So you say that you didn't notice the laptop temperature getting any lower, but this isn't too surprising to me, since this thing is going to be highly thermally limited.
I suspect that your setup is doing something, but the thing it's doing is allowing your laptop to sustain a certain performance level for longer. So what I would look at is some performance metric like e.g. peakflops() in a loop, or a video game FPS counter, and compare with and without the external fans.
Exactly. If you increase the capacity of a bus in a highly crowded area, the bus will still have 100% occupancy, but that doesn't mean it didn't help. The throughput increased.
Much like adding an extra lane to a highway, more people will use the highway and you'll be back to the same crawl. But technically there's more flow/capacity.
Because it’s a slightly different argument. “More people will use the highway” is not really applicable here. The bus analogy also didn’t meant “more people will take a bus”, just that if you have bus route where 20 people on each bus stop need to wait for the next bus, if you increase capacity of buses by 10, then only 10 people will be waiting on bus stops, but you will still have 100% bus utilization.
In other words, with added lane on highways, it’s sociological mechanism, which is slightly less precise analogy.
If you run the same bus route and frequency, one day with buses that fit 50 people and have 100% utilization, and the next day with buses that fit 100 people and have 100% utilization, you transported twice as many people on the second day as on the first day
This implies that on the first day a lot of people either didn't make their trip because there was no space, or took a different mode of transport. Presumably mostly the latter. With the highway example the same is true, just that it will be mostly people not making the trip at all before the capacity improvement because they were unwilling to make the higher time commitment
The laptop fans are also trying to keep a target a temperature. If you provide external cooling, the internal fans will simply work less and the temperature will remain stable. So check the RPM of the internal fans too.
Another factor is the CPU behaviour. The CPU involved in the article is intel, but IIRC for AMD Zen4 (at least for desktop) they made them boost up to a relatively high but well within spec temperature, rather than leaving performance on the table that only tweakers will see. The better your cooling capability the more you'll get but it caused a few people to freak out a little. Aspects like that are why I reserve the noisy part of my fan curve for when temperatures are going beyond normal.
How feasible would it be for laptop manufacturers to add a slot in a laptop's underside cover to the CPU's heat pipe, and adjust the heat pipe's shape at this location? This would allow a dock to insert its own heat pipe through it, and dissipate the heat with larger fans and/or larger heat sink.
For Macbook Air there was DIY solutions where people added thermal pads to conduct the heat to the aluminium chassis and then use external cooling on that [1]. Since Air just has passive cooling, this gave major boost for long running tasks.
An excellent idea. There's a certain class of laptops that were never meant to be used on one's lap- at best merely portable e.g. Dell precision specced at 240w.
If the pad contact locks together for heat transfer it could also function as a security lock.
The dock could have a water cooling loop under your desk to dry your boots while you work.
We need way more of this content! Things that were tried and failed. I have spent so many head-scratching hours on problem solution approaches that others likely already tried and failed. In science we only celebrate success. Even then it is typically poorly documented.
Indeed, generally and specifically. Ambient temperature's gonna rise thanks to climate change; cooling solutions, especially for storage technology, need to adapt to this challenge in a fashion that also reflects economic realities.
I’ve had some mild success with external piezoelectric coolers. However, the form factor isn’t ideal (weird angle, which led to a lot of returns from other people, so it’s no longer on Amazon)
I drilled some holes in my Framework laptop's bezel.
It isn't designed to be used with the lid closed which is what I do 99% of the time. After drilling the performance with the lid closed went up 30%, with the lid open up 5%. Removing the bezel with the lid open gives extra 10% vs normal bezel.
The nice thing is these can be swapped easily (magnets) and come in different colors. I used to have 2 until I stopped caring about my laptop looking weird in public.
So I had a similar problem and what actually worked pretty well was an external vacuum fan [1]. I tested it before by just using an inflator I had to pull a vacuum and I watched the CPU temp drop so I knew this was valid.
or even better a PTM. i was battling high temps and stutter due to throttling on my lenovo legion with ryzen 7945hx. stock thermal compound, whatever it was, didn't cut it. regular thermal paste was slightly better. PTM finally fixed it even to a point when i can use unlimited power mode.
for half a year at least, until radiators get clogged with dust and thing requires total disassembly. i'm looking to add metal mesh as filter, see how that works
For my home project I used foam tape, but any seal will do.
Regarding cooling I wholeheartedly recommend one Framework 16 owner's journey in making his device maintain 80°C with the CPU going full throttle (aside from other mods):
Don't you want it to do that? The air goes upwards, hits the laptop surface, and travels outwards carrying the heat?
If it's sealed, I imagine you would get a very turbulent situation, possibly far noisier, but also one where I can't intuitively picture the airflow and expected cooling flow. I should note I am very, very far from an expert here ;)
There's a lot going on here, but the gist is that even a magnesium alloy laptop chassis is a rather poor conductor of heat (for a metal) and you really have to push that air through the machine to get it out.
