Three extra fans couldn't cool this Lenovo P53 by a single degree
A failed experiment in laptop cooling
Kevin Boone's Lenovo P53 packs a six-core Intel H-class CPU, an NVidia GPU, and 32GB of RAM, yet hits 90°C within thirty seconds of full load and throttles. He built a custom wooden stand with three USB fans aimed at the laptop's air intakes. It failed: the fans barely lowered temperatures, never slowed the internal fans, and didn't even cool the SSDs. He suspects mismatched fans in series just add resistance, and that tilting the laptop on a book would have done as much.
Perhaps it's like trying to tow a Volkswagen with a Ferrari?
- eigenspace
So you say that you didn't notice the laptop temperature getting any lower, but this isn't too surprising to me, since this thing is going to be highly thermally limited.
I suspect that your setup is doing something, but the thing it's doing is allowing your laptop to sustain a certain performance level for longer. So what I would look at is some performance metric like e.g. peakflops() in a loop, or a video game FPS counter, and compare with and without the external fans.
- Tade0
So close to greatness.
I've dabbled in this and the one thing that absolutely has to be included is a seal on the edges between the laptop and the stand like so:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/126317216434
Otherwise the air will escape to the sides.
For my home project I used foam tape, but any seal will do.
Regarding cooling I wholeheartedly recommend one Framework 16 owner's journey in making his device maintain 80°C with the CPU going full throttle (aside from other mods):
https://community.frame.work/t/all-the-modifications-ive-mad...
- whatever1
We need way more of this content! Things that were tried and failed. I have spent so many head-scratching hours on problem solution approaches that others likely already tried and failed. In science we only celebrate success. Even then it is typically poorly documented.
- fwlr
Probably a monster chip like that has way more headroom than you expect, and can max out the extra cooling you’re giving it as well. If the goal is to avoid the 90C blast, maybe enabling thermal throttling plus using the custom cooling setup will give you (much?) less of a drop in performance than throttling with stock cooling?
- schobi
Well - the challenge is with the right type of fans.
I like the idea of a pump curve for a garden water pump. If you pump water without any back pressure (not even a hose connected), the pump will give a certain volume per time that is can move. If you connect a hose and pump upwards, you will reach a max pressure / max height at which no water will flow any more. Both cases are useless, but this is what the manufacturer prints on the box. Your sweet spot is in between. If you pay enough, you will get a datasheet with the pump curve in between these two points.
For simple and cheap PC fans, you are at most given the number of air volume without back pressure. I've not come across a cheap fan that gives a defined backpressure of even a curve.
For your application you would need a fan that can push air through a restriction.
I had success with high rpm server fans. They create pressure, consume 20W of power or more and also make a lot of noise. But in this case - this is not a solution