Broken cooling system in my T60 after accidental drop?

[zoltan87]

My Thinkpad T60 accidentally slid down of my table (yes, I am a moron ), but luckily it survived. Two issues has arisen though:

There is a small crack above the power jack on the plastic case (the magnesium roll cage is intact, thank goodness). My question is: could I use normal super glue to fix that tiny crack? It's not a structural part, and is extremely tiny, I could safely leave it as it is, but it just keeps bothering me, and if this kind of plastic is in fact glue-able, then I would rather fix it.

My second issue is unfortunately more serious. Since the drop the cooling fan goes really loud pretty much immediately after booting up. I checked the temperatures in SpeedFan. They are 68-74 Celsius after a cold boot up, nothing else is running. That is insanely high, before the accident I had like 45 Celsius idle, and in the 55-60 Celsius range when browsing and watching youtube videos.

So I would think there are two possibilities: somehow I damaged the motherboard in a way that it would read wrong temperatures ( I guess this is highly unlikely, as everything else works as before), or what is more likely, somehow the cooling system got damaged? Is it possible the the cooling pipes got cracked or something? Or maybe the contact area between the cpu/ gpu and the heat-sink got broken up with the big impact, and the heat-paste is not contacting the mating surfaces any more, hence not conducting the heat properly ? Any kind of suggestions/ ideas are welcome.

[MikalE]

Your latter guess would be my first guess, but there's no way of knowing for sure unless you pull it apart.

Cryo glue can be used for the small broken plastic part, but beware that it will craze the plastic and produce a white haze that is not entirely removable. You could paint over it with a semi-matt black paint for plastic like Testors.

[brchan]

Follow the HMM (find it at the top of this page), and reseat the heatsink. It's fairly simple and shouldn't take more than 15 minutes for a complete beginner. If the issue doesn't resolve itself, it may be possible the heatsink was damaged, but parts are readily available and pretty inexpensive.

[zoltan87]

Finally I had the time to disassemble my t60, remove the cooler, and have a look there. It didn't seem to be cracked. I thoroughly cleaned out the fins and such, put a little drop of oil on the shaft of the fan (it was completely dry), reapplied arctic silver thermal compound on cpu and gpu, then reattached the cooler and put everything back. Everything seemed to fit nicely.

Unfortunately things haven't improved a bit: after I switch on the laptop, temperatures are around 58-62 celsius, that is just around the threshold when the fan turns on. As soon as I open a browser or any other application, the fan comes on. After watching a Youtube video in 480p resolution for 30 minutes, the temps were in the 75-80 Celsius range.

I am really not happy with these temps, for one I hate the noisy cooler, and second, i am planning to use this machine for many many years to come, and I am just not comfortable using it in the 80 Celsius + range for extended periods. These machines will get more and more rare, and I really don't want to destroy it in 3-4 years time.

I have a spare t60, I was thinking about replacing the complete heatsink assembly with that one, but after some thinking and reading after these cooling issues I have decided that t60 coolers are pretty mediocre in general anyway.

So I will do one of the following things: either I will get a t500 (/w500) heatsink and use that in my t60, as many forum members say those coolers are more efficient and even quieter, or I will make a completely custom heatsink. I own a chinese cnc machine (unfortunately don't have much practice with it yet), and I am pretty good making CAD designs. So I am thinking about cutting out a fully custom made heatsink from a block of copper. If planned and executed properly, it would be a huge upgrade both in temperatures and in noise.

I could even utilize the empty space where the expresscard slot is, as that cavity is pretty high, could put a nice heatsink and even fit a fan there too. The tricky part would be connecting this heatsink in the expresscard slot to the cpu gpu, as the magnesium rollcage is pretty much in the way. But there is some space below and above that, I think it would be doable. This could even make the laptop go with passive cooling for not too demanding tasks.

This is all just plan for now as unfortunately I have a very hectic life right now, but when I will find free time, I will try to make some plans on computer and see how things would fit together.

[dr_st]

Just get a T/W500 heatsink. It's cool to be able to do CAD, but a heatsink is not just a block of copper. It has tubes with fluid in it. It's not such a trivial manufacturing process, and would hardly be worth your time.

[zoltan87]

Just get a T/W500 heatsink. It's cool to be able to do CAD, but a heatsink is not just a block of copper. It has tubes with fluid in it. It's not such a trivial manufacturing process, and would hardly be worth your time.

I am pretty sure they use copper tubes with fluid in them because of cost and weight considerations. Cutting out a heat sing with a blockof copper would be enormously more expensive (time consuming, wear to the tools and material costs), but I am pretty sure it's not because of performance.
I understand that a tube with fluis has a better heat transferring capacity than a similar solid copper tube would have. But the heatsink I am thinking about would be a big solid and probably quite heavy think. Because of the thinckness it would transfer heat a lot better than a small tube (even if that has a fluid in it). And I could completely custom make the whole thing, to perfectly mate with all the components (no silly thermal pads and such, just some paste and that's it).

But you are right about the financial considerations, it would be pretty expensive and hugely time consuming. This is more like an idea for now, depending on how much free time I will have next year. But would be amazing having a t60 with passive cooling during light tasks.

[wujstefan]

Well possibly either your cooling system got dented, or there is a crack in it that depressurised it.

Either way, I'd just buy a new one. I tried with custom cooling as well, but it just doesn't make much sense - someone who designed it probably worked on cooling systems for 10-15 years, made several tests and so on so I presume they have a little-little-more know-how than us to do this better

As for the fluid or no fluid, copper block would work way better than copper tube with (any) fluid. I wouldn't be very surprised to find a MET fluid in thinkpad coolers. There is actually no fluid with higher thermoconductivity than a pure copper, but there may be some reasons it's not full copper block. Pure copper softening or cost reasons, just a guess

[thinkpadcollection]

Inspect your fan casing again top part where pipes are soldered tend to be durable and bottom pressed fan casing might be bent out of shape causing fan wheel to tilt to one side, might be rubbing due to dented sheet metal parts or fan wheel itself went bent and wobbling.
Either way, another heatsink is in order.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection