I'm a Mechanical and Electrical Engineer graduated in 2011 working daily with industrial machinery, and I'm not ashamed to admit you impressed the hell out of me. That copper routed fan cover/heatsink... one of the finest ideas I have seen, and the low temp solder, I did not know that it came in paste form, I take many ideas to play with my old MSI GT70 and my new Dell G3. A couple of my customers have laser CNC's, so I will for sure will follow your lead. Subscribing, and thanks a lot for the video :)
This is a rare but much appreciated technical deep dive into modding a laptop. Even if I cannot support the company, I think the principles you laid out in modding the laptop is something worth learning. Hope you could do more for other models or brands of problematic laptops in the future, which to be frank, there are quite a lot of.
The thing is... Huawei could've easily added another heatsink but they didn't because it would lower their profit margin, after all, their ultimate goal is to make a lot of money
@@mlgoverrated745 wait..... you are a child, opinion rejected. Keep quiet and learn something before attempting to educate someone who knows more than you.
what the heck! This is AMAZING! Makes me remember the good old days where people still mod parts and fix components instead of replacing the whole blocks.
You've sold me on this product just by providing the extensive knowledge you've recorded. These tests are more valuable than any spec sheet I've seen before. Like many others in the comments are saying. Improving designs as opposed to replacing them entirely is a very commendable effort. I'll be subscribing to this channel and look forward to your future work :)
Dang man. I like doing mods and understanding why things are built the way they are, then enhancing it to your experience. This is pretty technical too so I will be sure to take some pointers from you
Dude I love how you used the fan cover as extra heatsink area, I've been thinking about doing exactly that in my thermally challenged Dell XPS for so long, it's awesome to see that it works!
Checked your mod guide article, and other mod videos. Just adding 2 pencil heat pipes made a big difference. Addressed the thermal throttling and overheating. But you went even further with other mods, and made a new cooler design in this video. My summary: OEM's cut corners very badly on both laptops and desktops. They pinch every penny, especially on cooling. They let out a bad build or design just to save $20-$40. I'd happily pay the difference for the performance gains, and quality of life. No computer can perform when it thermal throttles. A computer needs enough heatsink material to absorb the heat, then dissipate the heat. Such as CPU radiators, fans, and vents. The laptop form factor is more sensitive to thermal throttling. Your mods focused on adding more heat sinks material: heat pipes, copper plates, and and thermal pads. From what I read previously your temperature results were impressive. Wish you focused more on the before and after temps, and clock speed performance. I hope you sent the manufacturer this video as feedback. Good tutorial and project. 👍
Dude! Excellent presentation! I wish we could see more technical explanations and dedication to document those tests results as well as you did from other youtubers. Thank you for your hard work.
One of the most comprehensive mods I've seen by anyone in a long time! If I had heat pipes back in the 90's! The first time I added cooling capacity to a GPU was My Diamond Stealth II...Radio Shack and a handful of heatsinks, a small 12VDC fan and fortunately/unfortunately super glue! I got the card from 35 Mhz to 70 Mhz stable, it would artifact noticeably @ 72 Mhz. I absolutely shouldn't have used superglue, somehow it worked, never fried the card and I still have it!
That was fucking awesome. I saw your website a while back, but was afraid of losing warranty. It just ended so I'm about to have some fuun! Glad your guide is still up and many thanks for sharing!
Im really inspressed by your work, instead of going after a ready aftermarket solution like a coolpad, you tryed something different and let us know about it. The creativity here is really cool to see. Didnt see it before. Great content. Thank you
How come you only have 5k subs? I mean u clearly deserve more with the amount of information you're giving and you brother you are incredible keep up the good work and good luck thanks ^_^
15:45 but mate.. u do all this work, so why dont swap to liquid metal? The gains are extreme. And its pretty easy to do if u know how. Just make sure ur copper heatsink is nickel plated.
Aw man I tough I'm the only crazy about all this haha. I had made some really crazy cooling stuff in laptops but never did videos about. I'm still working on 2 rn. Really amazing work my friend!
Very clean mod, I'm impressed, infinitely better looking than when i added a 1070N MXM to my HP Zbook & a custom heatsink to the dvd drive bay to handle it to handle it
So you did all of this, and added a ton of copper surface area to improve power dissipation by only 4 watts? seems pretty low to me. Either the stock thermal solution already heated the air a lot and only warm air went into that fin stack which would mean, that without a bigger fan there is no point in adding surface area, or your construction has a very high thermal resistance somewhere...
I had no idea you could solfer thermal pipes to each other with just a heat gun. I mean you can solder copper together with heat guns but I didn't think that you could do it with heatpipes. I would've expected that the inner strands inside would just burn but apparently not.
Awesome demonstration; well laid out formatting of the challenges and data collection! I've never soldiered heat pipes yet, but it's probably like soldier copper pipes while water is still dribbling through them. You just need more heat, or maybe add heat to the whole surface to get no thermal transferring. I stumbled across your video because I was looking to extend a heat pipe in my A315-41G-R5U3 craptop that has a blank fan space. I struggle with thermal issues on this Ryzen 3 2200U system and wondered how simple it would be to extend the thermal pipe to cover two shrouds. Your video has helped and inspired me considerably to consider how to tackle the concept of extra cooling and higher benchmarking. Thank you!
4:38 holy shit you explained this a hell of a lot better than i have any time ive tried. undervolting is also a huge help when it comes to changing these curves for the better, all without needing to modify cooling at all. ive managed to greatly improve performance on my dell lattitude 7490 with its i5-8250u by both undervolting the hell out of the cpu, setting it to use 35 watts during PL1 and putting thermal pads on what i think are the vrms and along the heatpipe to touch with the bottom panel. all of this means gained me an extra 1500 points in the cinebench r23 multicore test and made gaming on it much more bearable, it can now sit at 30 watts of power usage while gaming and occasionally spike higher when it needs to instead of sitting at 15 with low fps and lots of stuttering.
It's hard to tell from the video but it seems like some of the solder paste flowed under the bridge heatpipes to where the big heatsink plate is (last solder, 15:17). If the gap is filled and making contact with the plate then that could limit the thermal performance.
Good job! I am getting ready to tweak some physical cooling items, but the biggest help would be an earlier fan start and higher speed curve- yet Dell holds us hostage and locks it (!)
I had an issue with my HP victus laptop with frequent fan ramps I fixed it by adding some copper tape to improve thermal mass and conductivity to the finstack, it is running much cooler now and it doesn't ramp up nearly as frequently
Good Job! Elegant solution) I actually had to mount large flat coper heatsink 15x7x1.5 with thermal pad (don't want void the warranty) directly to the heatsink (had to buy and make custom backplate for my 7790 50usd) the heatsink and the 2 blower fans sticks out 1.5 cm, but the laptop gained huge performance buff! 9750h max power now 80+watt it was 30+ max, and the 2060 clocking@1850 MHz! In games max temp is around 70c, in stability tests 92 max. I just hate when manufacturers limit performance with bad cooling and power limits!
This is so cool! I've modded my own MateBook according to your guides, and I'm happy with the result! I can do some heavy DS stuff like running clusters and some even heavier Robotics stuff like CAD and it just works! Maybe you can try scavenging a curved heatpipe from a spare laptop's cooling system so that it will cover the finstack completely, and gently bend and come into the contact with main heat pipes There are plenty of spare cooling systems on Amazon or eBay, you can definitely find one that fits your needs
to get the absolute most out of this one would have to bend the pipes over the full fin array and onto the cpu - in the caziest case even remove the current direct contact pipes and CNC a new path to the fin stack - all of that seems quite crazy for an individual but im kinda sad Huawei didnt do this right away in the design.
@@BradsHacks ow yes its so easy to kink them :/ you would likely have to use thicker ones which only rlly works if you remove the other pipes which i imagine are soldered - that would be a crazy amount of work and there is no going back at that point
@@jm036 This works for bending certain round pipes - usually you would use something slightly larger then a coin unless you have a 3 mil pipe and really need that tight curve (the tighter the radius the more you reduce heat transmission) Issue here is he would need to bend a flat pipe in its width plane - not so fun cause the tension and pressure on the edges is very high with low rigidity perpendicular to the plane resulting in kinks which kinda kill the pipe. This is usually done by first bending and then flattening the pipe.
Maybe. But that would mean all the heatpipes are subject to the same heat, increasing the chance of them bursting, or messing up the original heatsink's heat pipes in some way.
Brad Ling I dont have any personal experience, but reading some comments in another video, the author states if you a proper low temp solder paste (the one in the link melts at 138C) there’s enough of a margin to safely melt the paste without exploding the heat pipes. www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0195V1QEI/ref=ox_sc_act_image_1?smid=A2GPLZGUK8NBW5&psc=1
@@BradsHacks Ordered the paste. I'm following you're other heatpipe guide and will solder onto the stock aluminum fan plate. I'll also solder the gpu shim. Will let you know how it goes. Appreciate your guides!
@@lupohki I don't have any more copper fan covers. My university makerspace is closed so I can't make any more either. But here's the DXF file if you want to cut one yourself. bradshacks.com/Bin/MXPro/MXP2019_Fan_BradsHacks.com.dxf
This is excellent work! Did you btw look up the thermal conductivity of solder? It is quite poor. Some brazing compounds offer much better thermal conductivity but require 700-800c to flow. I have no idea if heatpipes can endure this.
Do you have any advice for making a flat heat pipe solution with custom bends? There doesn't seem to be a flat heat pipe bender anywhere on the market, so it seems the only solution is to get round copper heat pipe, bend them to shape, and then flatten them without crushing the internal pipe somehow.
