We need way more of this content! Things that were tried and failed. I have spent so many head-scratching hours on problem solution approaches that others likely already tried and failed. In science we only celebrate success. Even then it is typically poorly documented.
So you say that you didn't notice the laptop temperature getting any lower, but this isn't too surprising to me, since this thing is going to be highly thermally limited.
I suspect that your setup is doing something, but the thing it's doing is allowing your laptop to sustain a certain performance level for longer. So what I would look at is some performance metric like e.g. peakflops() in a loop, or a video game FPS counter, and compare with and without the external fans.
Exactly. If you increase the capacity of a bus in a highly crowded area, the bus will still have 100% occupancy, but that doesn't mean it didn't help. The throughput increased.
How feasible would it be for laptop manufacturers to add a slot in a laptop's underside cover to the CPU's heat pipe, and adjust the heat pipe's shape at this location? This would allow a dock to insert its own heat pipe through it, and dissipate the heat with larger fans and/or larger heat sink.
For Macbook Air there was DIY solutions where people added thermal pads to conduct the heat to the aluminium chassis and then use external cooling on that [1]. Since Air just has passive cooling, this gave major boost for long running tasks.
We need way more of this content! Things that were tried and failed. I have spent so many head-scratching hours on problem solution approaches that others likely already tried and failed. In science we only celebrate success. Even then it is typically poorly documented.
Totally noob question: Couldn't the problem just be that the laptop body not conducting heat so much? I think it'd be worth to try it with a macbook.
So you say that you didn't notice the laptop temperature getting any lower, but this isn't too surprising to me, since this thing is going to be highly thermally limited.
I suspect that your setup is doing something, but the thing it's doing is allowing your laptop to sustain a certain performance level for longer. So what I would look at is some performance metric like e.g. peakflops() in a loop, or a video game FPS counter, and compare with and without the external fans.
Exactly. If you increase the capacity of a bus in a highly crowded area, the bus will still have 100% occupancy, but that doesn't mean it didn't help. The throughput increased.
How feasible would it be for laptop manufacturers to add a slot in a laptop's underside cover to the CPU's heat pipe, and adjust the heat pipe's shape at this location? This would allow a dock to insert its own heat pipe through it, and dissipate the heat with larger fans and/or larger heat sink.
For Macbook Air there was DIY solutions where people added thermal pads to conduct the heat to the aluminium chassis and then use external cooling on that [1]. Since Air just has passive cooling, this gave major boost for long running tasks.
[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-macbook-air-heats...
It would risk the user touching the heatpipe during work, which is quite toasty under heavy load.
Raising it is the most important part. After that, if you can pop the bottom off while it's running, and swapping out the thermal paste are my go-to.
> I picked the locations of the fans and their supports very carefully, and it’s clear that the intakes aren’t blocked.
Just double checking: Did you put the fans in the correct orientation and on the intakes instead of the exits?
Aren't those laptops designed to boost until it hits the max temp ? OP should test performance before and after.
[delayed]