[Matej Dian]

Could you dump the bios?

[Matej Dian]

Could you dump the bios you have?

[Matej Dian]

Very unlikely, the power limit mod is only going to help you with continuous multi-core and gpu load. Even if power was the limiting factor in your usecase, SoC would hit 90°C within seconds and instantly throttle clocks down, so there is not much that you can do. Ofc you can disable C-states so it will be boosting more agressively (actually improving responsivness) but it will also run hotter. Disabling Windows Defender is going to give you the biggest improvement you can notice (without hardware intervention / additional cost).

[Matej Dian]

Alright i finally did the heatsink mod (since both items arrived). I used liquid metal on die, thermal paste between the shim and factory copper plate and finally thermal pad contacting the aluminium housing. I know LM is a overkill for this, but there were enough leftovers on the q-tip (from previous application) that i managed to cover both die and contact area of the shim. (SoC package SMD’s covered with electric tape for safety)

Paste instead of thermal glue because:
a) better thermal conductivity
b) no need to glue since the mounting pressure is good enough to keep it in place
c) i don’t have one readily available.

This is kinda optimally tiered TIM usage as with less conductive materials, there is more contact area for heat transfer.
Eg: 49mm^2 @ 73W/mK (advertised Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut)
-> 400mm^2 (2*2cm) @ 12.5W/mK (advertised Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut)
-> 1400mm^2 (3.5*4cm) @ 5W/mK (advertised EC-360 Blue thermal pad)

I have also repurposed the original thermal pad, half fold on short side and then tri-fold resulting in 6 layers of the pad and used it on the M.2 SSD controller (only component of SSD that actually needs cooling) although i’m again sure it’s not going to make any difference in terms of performance (since the original SSD is unlikely to throttle).

After doing bunch of testing (FurMark, LoL, …) for more than an hour, device itself is already pre-heated so for the final test i did 7-Zip benchmark. It’s been running continuously for more than 40 minutes (all cores at 2.3 GHz) and temperature is steady at 63°C (+/- 1°C), ambient 25°C. Of course, all testing done connected on AC with maximum performance power plan, disabled C-states and power limit removed (with RWeverything).

PS: Rubber feet seems to hold fine, but i will still keep my eyes peeled so i won’t loose them while traveling.

[Matej Dian]

(not heatsink modded yet, waiting for pad and shim delivery) General usage temps are OK, its not going to throttle nor get too hot to touch. Even in intense single threaded workloads its still fine. In intense multithreaded workloads it will power throttle before it can heat itself up. Machine was running (and was actively used) for bunch of hours, right now its been connected to charger for about hour. Left half of keyboard feels warm (likely due to charging) while right half is just above ambient (likely heated up by my hand) and core temperatures are in 50-60°C  range with extremely short spikes to 70°C. Workload: Firefox with over 30 tabs, code editor, mail client, document viewer and calculator 😀

[Matej Dian]

Solution: use Firefox instead of Chrome

Right now i’m running Firefox Nightly v64 fluently with 30 tabs opened, peaks at (only) 1.2 GiB of RAM.

If you need more than 4GB RAM for production workloads then you should invest in better platform as whole. For what this laptop is designed for, 4GiB is enough. And i would choose 4GiB of DDR4 rather than 6GiB of DDR3 especially for this kind of device.

[Matej Dian]

Few notes about the process.

20mm*20mm*1mm copper shim is actually good idea, of course you can get away with smaller but still need to cover whole SoC die. Since you have used higher thermal conductivity material between die and shim and less thermally conductive between shim and factory copper plate. With bigger contact area the amout of heat transfered should be ok. Same principle applies for thermal pad on top, you may be able to order cheaper, slightly lower conductivity one, but with bigger size you may actually have better results. Best thermal pad on market i found is Thermal Grizzly Minus Pad 8, has 8W/mK (thats comparable with high end pastes) and 30mm*30mm*2mm costs around 10 euro. There are also cheaper pads on ebay, eg. 5W/mK 50mm*50mm*2mm and should have similar results.

For the thermal adhesive, i think it wasn’t necessary. Since the plate is fixed with screws and with decent pressure, the die shim should not move even with regular thermal paste (should yeild better thermal results)

What about those screws under rubber feet? Did it stick back just fine or had to glue it back?

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