Drilling holes to improve T60/T61 HSF airflow

[iwishiwasinwhistler]

This is something I've been considering for a while for my 15" Frankenpad.

While over at NBR I noticed miro_gt had posted this:

if you'd like to further improve the cooling abilities of the T61, if you have space (just like I have on my 14" standard screen but not on my 14" wide screen T61) then you can drill holes on the plastic bezel just above the fan assembly, which would make the suction air flow cooler due to not having to go through the laptop internals first. Laptop would not look stock anymore of course. Taking off the keyboard produces the same effect, but I'm guessing that would not be permanent solution, hehe.

on the PLL Pinmod thread........

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardwar ... ost8385390

........as an aside congratulations to tqbinh with the PLL mod that was AWESOME.

Anyway, back to the cooling and airflow question. Has anyone actually tried this? Experiences?

I understand this will interfere with the the way airflow has been designed by lenovo. My feeling is that after modification it wont pull air around the rest of the laptop as well but should concentrate cool air intake where it's needed most, ie: the cpu and gpu heatsink. I'm less worried about the rest of the chassis as my Samsung SSD runs cold to the touch and the replacement intel 6200 wifi card is also cool running.

Yeah, OK cosmetically it'll look different but I think I can do a tidy job with a pillar drill and a new bit. And if it all goes wrong then a keyboard bezel is a pretty cheap and easy replacement.

I'd welcome your thoughts?......

(before some joker picks me up on it - I was planning on removing the bezel in order to do the work )

[TuuS]

I understand this will interfere with the the way airflow has been designed by lenovo. My feeling is that after modification it wont pull air around the rest of the laptop

That is my thoughts... the air is pulled through the entire laptop which I feel is important. You can experiment with your system and this mod may give you a cooler CPU temp, but in my opinion you can get all the cooling you need with a T61p fan and some arctic silver paste. I have a T60/61p that's running an x9000 cpu and FX570m gpu and I've found no need to do any such mods beyond the installation and careful fitting of the T61p fan, and on my similar system with integrated graphics and T9300 cpu, cooling is so efficient that the fan rarely comes on when idle so I have no need nor desire to do such a mod. Another thing I highly discourage is trying to modify the pressure between the GPU and heatsink. This usually causes misallignment and makes things worse, and can in some cases cause torque on the board that can lead to serious problems.

By the way, if you do decide to do such a mod, be scientific about it and gather data before and after and publish your results.

[Binh]

congratulations to tqbinh with the PLL

It is me on the notebookforum, and thank you for your warm words!

Actually, I need to update the mod with two facts:
- For overvolting, the 20K resistor in the feedback circuit need to be hard soldered to motherboard, otherwise the laptop may hang up on vibrating environment (in a moving car, for example) because hole-to-hole connection used previously in my mod is not very reliable.
- For undervolting, VID4 to VID3 mod (isolate VID4 from the CPU and then connect it to VID3) seems to be more effective than the original VID4 to VCC mod.

Going back to the idea of drilling holes in the keyboard bezel proposed by miro_gt, I did not tried it yet but I believe the cooling effect will be marginal because the area bellow keyboard bezel (near left screen hinge) is right above the output of the heatsink, therefore, very little intake air will come through these holes if they exist.