Adding Heatpipes to a Richland Laptop

[NamesDontMatter]

Hey everyone, so I have a good old, Asus K55n right now as a primary computer. Not the ideal gaming computer by far, but it has enough umph to make games playable at 1680x1050 (900p). I'm trying to mod this to hold me over until I build a mini-itx gaming/CAD/Design pc.

Current Hardware:
I've already swapped in the following components: 16gb DDR3 1800mhz, Crucial 128gb m4 SSD, A8-4550m to a a10-5750m, and I've upgraded from the wimpy 65 watt power supply to an Asus 120 watt Power Brick. I've also added an ultra quiet AC Infinity AI-MPF120A Quiet 120mm usb fan to the equation positioned right under neath the laptop while at home (on overclock settings).

Current Mods:
As far as mods so far I've bent the stock laptop heatpipe slightly to put more pressure on the processor and some pressure on the northbridge (previously had no contact with northbridge). And added a little artic silver and I'm able to hit 1050mhz on the gpu (from 720mhz stock). And I've also cut a few vents into the laptop immediately below the stock cooling fan (previously had inadequate ventilation to the intake of fan).

However because of the insanely high stock voltage the motherboard pumps into the gpu 1.175 I can actually clock up to 1300 mhz easily and stable (no artifacts) on stock volts, but right now I'm hitting the throttle temperature limits while overclocking that much which means the only thing I can do is improve the cooling to maximize performance.

Cooling System Upgrades:
Most people would stop there and give up and say and so is the limitation of laptops with tiny heatsinks. Now it seems like alot of let me just call it "entry level" modders add in heatsinks all over the heatpipe + backside of the copper chip.

(What Not to do Example 1)

Which seems really silly because now your adding heat to the unintended areas of the laptop. And your really not doing anything other than adding mass.

(what not to do Example 2)
I've also seen other poor attempts to use heatpipes like this:

SO it seems like few people get it correct for a tried and true method of improving a laptops cooling.

My Planned heatpipe Mod:
But I'm thinking with a little ingenuity I can add a second (and possibly third) heatpipe to the equation to help get more of the heat outside the laptop.

My top 2 goals are

1) not to compromise portability (everything must stay in the case)
2) Maximize airflow and Maximize surface area under airflow without constricting too much airflow.​

I've already ordered (2) additional k55n stock heatsinks/fan combos(so I don't have to chop up my stock one) and (2) k60ij heatsinks (for the heatpipes) all for less than $15.00 USD shipped, which is cheaper and easier than ordering heatpipes elsewhere, so now I have lots of heatpipes at my disposal!.

My first plan is to utilize the two k55n heatsinks and combine them into one heatsink, one will be my new master heatsink, and the second I'm going to remove from the fan assembly, cut off the cpu copper pad, and attempt to fit as much of the full heatsink inside the fan assembly (even if its severly trimmed down fins). If I can do anything with even one the k60i heatsinks thats just gravy, but those cost me $5.00 total between the two of them, so I'm not too worried about actually using them.

Ideal "wiring" Plan:

I'm hoping to keep at least some of the fins on one of the pipes and I'm thinking for the other from the k60i I may be able to cut the fins off and attach it to the stock pipe (which is attached to the stock radiator). I also have some copper ramsinks I could add into the equation, but I feel like putting these anywhere near this setup will just constrict airflow in the tiny area even more, so I might be best to keep as many aluminum fins attached to stock heatpipes as possible.

Derivative plan (use up more room in the fan):

I'm pretty sure I can make either version work, I think its just a matter of mass, vs airflow. What do you all think?

Lapping the heatsink:
Wet Sanding the heatsink is so easy I might as well do it to improve efficiency. I plan to do this before adding the other heatpipes

Void Filing:
I'm also planning to fill gaps with artic silver alumina
-gaps between fins and heatpipes.
-gaps between heatpipes and other heatpipes.


Question about modifying a laptop intake/exhaust fan?
Now I noticed that nearly all laptop fans are blower fans that exhaust air out the top(into the laptop) and out the side (exhaust). My question is why do they exhaust out both the top AND sides? My most reasonable guess is that the air is also vented into the laptop to stimulate SOME cooling over the motherboard/components. But I'm thinking this is unnecessary if I have a 120mm fan blowing over the other internals and I have some additional air vents cut into the bottom side of the case.

So Would it be reasonable to cover the exhaust that dumps air inside the laptop to force all of the air produced by the blower through the heatsink? It seems like the engineers probably intended it to pass through to cool off the chipset, however I'm thinking with ventilation holes drilled in the back cover it might be unnecessary, and I'm thinking it could be better performance wise to button up the hole to improve airflow over the fins.

Thanks everyone, I'm open to any advice!

 

[Mussels]

you could swap an A8 for an A10? :O

now i wanna upgrade the A6 in my laptop...

