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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!
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