Wierd piece of rubber

[Gunz]

I got an HP laptop in, and originally it wouldn't boot. The ac adapter checked bad, I replaced that. Then the laptop would power on, but show no video. No external video either. I took it apart, and under the heatsink I found a small piece of rubber. Is that normal? HP DV9700 btw.

I took the piece of rubber out, applied thermal paste, and all the sudden she came to life. The gpu runs at about 75-85c though. Anyone have any quick solutions to fix that? I know I could drill holes in the bottom of the case, but does anyone else have any little tricks?

 

[OnSiteSolutions]

I got an HP laptop in, and originally it wouldn't boot. The ac adapter checked bad, I replaced that. Then the laptop would power on, but show no video. No external video either. I took it apart, and under the heatsink I found a small piece of rubber. Is that normal? HP DV9700 btw.

I took the piece of rubber out, applied thermal paste, and all the sudden she came to life. The gpu runs at about 75-85c though. Anyone have any quick solutions to fix that? I know I could drill holes in the bottom of the case, but does anyone else have any little tricks?

I don't have a trick for the overheating gpu, however it is a known problem on the DV models. The "piece of rubber" that you described is normal and is a thermal pad often used in place of thermal compound. The pad dries up and shrinks over time, losing contact with the heat shield. Replacing it with thermal compound was the right thing to do.

 

[Vicenarian]

bolt a waterblock to the cpu/gpu and hook it up to an external liquid cooling station.

 

[Gunz]

bolt a waterblock to the cpu/gpu and hook it up to an external liquid cooling station.

CHARLIMIT...............

 

[Gunz]

I don't have a trick for the overheating gpu, however it is a known problem on the DV models. The "piece of rubber" that you described is normal and is a thermal pad often used in place of thermal compound. The pad dries up and shrinks over time, losing contact with the heat shield. Replacing it with thermal compound was the right thing to do.

The thing is, the rubber piece wasn't shrunk and had good contact. Replacing it with thermal paste did the trick though..

 

[14049752]

The thing is, the rubber piece wasn't shrunk and had good contact. Replacing it with thermal paste did the trick though..

Only temporarily....and it's very likely that the thermal paste isn't making contact as well as it should. The thermal pad is thicker than the layer of thermal paste. If you don't put the pad back in place, you should at least use a copper shim

 

[Gunz]

The heatsink is making solid contact with a good layer of thermal paste. If it overheats again then I'll try a copper shim

 

[meanderer]

laptop heatsinks often has a 1mm gap between the metal to the top of the chip. and the rubber pad is the thermal pad that fills the gap and perform heat transfer functions.

If you take it out and completely replace it with thermal paste, you would need a very thick layer and it won't perform well.

some people suggest a copper shim. But I have a hard time finding the correct thickness for this and I don't want to risk use a overly thick one and possibly crush the chip. So my solution is to use layers of aluminum foil with a minimal amount of thermal paste acting as "glue". Saved a computer from overheating this way.

This often happens to the GPU or chipset portion, the CPU portion usually mate very well. I don't know why they do this. My guess is that their design is to give CPU more cooling than the GPU by creating a heat transfer difference between the CPU interface and GPU interface.

As we all learned, this is completely false and GPU overheats more often than CPU and also takes the entire mobo with it.

 

[wimwauters]

There is such a beast as double-sided thermal 'tape'. Have a look on ebay, there's different thicknesses available.