 

[NamesDontMatter]

heck yeah, as long as you don't have a llano! llano CANT be swapped to trinity or richland. But any trinity can be swapped with any richland. So if you have a trinity a6 you can grab a a10-5750m and get something MUCH better performing. The only thing I've found is that the a10 richland and trinity chips are power hungry and really need a bigger badder power brick/psu if you plan to do any overclocking.

I really feel like how slow the industry has been to move from DDR3 to DDR4 is whats going to hurt AMD's IGP's once we can get systems running DDR4 or 5, APU's will be doing some serious damage in benchmarks.

 

[Mussels]

heck yeah, as long as you don't have a llano! llano CANT be swapped to trinity or richland. But any trinity can be swapped with any richland. So if you have a trinity a6 you can grab a a10-5750m and get something MUCH better performing. The only thing I've found is that the a10 richland and trinity chips are power hungry and really need a bigger badder power brick/psu if you plan to do any overclocking.

I really feel like how slow the industry has been to move from DDR3 to DDR4 is whats going to hurt AMD's IGP's once we can get systems running DDR4 or 5, APU's will be doing some serious damage in benchmarks.

i have a llano so i guess no upgrade for me. agreed on the faster ram, going dual channel kicked my APU up about 15%

 

[NamesDontMatter]

i have a llano so i guess no upgrade for me. agreed on the faster ram, going dual channel kicked my APU up about 15%

Once the Kaveri Laptop Chips come out, thats when itll be time to upgrade laptops, HSA Mantel look awesome, its too bad they sort of crippled the first gen of chips as far as the shaders go though. But the APU's they are so stinkin cheap, I bought my original laptop for $300.00 last year. Although in my case I'm just going to keep this laptop and build a mini-itx. I think my favorite thing about these APU's is they are pretty good with power efficiency. (Aka you still get battery life vs the discrete graphics card notebooks).

 

[v12dock]

This is awesome, is that thermal paste or are you going to solder the connection between heatpipes?

 

[NamesDontMatter]

Thanks! I actually don't have my soldering tools (in my parents basement lol). I'm going to go with giving the heatpipes a VERY light polish/lap at contact points and then use as thin a layer of artic silver adhesive (8W/m-K) as possible. IMO with soldering heatpipes its a big toss up, the risk of damaging heatpipes that are 2-3mm thick at a max is too big, also soldering can be a complete pain in the ass! I am probably going to loose a bit of thermal conductivity, but I think its the easier path to take and with thin enough layers of Artic silver I should be just fine.

On another note, its going to be interesting working with the fan enclosure, I'm definitely going to need to make the housing larger by bending the metal plates (and/or adding shims and using foil tape to cover the gaps). The bigger I can make it, the less I'll have to cut fins off the slave/secondary heatsinks.

 

[Kursah]

I have been using an Asus K55n-ds81 since August for school and light gaming. It's still got the stock A8-4500M which has been pretty good. I wish I could find the A10 for cheaper...It's 1/2 as much as I spent on this laptop! I'd consider upgrading memory too...still may. For now it's okay...it's not my main rig but I wouldn't mind some more performance from it. I don't think I'd do anything as extreme as what you've done to yours but it's good to see someone out there modding and oc-ing this model.

 

[NamesDontMatter]

Thanks Kursah! The k55n is a fantastic budget laptop. And I would never spend more than $300-$400 USD on a laptop personally because the money is always better spent on the desktops. It makes me weak in my knees when I see somone drop $750-$1,000 for a gaming laptop that can be beat out by a $350 budget gaming pc. Actually thinking about all this has made me wonder how much I've put into the laptop now.

Base Laptop $300 Refurb
Asus Slim Power Brick $50.00 retail (got it for $20 with a amazon giftcard)
16gb Crucial Ram $100.00
a10-5750m $120.00
Crucial M4 $00.00 (swap from old laptop that I gave away to a family member)
1TB HD $00.00 ( swap from old laptop)​

so I guess $550 isn't terrible for the kind of performance I'm getting and the upgrades have made this laptop a very acceptable daily driver. it by far outperforms the Asus UL50 I previously had with a Geforce 210M in it.


As odd as it is WarThunder(new fav game) + Steam Deals and Humble Bundles, actually got me back into all this pc modding, and light gaming. For the past 2-3 years I mostly shifted to xbox 360 for convenience/casual play, but bf4 on xbox 360 pissed me off enough to stop using it. And I was VERY unimpressed with the newest gen of consoles, microsoft dropped the ball on hardware, and sony dropped the ball on improving the dualshock controller enough to get me to buy one. So PC is back where Im at!

I think overall I'm very satisfied with the direction of the upgrades though, War Thunder was barely playable previously at 1680x1050 with the a8 (had to run lower non-native resolution), but after getting the a10 + some overclocking I easily hit 50-60 fps the sweet spot and it looks pretty good.