From doing construction, i know this video is 3 years old now. Pickup a caulking scraper, that will help making the glue and liquid solder much cleaner when attaching and detailing edges and scrapes off any excess uniformly. Also, this is an awesome video and gives me a few ideas to readjust some issues i been having with a couple of GPUs. Looking at how the heatpipes were designed and layout of the entire heatsink, i think temps would have benefited layering one stack 1x4 copperheatpipes of the same length for the longer pipes, and 1x3 stack of short length copper shims to make bridging contact from pipe to the copper shroud. That would help with spacing and coverage. Yeah, that heatsink design is not very good. Heatsinks like that i have normally seen 2 fan arrays on the opposite sides of the laptop and plus that fan is way too small to try to push heat from that kind of length of heatpipe. I have a dell optiplex 7480 that has the worst design flaw i have seen where the screen latch covers the vents for the CPU and only has a few millimeters of room to blow air through. There is no way of modifying the vent but i do plan on getting back in there to place some thin shims on the heatpipes and one on the Cpu to get the temps down
Hi Brad. I have ordered everything on your shopping list for the MXB 2018 upgrades.. Except graphite sheets, I can't find them anywhere either. Any recommendations? Thanks for your great work brother.
Hey Brad! Its been a few years since you published this video, and a few days since i discovered your TH-cam channel! What you did is super impressive and as someone who mods laptops personally, I love what you've done! Is this still your daily driver? How is it doing? Have you considered lapping the heatsink contact plate?
Thanks! I passed this 2019 MateBook X Pro to my dad, and he still uses it. I put liquid metal on it, but no other mods since then. I've switched between 10+ laptops since 2019 and am currently using a 2024 MateBook X Pro.
@@BradsHacks Neato! Have you gone inside yet? How's the thermals in the new machine? Planning on doing any mods to it? I'd love to hear about your future exploits!
Amazing video. One more thing that can help out is using liquid metal. In my laptop I changed the thermal paste, undervolted the CPU and I'm running 15 degrees Celsius cooler on the cpu, and 12 degrees cooler on the GPU. It is so much better that right now I can literally run it with the fans off if the load is relatively low. By doing this, and tuning the memory, u was able to beat the #1 spot and I currently hold the world record on Intel XTU for the 6700hq processor. Thanks for the amazing ideas. I will try to add some more heat pipes to help lower the temp just a tiny bit more, and I'm also 3d printing an enclosure to replace the dvdrom with a big fan. Is it possible to undervolt your processor? Can you change memory timings?
@@BradsHacks I am not, I am a senior at UC Santa Cruz. You've probably heard about all the protests going on here, so classes have been blocked by picket lines almost all quarter. I do know a lot of people at Cal though, including some Mech Engineers!
very great work, i came arround here when i searched for Notebook improvments, and you made it like a whole new way. just increasing the power limit and adding new thermalpaste was to borring for you i guess? ^^ i will also try that with my notebook, thx for that ^^
Hi Brad! I have an old laptop I like, but after a cpu upgrading, has an issue: thermal management. Yes, one problem was the insufficient mounting pressure. Yes, the fan has a low cfm output (5.3). No, it's not the thermal paste (currently using arctic mx-6). However, the dissipator thermal conductivity is intrinsically low, because the heat pipe is totally long 24 cm and has a U shape. So adding another heat pipe seems an option, and your suggestion seems valid. I have a question for you about turning the fan case into a heatsink: at first glance it seems an intuitive option. But after some investigations, I concluded that transferring heat on the fan case should create issues. Why? If that you have is a centrifugal fan, it gets air from the downside, and, with rotation, it accelerates it pulling outside. Now, the presence of a heat pipe on the fan case should create a hotspot right on the air inflow: so this means that the air, by rotating inside the fan case, gets hot, and then is expelled through the radiator. Shouldn't this actually diminish the efficacy of the entire cooling system? Moreover, i think that contact surface with the stock heat pipe is another important parameter that can be optimized: the more surface, the better? Could you show a picture with your thermal camera of your current setup? and, if you possess it, before the mod?
Commendable effort to reason about fan case issue, but you have reached an incorrect conclusion. (1) Heatsinking to the fan case, when you also have a fin stack heatsink at the fan outlet, is equivalent to adding a heatsink in series to another heatsink, because the air exiting the 1st heatsink (fan cover + heat pipe) enters the 2nd heatsink (fin stack). I think we agree on this. (2) As you pointed out, the air entering the 2nd heatsink is now warmer because it has already absorbed heat via the 1st heatsink. However, the heat that it absorbed came from the processor, so it already contributed to cooling the processor. Its additional contribution outweighs the efficiency loss of the 2nd heatsink. I will prove this mathematically using heat transfer principles, and later cite a real-world example. (3) The steady-state cooling capacity of a heatsink can be described by: q = ṁc(T_out - T_in), where ṁ is the mass flow rate of air [kg/s], c is the specific heat of air [J/kg°C], and T_out and T-in are the temperatures of air exiting and entering the heatsink, respectively [°C]. For convenience, let's label ambient air "1", air inside the fan "2", and the final exhaust air "3". Let's start with a laptop with just a fin-stack heatsink at the outlet of a centrifugal fan. The fan basically just pushes ambient air into the fin stack, so the system cooling capacity is: q_original = ṁc(T₃ - T₁) Now let's start heatsinking into the fan casing. The fan casing now acts as another heatsink, so: q_new = q_fan + q_stack = ṁc(T₂ - T₁) + ṁc(T₃ₐ - T₂) T₃ₐ distinguishes that the final exhaust air won't be the same temperature as before (T₃). ṁc is unchanged because we haven't changed the airflow. As you predicted, T₂ is warmer than T₁, because the air has been warmed up before it goes from the fan into the fin stack. By distributive property, the above equation simplifies to: q_new = ṁc(T₃ₐ - T₁) How does q_new compare to q_original? It depends on whether T₃ₐ >/
@@BradsHacks I have to sincerely thank you! Your proof seems valid to me. You made in few lines a lesson about thermodynamics. Maybe mine was a useless question, I should have looked on the manuals: however, my course in physics did not go deep about heat transfer theory, so I have a difficult walk into. Now I have some reference books to solve my doubts. Maybe you are a mechanical engineer student? T3a should be higher than T3, because the added heatpipe increases thermal conductivity from CPU to fan case, than more heat is sucked away from it, similarly to resistors in parallel in a circuit powered by a current source. T3a would be equal to T3 if, and only if, the heat carried away from CPU is unvaried. About the overheating issue on my laptop, I compared it with a newer laptop I have, and the difference, apart from fan airflow rate, is in the CPU silicon die size: the older one measures 1.5 cm x 1 cm, whereas the newer measures 2 cm x 2 cm; that's actually a great decrease in thermal resistance! So, I can conclude that the heat bottleneck in the older pc is caused by the die size. Adding another heatpipe on the fan heatsink, as you did, can effectively help reducing the aggregate thermal resistance, as you proved. Finally, I read about the mod you did on your website, after seeing your video, but from that point some other questions arose to me: I would appreciate if you can help me solve: 1) Why is it mandatory to put thermal paste on the interface between the heatpipe and the underlying surface, given that the thermal paste will dry out over time? Why not just use the thermal glue to contact? Can you advice me a reputable product or can I get away with anything aftermarket? 2) How should I contact the heatpipe to maximize heat conductivity? Maybe maximizing contact surface both on the original heatpipe and the fan case? Again, thanks for your explaination; I have now a model to use for drawing conclusions.
Where did you buy the "fin stack heat sink", I have looked around, but cannot find one. I am trying to mod my cooling system, but need one of these. Thank you
This is the most impressive technical TH-cam video about laptop I've seen.
Before i watched the video i saw this comment and thought "it can't be that impressive"
It IS impressive
Agreed. Awesome stuff.
I'm a Mechanical and Electrical Engineer graduated in 2011 working daily with industrial machinery, and I'm not ashamed to admit you impressed the hell out of me. That copper routed fan cover/heatsink... one of the finest ideas I have seen, and the low temp solder, I did not know that it came in paste form, I take many ideas to play with my old MSI GT70 and my new Dell G3. A couple of my customers have laser CNC's, so I will for sure will follow your lead.
Subscribing, and thanks a lot for the video :)
Thank you Ernesto for your encouraging words!
Low temp solder is very common in plumbing
This is a rare but much appreciated technical deep dive into modding a laptop. Even if I cannot support the company, I think the principles you laid out in modding the laptop is something worth learning. Hope you could do more for other models or brands of problematic laptops in the future, which to be frank, there are quite a lot of.
Windows 10+ bricked more than I could keep up with featurea I didn't ask for. I miss XP.
My man, you are amazing and an inspiration, I hope Huawei sees this and hires you as their leader in laptops, you are truly incredible.
Thank you, your encouragement means a lot to me.
The thing is... Huawei could've easily added another heatsink but they didn't because it would lower their profit margin, after all, their ultimate goal is to make a lot of money
@@kiyoponnn I’m not a huge fan of huawei but, I don’t really think they did this for that purpose
@@mlgoverrated745 Please don't reply with bs. explain your bs or don't reply at all.
@@mlgoverrated745 wait..... you are a child, opinion rejected. Keep quiet and learn something before attempting to educate someone who knows more than you.
what the heck! This is AMAZING! Makes me remember the good old days where people still mod parts and fix components instead of replacing the whole blocks.
Consoomer market. Women ruined computing..
You've sold me on this product just by providing the extensive knowledge you've recorded. These tests are more valuable than any spec sheet I've seen before. Like many others in the comments are saying. Improving designs as opposed to replacing them entirely is a very commendable effort. I'll be subscribing to this channel and look forward to your future work :)
Dang man. I like doing mods and understanding why things are built the way they are, then enhancing it to your experience. This is pretty technical too so I will be sure to take some pointers from you
If i had any laptop manufacturing plant i WOULDVE HIRED THIS GUY IMMIDIATELY
this my first video by u this was amazin❤
Dude I love how you used the fan cover as extra heatsink area, I've been thinking about doing exactly that in my thermally challenged Dell XPS for so long, it's awesome to see that it works!
After watching this,
my brain: man, we gotta do this!
my hands: nope, we are not.
Checked your mod guide article, and other mod videos. Just adding 2 pencil heat pipes made a big difference. Addressed the thermal throttling and overheating. But you went even further with other mods, and made a new cooler design in this video. My summary: OEM's cut corners very badly on both laptops and desktops. They pinch every penny, especially on cooling. They let out a bad build or design just to save $20-$40. I'd happily pay the difference for the performance gains, and quality of life. No computer can perform when it thermal throttles. A computer needs enough heatsink material to absorb the heat, then dissipate the heat. Such as CPU radiators, fans, and vents. The laptop form factor is more sensitive to thermal throttling. Your mods focused on adding more heat sinks material: heat pipes, copper plates, and and thermal pads. From what I read previously your temperature results were impressive. Wish you focused more on the before and after temps, and clock speed performance. I hope you sent the manufacturer this video as feedback. Good tutorial and project. 👍
Damn dude this is an amazing video, mad respect for doing such extensive mods on an expensive laptop!
That's not a macbook!
@@saadhussain6514 correct!!!
You can tell that you've put so much effort into this great video. This video marks a whole new level of your channel! Keep it going!
Dude! Excellent presentation! I wish we could see more technical explanations and dedication to document those tests results as well as you did from other youtubers. Thank you for your hard work.
One of the most comprehensive mods I've seen by anyone in a long time! If I had heat pipes back in the 90's! The first time I added cooling capacity to a GPU was My Diamond Stealth II...Radio Shack and a handful of heatsinks, a small 12VDC fan and fortunately/unfortunately super glue! I got the card from 35 Mhz to 70 Mhz stable, it would artifact noticeably @ 72 Mhz. I absolutely shouldn't have used superglue, somehow it worked, never fried the card and I still have it!
This is by far the best job application I've ever seen.
That was fucking awesome. I saw your website a while back, but was afraid of losing warranty. It just ended so I'm about to have some fuun! Glad your guide is still up and many thanks for sharing!
Wow. Props on the cutout. Also, somebody get this guy a job at Huawei or Dell laptop division
Im really inspressed by your work, instead of going after a ready aftermarket solution like a coolpad, you tryed something different and let us know about it.
The creativity here is really cool to see. Didnt see it before. Great content. Thank you
You made the engineer in us happy. Superb job and video. Instantly a FAN!
Absolute madman. 10/10 would watch again
Very under rated channel. Best tech info i seen about heat dynamics
Wow man, this is the most intuitive and impressive videos on the platform! Thanks amd Keep it going
Bro awesome content you seriously deserve more attention
Crazy level mods! Thanks for the incredible content!
Magnificent work and good tutorial for some newcomers for engineering stuff.
Keep it up, man!
Nice to see someone soldering heatpipes, makes me think I should try too
How come you only have 5k subs? I mean u clearly deserve more with the amount of information you're giving and you brother you are incredible keep up the good work and good luck thanks ^_^
This is so dope, I wish more people would do this and share it like you have!
15:45 but mate.. u do all this work, so why dont swap to liquid metal?
The gains are extreme. And its pretty easy to do if u know how.
Just make sure ur copper heatsink is nickel plated.
Very high quality production, keep it up 👌🏻👌🏻
This is a good technical information video about cooler system's for aptops and modding with thermal pipes.
Tks for tech your analsys about it.
You taught me things and gave me ideas. Well done and thanks.
Amazing quality content, it's hard to find it in the DIY world.
Aw man I tough I'm the only crazy about all this haha. I had made some really crazy cooling stuff in laptops but never did videos about. I'm still working on 2 rn.
Really amazing work my friend!
Would love to see your work!
Very clean mod, I'm impressed, infinitely better looking than when i added a 1070N MXM to my HP Zbook & a custom heatsink to the dvd drive bay to handle it to handle it
Awesome man now I know that you can solder heatpipes without them blowing up🙌
This is some legendary stuff.
super bien la verdad gran video, es algo que se me habia ocurrido y no habia encontrado un tutorial tan detallado, muchas gracias.
So you did all of this, and added a ton of copper surface area to improve power dissipation by only 4 watts? seems pretty low to me. Either the stock thermal solution already heated the air a lot and only warm air went into that fin stack which would mean, that without a bigger fan there is no point in adding surface area, or your construction has a very high thermal resistance somewhere...
I had no idea you could solfer thermal pipes to each other with just a heat gun.
I mean you can solder copper together with heat guns but I didn't think that you could do it with heatpipes.
I would've expected that the inner strands inside would just burn but apparently not.
Great in-depth video, my friend. Much obliged.
Awesome demonstration; well laid out formatting of the challenges and data collection!
I've never soldiered heat pipes yet, but it's probably like soldier copper pipes while water is still dribbling through them. You just need more heat, or maybe add heat to the whole surface to get no thermal transferring.
I stumbled across your video because I was looking to extend a heat pipe in my A315-41G-R5U3 craptop that has a blank fan space. I struggle with thermal issues on this Ryzen 3 2200U system and wondered how simple it would be to extend the thermal pipe to cover two shrouds. Your video has helped and inspired me considerably to consider how to tackle the concept of extra cooling and higher benchmarking.
Thank you!
