Reply To: Thermal mod / TDP increase – viable option for gaming?

[Max]

Hello everyone.

I wanted to share my own experiences with my thermal mod. I have replaced the cheap 1 mm thermal pad with a 15x15x1 mm copper plate in combination with MX4 thermal paste and the temperatures have dropped by 15°c while gaming. The laptop is also way cooler to the touch at the bottom of the notebook (which is NOT made out of plastic by the way) and on the left side of the keyboard. I don’t recommend using any kind of thermal pads because they transfer heat way worse than copper. I also HIGHLY recommend everyone to tweak the voltages of their CPU and the GPU inside the BIOS, because this will increase lifetime, reduce quite a lot of heat generation and save power.

Also, adding a copper sheet in combination with a thermal pad on top the copper heatplate will hardly do anything for your cooling. There isn’t much that you can do except for the copper plate between the SoC and the copper heatplate. Correct BIOS settings are also VERY important. Teclast has set a max TDP of 15 watts, which is way too high. Set it to 10 watts inside your BIOS if you want max performance. You won’t notice any difference in performance and your SoC will run cooler. Default normal TDP of 7 watts is fine.  I have set my TDP to 4.5 watts (normal and max) and Skyrim runs at around 38 fps with everything set to low except textures (medium), anisotropic filtering (8x) and viewing distance (medium) on 1280×720 and the SoC doesn’t go above 50°c. 4.5 watts is also perfectly fine for desktop use because the CPU is still able to clock at 2,6GHz and it saves a lot of battery life.