I just got my hands on a note 4 snapdragon, known for having issues with heat and emmc things.
Now, i watched many thermal tests on the note 4 and noticed that it does indeed get hot a lot. So, i decided to do a small hardware mod.
I took out the motherboard and noticed the 2 big thermal pads. I removed them and put 2 thermal pads that were better and had the same mm (somewhere in 0.5mm).
Now i've got another idea : make aluminium foil heatsinks at the same mm as the thermal pads and put thermal paste on the cpu.
Would this be a better and more effective way to dissipate heat from the processor?
(as soon as i get my hands on a new motherboard i will do in depth tests regarding cooling methods and so on)
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I've seen a couple of threads in the past where people have asked about creating heatsinks for improving the cooling efficiency of their devices. Under normal circumstances a heatsink wouldn't be necessary, but recently with Clemsyn and other kernel devs starting to push the physical limits of the Tegra 3, heat dissipation becomes a major concern at 1.8Ghz and higher. I'm starting to wonder if there might be a way to get creative with some copper foil and a few old laptop heatsinks I've got lying around, just to give the chips a bit of relief from all of the mean and terrible things I do to them. But having never taken my Nexus apart, I have no idea what kind of room is available for heat pipes or foil.
Anybody ever tried making a heatsink for a tablet or phone? This isn't meant to be wholly a serious discussion, and I fully expect to get a lot of flack about battery usage and melting plastic. I just think it would be cool to mod the device into being able to maintain these ridiculous clock speeds and not have it burn my hands.
using the clemsyn 2ghz kernel in front of the a/c works out well
There's very little empty space inside the Nexus 7, so there's no chance of adding additional cooling without more major modding.
I've been looking in to exactly this. I find my Tegra 3 gets to 60 C even before overclocking. If you study the teardown photos you can get an idea of how it might work. I turns out the main SoC chip's headspreader is nicely accessible.
The back pops off the Nexus 7 so easily we can easily take a peak.
My first idea would be to put a little thermal paste in each layer on the SoC's heat spreader, this is covered by a copper RF shield/heat spreader on the chip, and another copper layer on the back cover. Just a tiny dab would do, and it will be smooshed out over an area when the cover goes on. Could get a bit messy though.
There's exactly zero room to work with, it's all very tightly packed and a nicely engineered tablet.
But the back cover is so replaceable you could cut in to it.
If I was going to do it myself I would cut through all layers and have a heatsink directly on the tegra's heatspreader with an adhesive thermal pad. Any more than about something like 1-2mm and it would not be flush with the rear cover.
Alternately some perforation in the plastic on the rear around the area may help.
If i can scrounge some replacement parts I might have a crack at doing stuff.
Whoa whoa whoa, 2GHZ?
BRB !!
Mungulz said:
Whoa whoa whoa, 2GHZ?
BRB !!
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Yeah, for those people who want to fry their Nexus 7s.
I've only OC'd to 1.4 GHz..not so sure I'll go much farther than that.
I was having a long time random errors - invalid card please restart and so on, especially when it is more worm outside. I was reading that some people put some thin metal stuffs on the back of the phone etc. . But that stuffs are not helping and they are not very useful with that amount of plastic between chips and back site. Before some months my warranty already expired and as it was not fixed by repair service I open phone by my self. There are 2 chips that are cooled by the screen on the front through pink thermal pads - memory chip and maybe the other is some driver for gsm part - I never search what was exactly. The more interesting stuff is that there was no sign of chips on the thermal pads. I put some thermal compound on the thermal pads and after that for several months I am not facing that error any more(in the matter of fact only one software bug with sensor buttons, that resolved with restart for 4 months, no other errors). By my opinion is is a defect size of thermal pads on the 9505 phone(or may be it is designed defective ). Most probably the best solution is new thermal pads with proper thickness, as the thermal compound loose it's performance in time, but thermal compound is easier. I hope this will be helpful for the others, who have same problem.
Hi guys,
Just taken my N7 apart to replace a cracked screen for the first time ever, and noticed the only cooling the GPU gets is via the sticky foil which sinks the heat to the back of the screen? So, as I currently have it in pieces, is there any way I can instantly improve the cooling of the GPU, for example, would putting heatsink compound on the chip make any difference, etc?
Thanks in advance,
matheusl02
matheusl02 said:
Hi guys,
Just taken my N7 apart to replace a cracked screen for the first time ever, and noticed the only cooling the GPU gets is via the sticky foil which sinks the heat to the back of the screen? So, as I currently have it in pieces, is there any way I can instantly improve the cooling of the GPU, for example, would putting heatsink compound on the chip make any difference, etc?
Thanks in advance,
matheusl02
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u can put thermal paste between foil and gpu then foil and back cover
Sent from my Nexus 7
I decided to run Cpu Throttling Test to measure how is the stock thermal performance of the phone and I noticed that it is rather lackluster. After about a minute and half of full cpu load(100 threads option in the program) the processor starts jumping around 800mhz and 1.2ghz, if the load is for a longer amount of time it would likely throttle down to 800mhz completely and keep in mind that this is with only the heat of the cpu, if you are doing something else that is stressing the gpu and storage as well it would throttle harder. Nowadays as you know galaxy s2 is often running on full load due to modern operation systems and apps being pretty heavy.