If I was to do it all over again today, I probably would have gone with the a10-4600m insted of the 5750m, you can grab the a10-4600m's on ebay for around $50 USD and they have roughly the same gaming performance (same shader count, slightly lower clocks) , whereas the 5750ms are 100-130 ish. The 5750m's will be a better pick once the price comes down. But as far as gaming performance goes these laptops really just need a good overclock to the GPU, and a new power supply, and good temps to keep the apu from throttling itself.

Bit of a rant, but some more background I suppose, Can't wait for these new heatsinks to arrive though!

 

[NamesDontMatter]

Just got in all the heatsinks today! Starting to mockup a bit more to meet what I can actually fit in this tiny space!

Salvage Plans for other heatsinks:
My general goal here is to keep one set of fins + its respective heatpipe together, and then seperate another heatpipe from its fins and combine it with the one I'm keeping as one piece. Then snip the extra copper/fins to fitment, some thermal adhesive, and should have a pretty nice upgrade.

So In the end I'm pretty much going to add a second full heatsink, another heatpipe, and tieing them all together at the cpu side and at the heatsink/fins side. I'm a bit hesitant to connect all 3 pipes together to turn them into one, since it will add alot of rigidity using all that termal adhesive.

OEM Heatsink Revised Plans
I don't think I'll be able to bend the part with the fins here without cracking the heatpipe so I may have to just cut to fit. We shall see!

 

[SKBARON]

Keep us posted! I like how you want to mod things, does look like something i'd do if i needed to . Maybe you could heat the heatpipe up a bit and then try bending it?

 

[Vario]

I tried soldering a heatpipe once and it completely collapsed... Any pro-mod tips besides you are using adhesive for this?

 

[ZenZimZaliben]

Edit..never mind i guess there is a chance the gas will exploded....lol

Acetylene torch on the bend. Keep both ends wrapped in soaking wet rags up to where u want the bend. Heat the outside curve first and apply pressure while heating....works with copper pipes...idk how the gas inside will handle it though. But better than breaking it.

 

[NamesDontMatter]

Keep us posted! I like how you want to mod things, does look like something i'd do if i needed to . Maybe you could heat the heatpipe up a bit and then try bending it?

Thanks I appreciate hearing that! When I try to mod and create things I try and think how they can be done in the best, cheapest, and most efficient ways, and I think if you look the problem at as many angles as possible you eventually find the right path. I've considered heating them, with some low heat in the oven, but I don't think the risk of releasing mystery gasses in my oven is worth it. But to be honest heatpipes are usually very easy to bend slowly with your hands if they are decently warmed up. its always ideal to bend it the least amount possible, but I've actually done "heatpipe mods" on 2 other laptops, where you just bend the heatpipes to fix the way it distributes pressure on the processor, and none of them really required adding heat.

I tried soldering a heatpipe once and it completely collapsed... Any pro-mod tips besides you are using adhesive for this?

Yeah I've read that has happened to quite a few people on the pc modding forums, which is another reason I was so weary of soldering(and won't end up soldering anything to a heatpipe). I think its easy to forget that even though artic silver adhesive is only (8W/m-K) its still something like a 300 x better conductor than air. So if you align everything right and it fits flush with a small gap, your really not gaining much through soldering, especially with the risk of damaging the heatpipe.

Edit..never mind i guess there is a chance the gas will exploded....lol

Acetylene torch on the bend. Keep both ends wrapped in soaking wet rags up to where u want the bend. Heat the outside curve first and apply pressure while heating....works with copper pipes...idk how the gas inside will handle it though. But better than breaking it.

Haha yeah, thats another reason I want to shy away from adding heat as much as possible, you have exploding pipes, collapsing pipes, cracking them, etc. Too Much Risk!

Other notes/updates:
So I should be able to finally get to work on this tomorrow night or sunday night. Just received my Wiss Metal Master ActionSnips the other day, which should make quick work of the thin heatsink-fins that I may need to remove, and should work pretty well for the relatively thin copper plate. Shouldn't need to break out the dremel for any of this ( I Love dremels, hate grinding metals: dust/smell/fire concerns/inhaling metal particle concerns. etc etc)


Also I think I've figured out how to increase surface area of the new heatpipes making contact with the oem on the pressure plate. Pretty much it just involves trimming less of the pressure plate.

since the original heatsink is actually opposite (the k60i heatsinks are "upside down") I can actually make a better contact area by having some overlap left when I trim the k60i pressure plates. See the diagram above

 

[Arjai]

Very cool!!

 

[Mussels]

make sure you do thorough heat testing and benchmarking before you add the new stuff. we really need a before and after comparison.

 

[EiSFX]

I'm sure if you mean your going to cut the heatpipe or just areas around it. But you can not cut a heatpipe or else it just garbage after that. But i might just be reading it wrong.

