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.
Related
Hi all,
I have recently been repairing iphones and while doing this I have notice something in their construction that I thought we should have. Both the iphone 3 and 4 have a mylar mirror coating on the rear of the LCD to reflect heat away from the lcd and touchscreen, and it really works well. If you have an Iphone check it out, even when the cpu is flying the back gets hot but the screen stays cool. This got me thinking about the vega and how hot it gets running roms like VegaICS and Vegacomb. This can make touchscreens wig out and is uncomfortable. The design is flawed. There is a Mylar sheet in the vega but its completly in the wrong place. It is in the right place to be an RF sheild (thats probably what its for) but for cooling its about as much use as a 3 bar fire. When I am using my vega (playing games) it gets so hot inside that I can feel the heat flowing out of the hole for the dock connector. If I lay back, with the bottom of the vega resting on my stomach and I have a tee shirt on it gets hot enough to become uncomfortable so I have to move it. The Mylar sheet stuck to the back of the vega is reflecting heat back at the motherboard LCD and touchscreen like a little oven. The only place for the heat to escape is through the LCD, touchscreen and the other small gaps and holes around the vega. The metal panel bettween the LCD and motherboard will slow down the heating of the touchscreen but not much and will probably just be trapping heat when it gets up to temperature.
So to cool down the vega.
This is really simple. I ordered a small sheet of dimple mylar off eBay (non-conductive and disapates heat better than normal mylar preventing heat spots. apparently. I have put it under the motherboard and on the back of the LCD. I also removed the mylar from the back of the rear panel. For good measure I cut a pieces of aluminum off a PC heat sink and fixed them to the Tegra chip and the ram chips (with alaska sheet type heat sink stuff, that's a technical term ). The heat sinks are probably overkill but it cant hurt and may meen overclocking will be cooler and therfore more stable.
I tested it with and without the heat sinks and the overall temperature is significantly cooler on both. The screen now stays cool all the time, even when charging and using the cpu hard. The back still gets warm but no where near as hot as before. With the Addition of the heat sinks didn't noticably reduce the temperature but they will come into play when ICS gets overclocked.
A nice side effect is the charger no longer causes the touchscreen to freak out (altough this could be eduardo's new driver). Fine accuracy is reduced while plugged in but the screen no longer double/phantom clicks and is usable for everything but drawing.
Overall I am really happy with the mod. It's cheap and easy to do and cools the vega a lot. Next time I have the back off I may add another peice near the charge jack to try to completly remove the charge/accuracy problem. I have not noticed any problems with interferance caused by removing the mylar off the inside of the back panel although my neibours telly could be going haywire without me knowing (not my problem).
Heres some pictures of what I did.
The back of the LCD covered with mylar (hard to get a good picure because of the reflection.
The metal panel back in with more mylar where the battery and motherboard are mounted, holes cut in mylar for the motherboard mounting screws.
Everything back in except the battery.
This show the original mylar sheet and where it was inside the back panel. Now removed and binned.
The heat sinks
Running as cool as a cucumber B)
Amazing work, i have a Ployer Momo9, well it's more like a clone of that tablet, when i updated it to ICS it went ok, but sometimes i had random crashes, i used to have a small flat heatsink from an old motherboard wich still had the self-adhesive; so one day i finally gutted up and cracked open the tablet, placed the heatsink and had to say that now it doesn't crash.
I started googling to see if some1 had done the same with other tablet, i found your post and now i guess ill try the same with the mylar, wich can't find by the way, i have some aluminum sheet but i guess it's a bad idea to put some conductor as a heatshield
@richardmlea
awesome work
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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Click to collapse
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've been using my Priv for a year and a half now, without showing it much mercy. Without a case and a screen protector, it held up very well until I took a fall while holding it and cracked the screen. I decided to transplant my motherboard into a defective but like-new unit, and was shocked to see how the heat from the 808 distorted the copper foil that was supposed to help dissipate it. Also, my unit had way too much thermal paste just poured in it, which seems like an afterthought because the upside of the processor doesn't touch any proper heatsink - only the metal frame of the middle of the phone. After reading that a user achieved some improvement by sticking tinfoil between his 810 equipped Xperia Z3+ and an external case, I decided to try to put some tinfoil between the back side of the processor and the back casing. Removing the back housing is very easy and doesn't require any tools, so later modifications and tweaks are not a problem. I covered almost the entire back of the device with tinfoil and closed the housing back on it. The result is quite amazing - the spot where the 808 is placed, where the device used to get so hot I could not comfortably touch it, is now only mildly warm. To confirm that this solution actually worked, I installed antutu both on the modified and on the donor device. The modified unit held the processor at 1500 mhz under the stress test and did not feel hot at all. The unmodified unit dropped quickly to 1200 mhz and stayed there for the entire test. The unit feels a little snappier now, but I do think that the major improvement is in not having to hold that hot potato anymore. Regardless of this fairy tail, I will be purchasing the Key2. Another lesson learned from comparing my old device to the new one is how much an amoled panel degrades in the course of 18 months. I am not bothered by burn in (the bottom stripe is bright compared to the rest of the display), but the display itself is much less vibrant and the colors are much warmer after all that use. It will be hard to part with the beautiful colors I get from the new replacement panel, but overall an LCD has the advantages of maintaining its quality over time, and also being much cheaper to replace. A screen for the Priv costs around $120, while Keyone LCDs cost less than $50.
I wouldn't try that for these reasons:
1: tinfoil is conductive AFAIK, so it might cause an undesired shortcircuit between some exposed contacts
2: for the same reason, it might impact the antennas
However it makes sense from a thermal only point of view!
I'm just curious if you considered the points above and took care of where and how to place the tinfoil?
And did you notice any change in reception quility?
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)
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