a big difference. That may clue you in if want to spend the time lapping. The cost/benefit may be small, but if you are running hot, every couple of C help.

[wildlaser]

Well, I am looking for the thread where people with E1705 / Inspiron 9400 who modded to put in a 7900 GS GO post their temps, as mine still seems hotter than theirs, as I recall..

Haven't done the thermal paste yet, will do it on both cpu and gpu, and do a thorough cleaning inside...

It's getting annoying, I still have artifacts playing games using this card (probably from heat?) and have to play on low settings, with internal fan using l8kfangui, and external laptop cooler (island breeze one).... I get blue screens from it sometimes.

[skier]

i have one dell laptop that runs at 1.6GHz w/out graphics it goes up to 95C watching a movie(used to hit 101C at semi-load before i took it apart), and i have an HP 2GHz w/out graphics which loads at 77C

laptops run hot.

[wildlaser]

Your laptop could boil some soup (depending on altitude and salt content)!

I get that laptops run hot...

The thing is, it seems to vary quite a bit.

And somewhere, is a thread about others with my same laptop, modded with the same graphics card, (some even with only a single heatsink) getting lower temps than I.

THIS, is what I am not getting...

Why my system is running hotter than a (supposedly) identical system.

[DMB2000uk]

There's several things it could be...

If your CPU runs at a higher voltage than theirs.

How your thermal paste is holding up.

If there's dust cooked onto the heatsink fins (reducing their efficiency).

If they changed the default fan control through a new BIOS revision.

Dan