I had a look at pictures of the motherboard of the phone and instantly noticed a significant design flaw which is what causes the throttling-there is no heatsink over the soc at all. On the pic attached you can see the soc with another fairly big chip next to it(probably the baseband, idk).
I had some copper heatsinks left from a previous project so I decided to try adding them on top of the naked chips with some thermal paste. The size of the copper plates is 15x15mm, thickness 0.3mm.
So I disassembled the phone, removed the circle sticker from the soc, cleaned it and the chip next to it with some isopropyl alcohol then applied a tiny amount of thermal paste to the chips with a plastic spudger. Just a very thin coat. The next step is cleaning the copper heatsinks with isopropyl alcohol and sticking them on top of the chips. You only need to apply thermal paste to the chips, don't bother applying it to the copper heatsinks as well as if you put too much thermal paste and stick the chips it will likely cause a mess and get on the resistors and other components.
After that I applied a small amount of thermal paste to the plastic mid frame where chips would usually fit. Before that I cleaned the spot with a little isopropyl alcohol. I used a picture from ifixit teardown and drew with blue color on the spots where you should put the paste.
Well that is the mod. Now reassemble the phone.
Please keep track of the two little black screws that are securing the mainboard in place and be cautious around your volume and power button flex cables, as they are usually glued with weak adhesive to the plastic frame, so if you pull out the mainboard without wiggling them out of the adhesive first you might accidentaly rip them out or damage them.
And now, for the results. As last time, I did a full cpu load stress test with 100 threads. This time I waited the full 15 minutes and behold, the cpu didn't drop below 1.2ghz at all! This is insane improvement in thermal performance. The program says that the cpu thottled to 91% of the max performance, however that reading is due to the small inconsistency of the ''GIPS'' performance which is due to the difficulty of the load, rather than actual thermal throttling. As for the soc temperature, my rom doesn't seem to read it, I only get the battery temperature which was 35C after the 15 minute stress test. The 50C reading from the program is also wrong, it probably just lists it like that because it can't find a temperature reading for the cpu.
In reality even on stock speeds I feel that the phone runs smoother now. However, there is definitely plenty of room for overclocking now, easily to 1.4-1.6ghz. Unfortunately I'm using @rINanDO 's lineage os 14.1 with emulated storage(android 7.1.2) and there is no kernel with cpu overclock for that version, so I can't test that myself. Although I believe such a kernel will be very useful because this android version runs faster than android 9+ while still supporting nearly all apps.
So to sum it up, the benefits of this mod:
-thermal thottling completely removed
-lower temperatures mean less stress on the silicon and longer device lifespan, which is important as this model is already 11 years old
-plenty of thermal headroom for overclocking and significantly increased performance even on stock speeds
And the requirements for the mod:
-a screwdriver
-thermal paste, preferably non conductive
-two 15x15mm 0.3mm thickness copper heatsinks-I got mine from Aliexpress, a pack of 10 costed me 1.25$. They also come with a generic thermal grease but I don't recommend using it. I guess it will do the job if you don't have any other thermal paste.
-some isopropyl alcohol is also recommended for cleaning the surfaces, for better contact
-maybe a disassembly tutorial, anyway disassembling this phone is fairly easy. If you have no experience take your time
Unfortunately I didn't take pictures while doing the mod, so I hope the generic ifixit disassembly photos and my explanation are enough. The mod is pretty easy and took me around 30 minutes.
Informative
Tried it with alluminium instead (i cut 2 pieces from a pc cooler) and in android 12 it did throttle after 5 and a half min, but i undervolted it to 1175mv at 1200mhz and now it is throttling after 8min 45 sec, used arctic mx2 thermal paste. I didn t tested it before the mod, but i will try some games to see if alluminium really makes a difference. After the phone cools down i will try at 1300mhz, thx for the tutorial.
Hi how many of you have done it and is it really useful and worth the trouble? thx
nostupidthing said:
Hi how many of you have done it and is it really useful and worth the trouble? thx
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I have on my H910 phone. I would say it should help prolong the life of the phone, heat is the number one enemy of cpu's. It does speed up the phone I think, if anything it wont hurt.
I used a 0.5mm copper shim and Arctic silver. I left the copper tape on the cpu because the cpu is not designed to have thermal paste applied directly to it. I applied the Arctic Silver to the cpu then applyed the copper shim to the cpu then put paste on the base of phone. That way you can make sure it's on the right spot on the board. My idle temps are around 30c.
Also I used very fine sandpaper on the copper shim before installing in my phone. There was a little lip on one side.
PS. I used just a little paste and did not spread it out. I put my finger on there and applied a little pressure to spread it out.
This is what I bought.
Honbay 25pcs 5 Sizes 15x15mm IC Chipset GPU CPU Thermal Heatsink Copper Pad