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October 4th, 2020 04:00
m15 R2, refurbished, heat/repaste queries
Hi All
About three weeks ago I purchased a M15 R2 from the refurbished dell store.
For the most part this is a great product but I when I bought it I never really understood what was going on with the whole turbo mode for the i7 and the heat of it running at 100C.
After seeing my laptop running at 100C I did a repaste with kryonaut. When I did that I could see the previous owner had already attempted this (clue to the fact that is was refurb no doubt). The screw heads on the heatsink were slightly wallowed out but still functional and the paste present was all over the place.
After the repaste running Prime95 my i7 thermally limits at 2900MHz and has about 18C temp variation between cores so it seems to me like the heatsink is not sitting flat on the CPU.
I've ordered some copper shims and more kryonaut and am planning on repasting again but I was curious as to whether anyone else has successfully tinkered with the heatsink in a situation like this and made it work.
I'd still say that for the reduced price of the refurb this is an OK machine even limiting to 2900Mhz but I'm a bit concerned about the longevity of running a CPU at 100C
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Gastraea
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October 7th, 2020 01:00
So I take it that when the Dell Virtual Assistant says that "One of our technical experts will get in touch with you shortly." that this is just a bot talking
Gastraea
4 Posts
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October 12th, 2020 22:00
Sooo for any bot out there that cares I'll detail my re-repaste experience.
The last repaste was with Grizzly kryonaut but this time I used Grizzly kryonaut extreme
When I had it all disassembled I think (perhaps imagined) that the old paste was squished thinner the side of the cpu closest to the GPU.
I also think that there may have been a very small dent in the copper of the heatsink over that section of the cpu.
I smoothed the surface of the heatsink and test fitted the heatsink again with two small dobs on either side of the cpu. To my eye they looked squished about the same so I liberally applied the super dopper paste and reassembled. Shim would not help at all, I misremembered what the heatsink arrangement was like.
The new tests with Prime95 seemed to offer no difference to the last repaste.
So I think this is just how this system will be. The only other thing that could be tired would be a whole new heatsink and even then I'm not sure if that would fix things.
I plan on just running the CPU in balanced mode where it runs around 95C and 3GHz on Prime95 small FFT.
It's kind of hard for me to imagine getting the levels others have reported ie 80C 4GHz
Oh well I got the extended warranty I guess just in case it dies from a hot CPU.
GPU always runs nice and cool and I'm done with repaste.
Gastraea
4 Posts
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October 12th, 2020 23:00
I'll further add that I was undervolting by 140mV
This all looks to me to be an intel problem not a Dell problem.
Perhaps AMD might be a better option if intel want to push that much heat out of such a tiny die