Windows 7 - Dell D630 Cooling Mods

As most people are aware, the Dell D6xx and the Dell D8xx nVidia cards are a part of the recall and I have had only one fail on me so far. My "daily driver" is a D630 and I use it for everything from my Network Admin job to editing HD video. I've got the T9300 in it with 8GB's of ram and a 500GB Seagate hybrid Hard Drive in it. She runs like a dream! She rips through HD video and playing COD 4 online. She has all her ports on the back and plenty of USB which most laptops lack now a days! anyways onto the problem. This was just a little introduction.

When I first got into this line of laptops I had a D620 which failed after a couple months.. After that died I bought a D630. After a couple months this one also started showing signs of doom in the ways of idle temps being 70c+! (160-170F) and load temps are 200+. After taking it apart I found the heatsink wasn't even touching the GPU die because it was bent and the thermal pad was hovering above it! WTF! so I bought a copper shim to replace it. Seemed to work OK but idle temps were still 150-160F and load temps were still 200+.. so I did lots of research and found that Dell had a revision of it's heat sink! The old version had no copper contact for the GPU but the new (DT785) heatsink did. I jumped on eBay and picked up one for 5 bucks and some new Artic silver thermal paste. now idle temps are (115-125F) and load temps are 150-152 MAX. Success! Now onto some other info...


It's not Dells fault the chips was failing.. nnidia gave all the manufacturers the wrong thermal specifications and thought a thermal pad was enough for cooling.. well it is for memory chips and chipsets and any other chips that do not exceed 120F degrees.. what was happened was since the thermal pad did not transfer the heat properly to the heat-sink (and had an even harder time since there was no copper plate on the first revision of the heat-sink) that part of the copper was a cool spot and the CPU, when under load or idle would cause all the cold spots in the heat sink to heat up because that's how they work.. this would cause the GPU end to heat up and eventually causing the GPU to fail... So far I have been exporting 2500+ NEFs in lightroom and the CPU is at 152F and the GPU is at 124 and steady.. Idle temps for the GPU are always 89-102 when browsing the web. If any of you guys out there have this laptop it is really worth getting the updated revision of the heat-sink if you don't already have it.. All the parts were under 10 bucks (if you already have thermal paste..) and will also make your lap cooler!

Just though I'd share my info... hope I posted this in the right place!

I also found this out while I was the District Service Support head at Siemens Information service for South Florida / Caribbean.

We were replacing D600 and D610's with D620 and D630's in 2008/9 and I too jury rigged those that did not have Intel integrated graphics[Majority]. Had a few hundred replaced over time.

I only ordered lappy's with better graphics to some of the engineers and of course myself.

Heat was always a big Issue for the whole Latitude 6XX series.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/jmsC-X90-kU

yeah as well as the 8xx series. they also had the bad GPU issue.

If you've only had the box for a couple of months, why bother fixing it?
It's still in warranty!
Let Dell pay for the problem.

well yes I could lol BUT.. id rather not be without a laptop for a month and I want it done right the FIRST time. they just send me another machine with the same problem lol

halo2surfer,
I understand your logic but when you affect these modifications you will void your warranty and to me this is a much greater liability that you should consider.