cleaning overheating laptops that have a separate video card
Nowadays, many laptops have dedicated video cards from Nvidia and ATI.
Its a good idea if you want to play graphics-intensive games on your laptop, or if you need the video power for other reasons.
However, I’ve also noticed that many of these laptops don’t have their cooling system designed properly, which dramatically shortens the life of the laptop.
Here is an example of what a normal laptop CPU fan and heat sink might look like:
but when you add a high speed Graphics Processor (GPU), then it needs to be cooled as well as the CPU.
Ideally, the components will be arranged, so that 1 heatsink is used to cool both the CPU and the GPU.
But you get problems when laptop makers decide to take an existing laptop design, and just “bolt on” a GPU, giving it its own heatsink, but using the same fan to cool both heatsinks… placing one heat sink behind the other… so that the air leaving the first heat sink, then goes through the second heat sink.
What happens now, is that dust gets trapped at the entrance of both heat sinks.
This means that blowing compressed air into the heatsink exhaust vent won’t really clear much dust.
In particular, the dust thats “trapped” between the 2 heat sinks will just be pushed from the second heat sink onto the first one (and eventually back onto the second one during normal operation).
In these cases, the only way to clean the cooling system on these laptops, is to open the bottom of the laptop case, and pick away at the dust “by hand”… a slow, dirty and nasty job!
We all know that laptops as well as PCs will shutdown abruptly when the CPU reaches certain temperature.
Something I have learned about some laptops (and most desktops) is that the video (GPU) may not be protected by the same ‘thermal event’ shutdown capability.
I have seen a few laptops come in to the shop with a failed GPU. The customer will often mention how in days/weeks prior to failure, their display would often become corrupt.
So basically, the GPU was literally heated to death without the user even being aware of what was going on.
We bought one of those laptop coolers that the laptop sits on and it’s working very well.
Great Tips. I really was unaware that some laptops are now coming with even a fan on the video card. To me, it seems like just another component that when it fails can really cause a lot of problems.
do the cooling pads really work? I have 2 laptops with overheating issues…
Do the cooling pads work?
It depends on the laptop.
Some laptops are more prone to overheating than others.
Most CPUs nowadays are efficient enough to cause few overheating problems… but bad laptop design can still be a problem.
The cooling pads really just mask the main issue.
And depending on where the overheating problem is, they might not work.
As always, you are best served to test the cooling pad, together with a program like speedfan… just to see what difference a cooling pad actually makes.