 

[v12dock]

That additional heatsink will increase the static pressure I wonder if that fan is powerful enough to push across the fins. Should be interesting its possible the extra heatpipe and fins will draw heat away from the processor and the fan will expel heat at a slower rate giving a minimal affect. Or its possible that the pressure will be to high for the fan to push air over and the laptop could suffer a heatsoak effect. Either way I am extremely interesting in what the outcome is

 

[leeb2013]

I'm sure if you mean your going to cut the heatpipe or just areas around it. But you can not cut a heatpipe or else it just garbage after that. But i might just be reading it wrong.

yeah, that's what I'm wondering too. Are heatpipes being cut in this process?

 

[NamesDontMatter]

No heatpipes being cut . I would Only be cutting fins.So did my first bout also work and experimenting tonight.

Lapped the new k55n master heatsink base to a 2500 grit mirror (was much more difficult to lap than a desktop heatsink imo because the weight of it isn't above the direction your sanding.)

not perfect but good enough for me!

Comparison old vs new

I also gently Lapped the top of the heatpipe/base plate I'll be attaching the new headpipes to. (pic coming soon)

I also experimented with cutting the fins. My aircraft snips didn't do well and crushed the fins together rather than cutting them(go figure lol) . So I'm picking up a dremel and play-doh. To cut the fins (play-doh recommended by some machinist, in between them to keep them from crunching as I cut them with Diamond cutting discs) . Should make quick work of them. Not sure if I can refrigerate or freeze the heatpipe with play-doh in the fins, would I risk them bursting? Anyone know?

One of my k60i pipes snapped as I was bending it too much pressure, so one down. still got plenty more just need to be more careful.

My new plan is still to use the second k55n heatsink cut the base where it contacts the cpu so that I can fit it to the top of the stock heatsink. And I'm going to cut the fins just enough so that I can fit it in the default housing.

im planning to take temps before and after the swap and after. Going to be running cpu cores locked to 2.5 ghz and over clock gpu to 1025 mhz for testing.

• I'm going to do one run with war thunder (real world scenario)

• And one 3d mark, while logging temps both runs via amd overdrive

Then I'm going to compare that stock gheatsink with the new modded heatsink . Same 2 runs.

If the extra set of fins causes too much back pressure I can always cut away sections of the fins to allow more flow on through to the main set from the stock heatpipe. It's going to be very tight! But it should all fit. Also keep in mind I've cut holes in the bottom of the laptop to allow for a 120mm fan to blow upward into it the intake air path of the stock laptop fab. (will add picture here) so I have quite a bit of airflow going into it when I'm gaming / overclocking.

I'll also upload the temp logs when they are ready. Data backed testing!

 

[NamesDontMatter]

I think it might also be wise for me to run this with and without the 120mm fan to give us data on how a stock laptop fan will handle the extra static pressure.

 

[silentbogo]

Dude, that's awesome!
I have a K55VM myself, and fortunately cooling or performance was not an issue so far (Core i7, GeForce GT630M, 8GB RAM). But I was thinking about swapping HDD for SSD, since I don't really use more than 200GB(actively).

My 630GT can get up to 950MHz from stock ~700MHz, but there was no real improvement past 800MHz GPU / 1000MHz VRAM...
Only furmark gave me maybe another 50FPS in 720p benchmark. Everything else is almost the same: 3DMark, Unigine Heven etc.

 

[MrH0lt]

I have a question. My video is 1 steap from death on my a8-4500m and i want to replace it with a richland preferably the a10-5750m. Will i have to upgrade the heat sink and powerbrick if i am not doing any overclocking? or will some arctic silver and lapping the heat sink be enough?

 

[NamesDontMatter]

I have a question. My video is 1 steap from death on my a8-4500m and i want to replace it with a richland preferably the a10-5750m. Will i have to upgrade the heat sink and powerbrick if i am not doing any overclocking? or will some arctic silver and lapping the heat sink be enough?

Nah no heatsink upgrade required. And if your not planning to overclock no need for a bigger power brick. The a10-5750m is a good upgrade as long as you don't expect dedicated gpu like performance, but its still a very nice upgrade IMO, well worth the ~100.00.

you don't even need to lap the heatsink, but it would help. Just as a warning its a bit more difficult to lap laptop heatsinks than desktops, because of the way the weight is distributed over the contact plate.

 

[Durvelle27]

Nah no heatsink upgrade required. And if your not planning to overclock no need for a bigger power brick. The a10-5750m is a good upgrade as long as you don't expect dedicated gpu like performance, but its still a very nice upgrade IMO, well worth the ~100.00.

you don't even need to lap the heatsink, but it would help. Just as a warning its a bit more difficult to lap laptop heatsinks than desktops, because of the way the weight is distributed over the contact plate.

Have you thought about adding a dedicated card