Replacing thermal paste in a Dell XPS L501X

Burn Baby Burn!

I must confess Dell has been my brand of choice for quite a long time, but lately, my latest purchase, a Dell XPS L501X couple years old is giving lots of trouble. First the hard drive died, mostly because I'm not the most gentle guy when handling my stuff, but also because Dell hasn't used ANY shocking protection for this model when it comes to hard drive. After fixing this, I realized the fan was going mad all the time. 

A quick search in google will give a thousand pages of people complaining about fan noise in this model. Updated BIOS, used SpeedFan, nothing seemed to work. So I though, hey, maybe the fan is working mad because the laptop, is like...real hot?

Ok, you can start the stress test now, ready here

Installed CPUID Hardware monitor, a neat program, and discovered something scary. At idle, core temps were intimidating, 50-60 Cº, doing....nothing.

Idle test

So I said, whoah, let's try to do something hardcore, like...playing a Youtube video in Firefox, here are the results:

Playing Youtube video test

What the heck? 80-90 Cº after a minute playing a Youtube video in Firefox? No way, guess its time to clean off the dust and replace thermal paste.

State-of-the-art dust cleaner, living on the edge heh

The process

I'm used to disassemble and assemble laptops, mostly not mine, but from friends and relatives (you know the feeling, you're the IT tech freak, you know everything right?), so the process of disassembling a laptop is pretty straight forward for me, no big deal. Once you've done a few times, you realize that laptops are built to be disassembled and assembled quite easily, but if you're not feeling comfy, I'd recommend downloading the User's manual for whatever your laptop it is and follow its instructions. 

In my case, I only checked this wonderful video occasionally to know how to do the tricky parts for the XPS L501, worth a check, great explanation from the recorder. Check the following pics to see how the diassemble process took place, if you're curious :P.

After removing back plate and laptop screen, you face the plastic cover:

Plastic covering motherboard

Hard drive, Wireless and RAM out

Detached screen

The root of all the problems, the unfamous Dell XPS L501 fan...you can tell that is not top-notch quality by the way it looks. Anyway, I cleaned it as best as I could, removing a lot of dust in the process.

Evil little one

After removing the plastic covering case, the motherboard shows up. As you can see, heat sink is on the left. Intel i7 is right in the center and Nvidia GPU is on the left.

After removing the heat sink, you can see that the fabric thermal paste from Dell is long gone...dried out and completely uneven distributed along the chip surface.

i7 crying out loud for thermal paste replacement

Same goes for the GPU...

 A close look to the heat sink contact surfaces also shows up a terrible mess with the thermal paste

Contact point with i7

Contact point with GPU, at least heat pads seem to be alright...

Now the boring part: cleaning both the heat sink and the chip surfaces from any remnants of the old thermal paste. My recommendation would be to buy a proper solution for this, like the Arctic Silver Arcticlean Thermal material Remover & Surface Purifier or something similar. If you don't have anything similar, use pharmaceutical alcohol and some lint free cloth to clean up the mess. Do not use any other thing, you will definitely cause more problems than you already have. Check the Artic guide about how to do this if you ever done it before.

After careful (and boring) cleaning, the best I could come up with can be seen here

Intel i7 almost clean

Nvidia GPU quite clean too

Not perfect, but should do the trick. Now the funny part, I bought Artic 5 silver thermal paste, already used that one in my gaming rig and it really works like a charm.

The tools

Use the plastic card to extend the paste along the surface til it is flat enough. There is no need really to put big chunks of paste, you really don't want the Artic 5 to be spreading out of the surface. Reason for that is that the components are highly conductive and may transfer some of the heat to other components of the chipset (as far as I know), something you don't want to happen. Once applied, you should have something similar to this:

Heat sink contact surface with i7

And the GPU part

I didn't do anything with the heat pads, the seemed ok to me, but you can buy some and replace them if you think is needed.

Everything back in order

The results

Ok, time to try it. You should keep in mind that, depending on how you laptop/computer dissipates the heat, the break-in time for the thermal paste varies, so these results should not be taken literally, but they can tell you how good or bad the process went.

In this case, I first started Windows and did the same as before, idle and Firefox playing Youtube video.

Windows 7 idle test after replacement

Windows 7 playing Youtube video

While in idle temperatures seem to be pretty much the same, the "load" test has dropped dramatically, almost 20ºC!!

Let's see what we get in Linux x86...

Linux idle

Linux playing Youtube video

Hmmm, I kept playing the video for quite a long time and temperature never went higher than 57-58 Cº. I've been using the computer for 12 since the replacement and never get past 65 Cº while browsing, playing music, etc. Still gotta try with some hardcore test, like gaming or some testing benchmark, but looks good so far.

So yeah, replace your thermal paste as soon as possible folks. If you, like me, use your laptop a LOT, like, 3-6 hours every day, fabric thermal paste is not going to last long...specially the one from Dell, as it seems. As I said before, I'm quite happy with Dell, specially when it comes to workstations and servers, but I keep seeing more and more laptops from this brand having all kinds of troubles. That said, my next laptop is not going to be a Dell :)