I got a laptop cpu in a desktop motherboard (a mini PC board). It was cheaper, and performs much better that the same cpu in a laptop. It was a steal. It's like shucking an hdd, an incredible value for the price.
I got one from Amazon. A 32-thread Ryzen 9 7945HX, along with a motherboard, CPU cooler, case, and PSU for $400. But I didn't trust the PSU, so I bought a better one, replaced the thermal paste with PTM 7950, and replaced the CPU fan with a Noctua.
I also had to buy SODIMM DDR5 RAM modules (just before prices skyrocketed, I got 64 GB for $180), a 2 TB Samsung NVMe SSD, and an RTX 5060. The CPU comes with an integrated GPU, but I disabled it to get better cooling.
I also wanted to replace the CPU cooler with a Noctua one, but the GPU sits too close to the CPU. Maybe someday I'll adapt a liquid-cooling radiator, but that would require 3D printing a custom adapter and making multiple trips to a 3D printing shop for trial and error. That's too much hassle.
Just a note: some laptop fans are not solely controlled by CPU or GPU temperature, but also by power consumption. This may explain why your laptops internal fans are still spinning up under load, even though the external fans do all the work already.
Amazing they're called 'laptops' when you haven't been able to safely keep a laptop on the top of your lap for decades.
Even slight increases in temperature is enough to do damage to certain parts of a man, and it's really not good for your legs to have this extremely hot air blasted over it continuously.
Seems P53 has plastic chassis, I bought fan stand for my laptops that have metal chassis because that is used as heat sink. With metal you don’t need magically placed fans you just want to cool the surface.
For overpowered CPU that should not be in laptop it won’t help anyway, I had core i9 and best thing to do was to sell it and just swap to core i7 because there was no home made trick to make it better even with metal chassis.
Well - the challenge is with the right type of fans.
I like the idea of a pump curve for a garden water pump. If you pump water without any back pressure (not even a hose connected), the pump will give a certain volume per time that is can move. If you connect a hose and pump upwards, you will reach a max pressure / max height at which no water will flow any more. Both cases are useless, but this is what the manufacturer prints on the box. Your sweet spot is in between. If you pay enough, you will get a datasheet with the pump curve in between these two points.
For simple and cheap PC fans, you are at most given the number of air volume without back pressure. I've not come across a cheap fan that gives a defined backpressure of even a curve.
For your application you would need a fan that can push air through a restriction.
I had success with high rpm server fans. They create pressure, consume 20W of power or more and also make a lot of noise. But in this case - this is not a solution
FTA: “In the end, I’m not really sure we can just put dissimilar fans in series. If you put a fan that can pump (say) 200 cubic feet per minute (CFM) in series with a fan that can only pump 100 CFM, what is the resulting output? Probably not 300 CFM.”
- "n" fans in series will increase pressure "n" times at a given flow rate, with no additional free delivery flow. Fans in series can be useful in high resistance systems.
- "n" fans in parallel will increase flow "n" times at a given pressure level, with no additional shutoff pressure generated. Fans in parallel can be useful in low resistance systems.”
Compact electronics rarely have vents "close" to the things that get hot - it's been heat pipes for a long time already; and that system is fixed and "scaled" for the included fan(s)... Not much anyone can do in practice without taking the laptop apart - at which point you'd be better off buying a (mini) PC in the first place.
Also: thermals in general are vastly more complex and tricky than our intuition tends to tell us (with the article being a great example of it!).
Probably a monster chip like that has way more headroom than you expect, and can max out the extra cooling you’re giving it as well. If the goal is to avoid the 90C blast, maybe enabling thermal throttling plus using the custom cooling setup will give you (much?) less of a drop in performance than throttling with stock cooling?
If I had a penny for every time a heat engineer's suggestion was discarded because it's too expensive, too time consuming to implement this late into the project or too impactful on weight or size I'd be rich already. The only guys I know that are ignored more than them are the EMI filter designers ("what's EM noise anyways?")
It's a pity laptop manufacturers haven't figured out how to dissipate heat by using the lid as radiator. I read about some experiments years ago where they managed to get rid of like 25W
Interesting, were those experiments with traditional layout when motherboard is in the bottom part of the laptop? Maybe we just need to make screen heavy laptops with thin keyboards but with thicker cooling, that could also utilize convection better. Something that you put vertically and open keyboard down, I think some gaming tablets are like this now
You can use a thermal strap to transfer heat through the laptop hinges and in to the top screen area. But then you introduce thermal issues for the screen. LCD/OLEDs are rather heat sensitive.
That is so extremely cool (ha) but boy, that sounds difficult to make reliable through ~100,000 lid open/close cycles. Still, I would love this if it could be made so. I have seen so many horror stories of "I'm using my laptop in my lap on a blanket and blocking all the cooling, why is it so hot?"
