Tag Archives: heatsink

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).