M17x R2 Massive CPU cooling upgrade

[StripeySnake]

I haven't gotten around the the GPU stuff yet, but my friend's M17x R2 was having some serious thermal issues on it's CPU. (90+c gaming with no OC) So I decided to do something about it. I repasted it ofc because that's always good, but then I got to thinking and realized there's an entire damn GPU heatsink that will never be used and I can still make it's fan rev using HWINFO. So I grabbed an extra heatpipe I had lying around, some thermal glue, and the second GPU heatsink, and after an hour I came out with this abomination:

 

 

At this point, the second heatsink barely pushes out warmer than room temperature air, but that's OK because the main one is only slightly warmer and the CPU temps max at 75 while running demanding games and A 70 watt OC to roughly 3 ghz all cores, WHILE ALSO RUNNING CPU BENCHMARKS. I only expect this to improve as well, as the thermal glue has yet to set properly and once it does conductivity should be even better. Anyway, I thought yall might enjoy this bit of crackhead engineering.

 

P.S. If for some reason you want to try this, keep in mind you will have to cut up the chassis a bit to make room for the extra heatpipe. Also it's fine to solder the pipe to the finstack, but use thermal glue to attach it to the main heatsink as soldering there is way too risky. Also your keyboard WILL bulge a little bit, but it's not really noticeable when typing.

 

 

1 DAY LATER:

The air coming out of the additional heatsink is now noticeably warm, the glue likely finally set. Additionally, max temps are still staying around 75, even with hefty ocing. I can verify it wasn't just the thermal paste too, as when I tried this OC profile right after repasting it normally, I was seeing max of 85 c, and now after the additional heatsink that's dropped 10 C.

Edited March 14, 2022 by StripeySnake
more information

[Eban]

1 hour ago, StripeySnake said:

I haven't gotten around the the GPU stuff yet, but my friend's M17x R2 was having some serious thermal issues on it's CPU. (90+c gaming with no OC) So I decided to do something about it. I repasted it ofc because that's always good, but then I got to thinking and realized there's an entire damn GPU heatsink that will never be used and I can still make it's fan rev using HWINFO. So I grabbed an extra heatpipe I had lying around, some thermal glue, and the second GPU heatsink, and after an hour I came out with this abomination:

 

 

At this point, the second heatsink barely pushes out warmer than room temperature air, but that's OK because the main one is only slightly warmer and the CPU temps max at 75 while running demanding games and A 70 watt OC to roughly 3 ghz all cores, WHILE ALSO RUNNING CPU BENCHMARKS. I only expect this to improve as well, as the thermal glue has yet to set properly and once it does conductivity should be even better. Anyway, I thought yall might enjoy this bit of crackhead engineering.

 

P.S. If for some reason you want to try this, keep in mind you will have to cut up the chassis a bit to make room for the extra heatpipe. Also it's fine to solder the pipe to the finstack, but use thermal glue to attach it to the main heatsink as soldering there is way too risky. Also your keyboard WILL bulge a little bit, but it's not really noticeable when typing.

 

Nice. Im interested in this, but thermal glue? Never heard of it.

 

I looked on amazon and found it, now to order some copper pipe from my fav Chinese people.

[StripeySnake]

A couple tips: You need fairly long heatpipes, always bend the heatpipes with them pressed up against a flat surface, yes it is very had to do but results are much better. Finally, if a heatpipe develops a crack while bending, it won't swell up when you soulder it to the heatsink, and then it won't work. So you wanna make sure your heatpipe has no cracks and ideally swells up a bit. The way I attached mine was by putting it where I wanted it on the heatsink with a bit of soulder on either side, and a ton of flux, then I wrapped wire around the whole thing to hold it in place and just used a heatgun to melt the soulder. The best way to check if it worked is to carefully check if the far end of the heatpipe is hot after you soulder to it, as it will barely be warm if the heatpipe is broken, but very hot if it isn't. My first time attempting this I actually got much cleaner bends, but my heatpipe was broken so I had to restart.

[aldarxt]

saw this on ebay https://www.ebay.com/itm/253284253813?epid=13019948470&hash=item3af8eb0075:g:6McAAOSwdjdaHlfw Dont think this will fit on the r2, Just wondering if the fins can dissipate enough to cool the extra mass. The heat still has to go through the same area on the fins. But if you got 10 C drop with thermal glue I will go with this for the price. My m17xr4 peaked to 105c according to gpuz during firestrike so I disabled the extreme OC but it still touching 100c, dont know why it didnt shut down. Gonna try another paste when I get my gtx 1080 in a day or so, 

I see some discrepancies between speccy and gpuz about 8c on the cpu and 0.8c on the gpu