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] threadI suspect that your setup is doing something, but the thing it's doing is allowing your laptop to sustain a certain performance level for longer. So what I would look at is some performance metric like e.g. peakflops() in a loop, or a video game FPS counter, and compare with and without the external fans.
In other words, with added lane on highways, it’s sociological mechanism, which is slightly less precise analogy.
This implies that on the first day a lot of people either didn't make their trip because there was no space, or took a different mode of transport. Presumably mostly the latter. With the highway example the same is true, just that it will be mostly people not making the trip at all before the capacity improvement because they were unwilling to make the higher time commitment
Just double checking: Did you put the fans in the correct orientation and on the intakes instead of the exits?
[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-macbook-air-heats...
https://videocardz.com/newz/colorful-launches-water-cooled-l...
If the pad contact locks together for heat transfer it could also function as a security lock.
The dock could have a water cooling loop under your desk to dry your boots while you work.
Indeed, generally and specifically. Ambient temperature's gonna rise thanks to climate change; cooling solutions, especially for storage technology, need to adapt to this challenge in a fashion that also reflects economic realities.
It isn't designed to be used with the lid closed which is what I do 99% of the time. After drilling the performance with the lid closed went up 30%, with the lid open up 5%. Removing the bezel with the lid open gives extra 10% vs normal bezel.
The nice thing is these can be swapped easily (magnets) and come in different colors. I used to have 2 until I stopped caring about my laptop looking weird in public.
[1] this is just example, there's better ones I'm sure. https://www.amazon.com/KLIM-Tempest-Laptop-Cooler-Vacuum/dp/...
for half a year at least, until radiators get clogged with dust and thing requires total disassembly. i'm looking to add metal mesh as filter, see how that works
I've dabbled in this and the one thing that absolutely has to be included is a seal on the edges between the laptop and the stand like so:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/126317216434
Otherwise the air will escape to the sides.
For my home project I used foam tape, but any seal will do.
Regarding cooling I wholeheartedly recommend one Framework 16 owner's journey in making his device maintain 80°C with the CPU going full throttle (aside from other mods):
https://community.frame.work/t/all-the-modifications-ive-mad...
Don't you want it to do that? The air goes upwards, hits the laptop surface, and travels outwards carrying the heat?
If it's sealed, I imagine you would get a very turbulent situation, possibly far noisier, but also one where I can't intuitively picture the airflow and expected cooling flow. I should note I am very, very far from an expert here ;)
I also had to buy SODIMM DDR5 RAM modules (just before prices skyrocketed, I got 64 GB for $180), a 2 TB Samsung NVMe SSD, and an RTX 5060. The CPU comes with an integrated GPU, but I disabled it to get better cooling.
I also wanted to replace the CPU cooler with a Noctua one, but the GPU sits too close to the CPU. Maybe someday I'll adapt a liquid-cooling radiator, but that would require 3D printing a custom adapter and making multiple trips to a 3D printing shop for trial and error. That's too much hassle.
Even slight increases in temperature is enough to do damage to certain parts of a man, and it's really not good for your legs to have this extremely hot air blasted over it continuously.
For overpowered CPU that should not be in laptop it won’t help anyway, I had core i9 and best thing to do was to sell it and just swap to core i7 because there was no home made trick to make it better even with metal chassis.
I like the idea of a pump curve for a garden water pump. If you pump water without any back pressure (not even a hose connected), the pump will give a certain volume per time that is can move. If you connect a hose and pump upwards, you will reach a max pressure / max height at which no water will flow any more. Both cases are useless, but this is what the manufacturer prints on the box. Your sweet spot is in between. If you pay enough, you will get a datasheet with the pump curve in between these two points.
For simple and cheap PC fans, you are at most given the number of air volume without back pressure. I've not come across a cheap fan that gives a defined backpressure of even a curve.
For your application you would need a fan that can push air through a restriction.
I had success with high rpm server fans. They create pressure, consume 20W of power or more and also make a lot of noise. But in this case - this is not a solution
https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/91/
“Dissimilar” isn’t needed there.
https://www.rotron.com/Resources/Application-Notes/Series-an...:
“When applying more than one fan in a system:
- "n" fans in series will increase pressure "n" times at a given flow rate, with no additional free delivery flow. Fans in series can be useful in high resistance systems.
- "n" fans in parallel will increase flow "n" times at a given pressure level, with no additional shutoff pressure generated. Fans in parallel can be useful in low resistance systems.”
Also: thermals in general are vastly more complex and tricky than our intuition tends to tell us (with the article being a great example of it!).
And it also might be a problem with the cpu paste and not with air.
Used in heavy duty aerospace and industrial applications. 100k lid cycles would be pretty easy.