I have an old laptop which I revived with the addition of a SSD. The problem now with this laptop is that it gets very hot causing thermal shutdowns in the middle of work. I thought of a lot of solutions and finally repasted the heat sink, bought a cooling pad and removed the bottom cover. It is now running fine. Now that I am free with my projects, I am thinking of converting this laptop to a tablet pc. Now my question is that "Can I weld a copper pipe directly to the existing one?" Will welding it increase the thermal capacity of the PC? Or will there be issues due to other scientific reasons?
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1it may be easier to solder the pipe – jsotola Jun 09 '22 at 19:22
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Thank you for your help – Supragy Mishra Jun 10 '22 at 06:42
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I think, it is necessary to find a cause of overheat. This may be due to bad thermal contact somewhere:
- between integrated circuit and metal pad through thermal paste or pad
- between metal pad and heat pipe
- between heat pipe and heat exchange plates
Heat exchange plates could be blocked by dust/dirt.
Heat pipes may be damaged and should be replaced. Typically, all heatsink system of notebook is replaced.
Fan may be not creating enough air flow due to thickened old grease or contamination.
May be there is any software problem which causes CPU overloading.
Continuous and cyclic IC overheat leads to breakage of BGA solder balls which connect IC to board and irreparable breakage of flip-chip joint between IC crystal and flip-chip substrate, so, overheat problem requires solution.
Simple copper pipe has much lower heat conductivity than thermal pipe, except if it is filled with circulating liquid.
Vladimir
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@Abel there is more there than a repeat of what the OP has already tried. First thing I thought of is a problem with air flow not the existing heat pipes. Dust, cat hair, etc blocking air ducts or insulating radiating fins. While a good cleaning is a nice recommendation, sometimes those ducts can't be opened and makes removal of hair clumps extremely difficult. – Forward Ed Jun 12 '22 at 20:13
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Many products have a tendency to overheat right out of the box. Look at the original xbox 360 "red ring of death". Very few of them survived more than a couple of years. – Drew Jun 14 '22 at 00:35
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The laptop is very old and yes I have checked airflow problems. Any system would heat up if it was made to run over its designated load, and this one is under constant load. So yes, I HAVE tried Software problems, Fan problems, and thermal pasting that I did was done after I cleaned the surfaces with Isopropyl alcohol. So yeah Conductivity problems – Supragy Mishra Jun 19 '22 at 11:33
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If the existing heatsink is made of copper, then yes you can solder more copper onto it and it will probably dissipate more heat.
You can probably weld copper, but it's not commonly done.
If the existing heatsink is made of aluminum, your best bet would be to use thermal epoxy to attach your heatsink extension.
It is also possible although difficult to braise aluminum to aluminum using special brazing rods.
Drew
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2but be careful applying a ton of sustained heat to heatsinks using heatpipes, those contain liquids that will boil and rupture when you make them too hot – ratchet freak Jun 10 '22 at 09:11