4:38 holy shit you explained this a hell of a lot better than i have any time ive tried.
undervolting is also a huge help when it comes to changing these curves for the better, all without needing to modify cooling at all.
ive managed to greatly improve performance on my dell lattitude 7490 with its i5-8250u by both undervolting the hell out of the cpu, setting it to use 35 watts during PL1 and putting thermal pads on what i think are the vrms and along the heatpipe to touch with the bottom panel.
all of this means gained me an extra 1500 points in the cinebench r23 multicore test and made gaming on it much more bearable, it can now sit at 30 watts of power usage while gaming and occasionally spike higher when it needs to instead of sitting at 15 with low fps and lots of stuttering.
Best video on youtube i've ever seen.
Love this, subbed and I hope for more of this kind of content
It's hard to tell from the video but it seems like some of the solder paste flowed under the bridge heatpipes to where the big heatsink plate is (last solder, 15:17). If the gap is filled and making contact with the plate then that could limit the thermal performance.
Good job! I am getting ready to tweak some physical cooling items, but the biggest help would be an earlier fan start and higher speed curve- yet Dell holds us hostage and locks it (!)
Wow man really went into incredible detail. Definitely won my sub. I'm currently working on a video as well for some upgrades to a laptop.
that was insane, thanks so much for sharing!
I was very impressed by this video. Thorough explenations
vous êtes doué bravo félicitations pour votre Mod👍👍👍👍
14:35 bro is a certified pro😂. Man's got three hands.
this video is very informative and your methods are intelligent
I had an issue with my HP victus laptop with frequent fan ramps
I fixed it by adding some copper tape to improve thermal mass and conductivity to the finstack, it is running much cooler now and it doesn't ramp up nearly as frequently
What an amazing job!
Good Job! Elegant solution) I actually had to mount large flat coper heatsink 15x7x1.5 with thermal pad (don't want void the warranty) directly to the heatsink (had to buy and make custom backplate for my 7790 50usd) the heatsink and the 2 blower fans sticks out 1.5 cm, but the laptop gained huge performance buff! 9750h max power now 80+watt it was 30+ max, and the 2060 clocking@1850 MHz! In games max temp is around 70c, in stability tests 92 max. I just hate when manufacturers limit performance with bad cooling and power limits!
very didactic and interesting you deserve so many more views
nice work man, cheers from brazil
This is so cool!
I've modded my own MateBook according to your guides, and I'm happy with the result!
I can do some heavy DS stuff like running clusters and some even heavier Robotics stuff like CAD and it just works!
Maybe you can try scavenging a curved heatpipe from a spare laptop's cooling system so that it will cover the finstack completely, and gently bend and come into the contact with main heat pipes
There are plenty of spare cooling systems on Amazon or eBay, you can definitely find one that fits your needs
This is not the 2020 version right?
@@provamaggio954 2018 i5/8gb
@@yuriysukhorukov391 you think these tutoriaps would work on the new one also?
@@provamaggio954 it's very dangerous to try these on your laptop, specially they are new ones.
Thanks for posting the work you've done on this laptop. Now I know what I need to do to get my Matebook to cool better.
fantastic, this helped so much with what i'm doing. thank you!
wow. just wow. thanks for the video sir. really enjoy it
Dude this is sick, I don't have a mate X but I'm going to try and do this to my laptop
You earned a sub...
And deserve many more!
For laptops you should use PTM 7950 phase change thermal pads
Yeah that's what I use nowadays
Have you checked out any Framework laptops? Would be interested to see how you would go about improving their cooling design
i think a large thick thermal pad from the heatsink to the bottom might work very well also, i was hoping that you tested that too before cutting
I didn't want to burn my balls lol
This is just brilliant!!!
to get the absolute most out of this one would have to bend the pipes over the full fin array and onto the cpu - in the caziest case even remove the current direct contact pipes and CNC a new path to the fin stack - all of that seems quite crazy for an individual but im kinda sad Huawei didnt do this right away in the design.
Yeah, exactly, I thought of bending the heat pipes but they are too flat to bend with the tools available to me.
@@BradsHacks ow yes its so easy to kink them :/ you would likely have to use thicker ones which only rlly works if you remove the other pipes which i imagine are soldered - that would be a crazy amount of work and there is no going back at that point
I saw a video of a guy bending heatpipes with a ridiculously simple method. Put a coin in a vice and used that to bend the pipe.
@@jm036 This works for bending certain round pipes - usually you would use something slightly larger then a coin unless you have a 3 mil pipe and really need that tight curve (the tighter the radius the more you reduce heat transmission) Issue here is he would need to bend a flat pipe in its width plane - not so fun cause the tension and pressure on the edges is very high with low rigidity perpendicular to the plane resulting in kinks which kinda kill the pipe.
This is usually done by first bending and then flattening the pipe.
Would it have been easier to melt the solder paste in a kitchen oven?
Maybe. But that would mean all the heatpipes are subject to the same heat, increasing the chance of them bursting, or messing up the original heatsink's heat pipes in some way.
