I get computers given to me on a regular basis from clients who buy new computers and want a free way to get rid of old computers without paying to get rid of them. I go through them and figure out whats wrong with them. They either get disassembled for good parts and toss out the dead guts to recycle or fixed. When fixed I offer them to people as low cost computers for people who need a computer that dont have much money etc. Well in some situations I end up with computers that have problems that I dont have replacement parts for but get creative and modify the system to take universal parts or a part not designed for it.
I was given a Thinkpad that would shut down randomly. The shut down was due to it overheating. Added new thermal compound and that didnt make any difference, its as if the heatpipes arent drawing away enough heat to fins of heatsink. Heatsink fan spins and blows warm air, but doesnt keep up with the Core i5 and is free of dust and spins at almost 4000 rpms. So I decided to make a quick modification to this laptop and add it to my systems that crunch data for BOINC projects in which I put my processing power currently on the Asteroids project. I added thermal compound to flats of the heat pipes at the top of the 2.4Ghz Core i5 M520 CPU and placed a large Pentium 4 heatsink on top of it to passively cool.
When i got this laptop it would climb to above 105C and then shutdown. With adding this heatsink from a Dell tower which use to cool a hot Pentium 4 HT 3.0Ghz, its able to passively cool the Core i5. I have a few boxes with parts and heatsinks I hold onto usually to swap out with one that fails, but in this case to add to a laptop to cool it to safe temperatures.
The spikes in the graph in the pictures are from me showing my 12 yr old daughter how fast a CPU gets hot without proper cooling of a heatsink, temperature plunges upon placing the heatsink back to its surface to draw heat away. So this laptop will be used to crunch data for Asteroids project of BOINC now.
I suppose I could even use it as a desktop computer with a external display to VGA or HDMI port and USB keyboard and mouse too if I didnt want to use it for crunching data. But this isnt going out the door to anyone modded in a frankenstein manner like this..
Although would be cool for a computer gathering to get attention of the guy running a laptop with a desktop heatsink.
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