Tag Archives: heat

cleaning overheating laptops that have a separate video card

Computer Aid Posted on by

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!

Overheating laptop

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve had a few laptops recently, which have had varying degrees of overheating problems.

The most severe I had seen, was a CPU failure… The PC just wouldn’t switch on, despite my cleaning the CPU heat sink.

Other laptops had varying problems, like shutting down after just 20 minutes.

In some cases, it very easy to prevent the problem: while the laptop is off, blow some compressed air into the CPU exhaust vent.

Here is an example of what a laptop fan and heat sink might look like:

The heat sink is the set of cooling fins on the right.

The problem is that as the fan blows air across the fins, dust builds up at the “entrance” to each small “tunnel” created by the cooling fins.

As more dust accumulates, less air flows through.

Eventually no air flows through, and both the CPU and the heat sink, get hotter, until the CPU shuts down.

So blowing air in the reverse direction, means that the dust can get pushed out past the fan itself.

But in some cases, its actually better to take the casing apart, in order to clean the fins properly.

And here is where some laptops are better than others: some will have a flap under the laptop, which allows you to easily access the fan and heat sink.

But others (often Toshiba) force you to dismantle the entire laptop, in order to clean the cooling fins.

The next article will be along similar lines: cleaning overheating laptops that have a separate Video card (eg Nvidia and ATI cards).

I’m a fan of fans.

Computer Aid Posted on by

It’s true. I like them. If I were an electrical apparatus I’d like them more. Electronics and heat go together, but they don’t like it.

metal fan

Heat in electronic gear causes many problems. They can often be subtle, like the gear ‘acts up’ after a while. It could be the VCR or DVD player that produces streaks in the picture after some time running or the hanging/rebooting pc in the back room.

Recently my own DVR started carrying on. The first symptom was it wouldn’t play any previously recorded material. A closer look showed that it thought the program names were written in a mixture of 5 foreign languages and were 350GB long. That would havebeen great except I knew it had only a 160GB hard disk drive in it. I tried to delete some of the old stuff but no, it wouldn’t delete. After some time I thought I’d try to format the hdd, but oh no, it wouldn’t allow that either. At that point I was getting quite frustrated and started to pull it out of the timber entertainment unit it was in. As soon as I put my hand on it I could feel that it was quite warm. Not really blazingly hot, but way too warm. After letting it cool in free air for a while it magically worked normally and has continued to work normally since. Another victim of heat causing problems with electronics.

Consumer electronics like DVD players, HiFi gear and most TV’s (Plasma’s are an exception) are made cheaply and generally heat disappation is not of paramount concern in the manufacturers mind. Maybe they’re made for a cooler climate than Australia, where I live, but here things get hot.

Computers on the other hand have at least 1 fan, in the power supply. Well, unless you’re a noise freak, that’ll be the case. That fan has a dual purpose. Not only does it extract warm (or hot) air that has been heated from the components inside the power supply, but the air that it draws in (if it can! ) is already warm from the other electronics inside your computer. So now we’re drawing in already warm air over warm components that need to be cooled. Hmmm…. Not good. As I said before, if the power supply in question, as is common, has its intake vents partially clogged with dust and crud then less air can be drawn in.

Modern computers have more than one fan. As computers get faster they generate more heat. It’s a fact of life with electronics. CPU’s (the “brain” inside your computer), the Pentium 4, Core 2 Duo, Centrino, Phenom or what have you, all do it. They get hot. In some designs if they get hot they go slower, others destroy themselves.

To get rid of the heat, metal heatsinks are fitted. These come in many designs but generally have some sort of fins that extend away from the heat source to allow the heat to dissipate. Modern multi-gigahertz (fast) cpu’s generate a whopping amount of heat and not only have a heatsink but an integrated fan too. So now we have the cpu stirring warm air around that will be drawn into the power supply. If your computer is used for modern 3D games, then it very likely has a fan (or 2) on the video card too. Fast video cards, like fast CPU’s generate a LOT of heat. Now we have several sources of heat in the computer. Don’t forget hard disk drives too. They get quite hot but their heat is generally drawn away by the metal chassis of the computer that they’re mounted into.

Some computers may have a fan mounted at the front to draw in (hopefully) cool outside air. They may also have 1 or more extra exhaust fans at the rear of the case. It seems that no matter how many you have, it’s not quite enough.

Now let’s throw into the mix a warm summers day. As I’ve often said to clients, if you are uncomfortably warm, your computer is frying. Should one of the fans fail you are in strife.

The most common fans to fail are the power supply fans. While CPU fans don’t tend to fail, their heatsinks do get heavily clogged up with dust and fluff. Regular cleaning is a good idea, but don’t do as recommended in a local supposedly hi-tech magazine and wash your motherboard under running water. Can you believe that nonsense? Call a professional (and I don’t mean a maid) to do it.

Get to know how warm your system runs. It may save you a lot of heartache.