Brad Ling I dont have any personal experience, but reading some comments in another video, the author states if you a proper low temp solder paste (the one in the link melts at 138C) there’s enough of a margin to safely melt the paste without exploding the heat pipes.
www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0195V1QEI/ref=ox_sc_act_image_1?smid=A2GPLZGUK8NBW5&psc=1
@@lupohki That's great. That's the paste I used. Maybe you can try this method and share the results!
@@BradsHacks Ordered the paste. I'm following you're other heatpipe guide and will solder onto the stock aluminum fan plate. I'll also solder the gpu shim. Will let you know how it goes. Appreciate your guides!
@@lupohki I don't have any more copper fan covers. My university makerspace is closed so I can't make any more either. But here's the DXF file if you want to cut one yourself.
bradshacks.com/Bin/MXPro/MXP2019_Fan_BradsHacks.com.dxf
Nice job man, but undetvolting? Can you do a tutorial on throttlestop indervolting?
You should get a hold of the Dell xps 13 2-in-1 7390 and analyze it's cooling.
Dude Smart as Hell! I wish I was like him
awesome video still today
I like your challenge spirit
This is excellent work!
Did you btw look up the thermal conductivity of solder? It is quite poor.
Some brazing compounds offer much better thermal conductivity but require 700-800c to flow. I have no idea if heatpipes can endure this.
That's interesting, but the heat pipes were already swelling when applying 200°C hot air
@@BradsHacks Wow! Yeah that is interesting info. So flat pipes puff!
Do you have any advice for making a flat heat pipe solution with custom bends? There doesn't seem to be a flat heat pipe bender anywhere on the market, so it seems the only solution is to get round copper heat pipe, bend them to shape, and then flatten them without crushing the internal pipe somehow.
From doing construction, i know this video is 3 years old now. Pickup a caulking scraper, that will help making the glue and liquid solder much cleaner when attaching and detailing edges and scrapes off any excess uniformly.
Also, this is an awesome video and gives me a few ideas to readjust some issues i been having with a couple of GPUs. Looking at how the heatpipes were designed and layout of the entire heatsink, i think temps would have benefited layering one stack 1x4 copperheatpipes of the same length for the longer pipes, and 1x3 stack of short length copper shims to make bridging contact from pipe to the copper shroud. That would help with spacing and coverage. Yeah, that heatsink design is not very good. Heatsinks like that i have normally seen 2 fan arrays on the opposite sides of the laptop and plus that fan is way too small to try to push heat from that kind of length of heatpipe.
I have a dell optiplex 7480 that has the worst design flaw i have seen where the screen latch covers the vents for the CPU and only has a few millimeters of room to blow air through. There is no way of modifying the vent but i do plan on getting back in there to place some thin shims on the heatpipes and one on the Cpu to get the temps down
Hi Brad. I have ordered everything on your shopping list for the MXB 2018 upgrades.. Except graphite sheets, I can't find them anywhere either. Any recommendations? Thanks for your great work brother.
Remind me to watch this again once I'm not afraid to damage my matebook.
Great job!
Hey Brad! Its been a few years since you published this video, and a few days since i discovered your TH-cam channel! What you did is super impressive and as someone who mods laptops personally, I love what you've done! Is this still your daily driver? How is it doing? Have you considered lapping the heatsink contact plate?
Thanks! I passed this 2019 MateBook X Pro to my dad, and he still uses it. I put liquid metal on it, but no other mods since then. I've switched between 10+ laptops since 2019 and am currently using a 2024 MateBook X Pro.
@@BradsHacks Neato! Have you gone inside yet? How's the thermals in the new machine? Planning on doing any mods to it? I'd love to hear about your future exploits!
Did you ever test that thermal putty? How does it perform?
Amazing video. One more thing that can help out is using liquid metal. In my laptop I changed the thermal paste, undervolted the CPU and I'm running 15 degrees Celsius cooler on the cpu, and 12 degrees cooler on the GPU. It is so much better that right now I can literally run it with the fans off if the load is relatively low. By doing this, and tuning the memory, u was able to beat the #1 spot and I currently hold the world record on Intel XTU for the 6700hq processor.
Thanks for the amazing ideas. I will try to add some more heat pipes to help lower the temp just a tiny bit more, and I'm also 3d printing an enclosure to replace the dvdrom with a big fan.
Is it possible to undervolt your processor? Can you change memory timings?
Holy shit dude. Amazing video.
Wow! Go Bears! Whats your major?
Also, thanks for the video! Incredibly impressive. Your site has helped me debug a lot of different issues!
I'm in mechanical engineering. You are very welcome. You go to Berkeley too?
@@BradsHacks I am not, I am a senior at UC Santa Cruz. You've probably heard about all the protests going on here, so classes have been blocked by picket lines almost all quarter. I do know a lot of people at Cal though, including some Mech Engineers!
The hardest thing is getting the third hand. How did you grew one?
amazing bro, why you not trying watercooling ?
super entertaining video!
very great work, i came arround here when i searched for Notebook improvments, and you made it like a whole new way. just increasing the power limit and adding new thermalpaste was to borring for you i guess? ^^ i will also try that with my notebook, thx for that ^^
never give a mechanical engineer free reign over a workshop lmao
I find it really interesting!
Hi Brad!
I have an old laptop I like, but after a cpu upgrading, has an issue: thermal management.
Yes, one problem was the insufficient mounting pressure.
Yes, the fan has a low cfm output (5.3).
No, it's not the thermal paste (currently using arctic mx-6).
However, the dissipator thermal conductivity is intrinsically low, because the heat pipe is totally long 24 cm and has a U shape.
So adding another heat pipe seems an option, and your suggestion seems valid.
I have a question for you about turning the fan case into a heatsink:
at first glance it seems an intuitive option.
But after some investigations, I concluded that transferring heat on the fan case should create issues. Why?
If that you have is a centrifugal fan, it gets air from the downside, and, with rotation, it accelerates it pulling outside.
Now, the presence of a heat pipe on the fan case should create a hotspot right on the air inflow: so this means that the air, by rotating inside the fan case, gets hot, and then is expelled through the radiator.
Shouldn't this actually diminish the efficacy of the entire cooling system?
Moreover, i think that contact surface with the stock heat pipe is another important parameter that can be optimized: the more surface, the better?
Could you show a picture with your thermal camera of your current setup?
and, if you possess it, before the mod?
Commendable effort to reason about fan case issue, but you have reached an incorrect conclusion.
(1) Heatsinking to the fan case, when you also have a fin stack heatsink at the fan outlet, is equivalent to adding a heatsink in series to another heatsink, because the air exiting the 1st heatsink (fan cover + heat pipe) enters the 2nd heatsink (fin stack). I think we agree on this.
(2) As you pointed out, the air entering the 2nd heatsink is now warmer because it has already absorbed heat via the 1st heatsink. However, the heat that it absorbed came from the processor, so it already contributed to cooling the processor. Its additional contribution outweighs the efficiency loss of the 2nd heatsink. I will prove this mathematically using heat transfer principles, and later cite a real-world example.
(3) The steady-state cooling capacity of a heatsink can be described by:
q = ṁc(T_out - T_in),
where ṁ is the mass flow rate of air [kg/s],
c is the specific heat of air [J/kg°C],
and T_out and T-in are the temperatures of air exiting and entering the heatsink, respectively [°C].
For convenience, let's label ambient air "1", air inside the fan "2", and the final exhaust air "3".
Let's start with a laptop with just a fin-stack heatsink at the outlet of a centrifugal fan. The fan basically just pushes ambient air into the fin stack, so the system cooling capacity is:
q_original = ṁc(T₃ - T₁)
Now let's start heatsinking into the fan casing. The fan casing now acts as another heatsink, so:
q_new = q_fan + q_stack = ṁc(T₂ - T₁) + ṁc(T₃ₐ - T₂)
T₃ₐ distinguishes that the final exhaust air won't be the same temperature as before (T₃).
ṁc is unchanged because we haven't changed the airflow.
As you predicted, T₂ is warmer than T₁, because the air has been warmed up before it goes from the fan into the fin stack.
By distributive property, the above equation simplifies to:
q_new = ṁc(T₃ₐ - T₁)
How does q_new compare to q_original? It depends on whether T₃ₐ >/
@@BradsHacks I have to sincerely thank you! Your proof seems valid to me. You made in few lines a lesson about thermodynamics. Maybe mine was a useless question, I should have looked on the manuals: however, my course in physics did not go deep about heat transfer theory, so I have a difficult walk into. Now I have some reference books to solve my doubts.
Maybe you are a mechanical engineer student?
T3a should be higher than T3, because the added heatpipe increases thermal conductivity from CPU to fan case, than more heat is sucked away from it, similarly to resistors in parallel in a circuit powered by a current source. T3a would be equal to T3 if, and only if, the heat carried away from CPU is unvaried.
About the overheating issue on my laptop, I compared it with a newer laptop I have, and the difference, apart from fan airflow rate, is in the CPU silicon die size: the older one measures 1.5 cm x 1 cm, whereas the newer measures 2 cm x 2 cm; that's actually a great decrease in thermal resistance!
So, I can conclude that the heat bottleneck in the older pc is caused by the die size.
Adding another heatpipe on the fan heatsink, as you did, can effectively help reducing the aggregate thermal resistance, as you proved.
Finally, I read about the mod you did on your website, after seeing your video, but from that point some other questions arose to me: I would appreciate if you can help me solve:
1) Why is it mandatory to put thermal paste on the interface between the heatpipe and the underlying surface, given that the thermal paste will dry out over time? Why not just use the thermal glue to contact?
Can you advice me a reputable product or can I get away with anything aftermarket?
2) How should I contact the heatpipe to maximize heat conductivity? Maybe maximizing contact surface both on the original heatpipe and the fan case?
Again, thanks for your explaination; I have now a model to use for drawing conclusions.
You are doing a good job.
I wish you can do this with an LG Gram Pro 16!
This is soo good of a vidio. Apritiate your work.
Where did you buy the "fin stack heat sink", I have looked around, but cannot find one. I am trying to mod my cooling system, but need one of these. Thank you