[y500] Removing Dust Filter Mesh: Do not recommend

[conscriptvirus]

WARNING: I do not recommend doing what I do. I don't think it's worth it. I am merely posting this for educational purposes....right

So, I wanted to remove the dust filter mesh that is on the vent as it can block airflow. (Blow on your fingers while keeping them like 1cm apart and use your other hand to see how much air can get through..not much right?)

I did this "mod" to my old XPS 15 and you could feel significantly more air blowing through the vents.

Here's what I did:

1) Remove the bottom cover of the laptop. You can see other y500 disassembly threads. Pretty simple: take out battery, take out optical drive, unscrew 9 screws, CAREFULLY pry off back, etc

2) To remove the vent, there are these metal tabs which can be bent. I used a very fine/thin flathead screwdriver to pry the tabs. NOTE: If you feel like doing this, don't touch the tabs. Skip to step #4.

The vent part is pretty much all plastic except for the tabs, so you will scratch it up. Metal screw driver versus plastic...

3The mesh itself is actually made from some sort of cloth. I basically used the flathead screw driver to scratch off the mesh. I didn't take off the whole mesh. Just the part that was covering the fan. Then just put the vent back onto the back cover and push down on the metal tabs to lock it in.

4) Basically steps 2 and 3 was a mistake. It would have been much easier and cleaner to just scrape off the mesh with the vent still on the back part.

5) You can see that it's not very pretty...I would have just gone with step 4 and scrape using the plastic border area as a guide.

For reference: here is what the back would look like if you just took the vent out all together (the back part is obviously missing the optical drive and isnt attached to the laptop)

And here is a close up on the mesh itself. It is rather nice:

And the part you all are waiting for...temps!

I ran the TS Bench on ThrottleStop where it seems to calculate..something (prime numbers?). 1024M on 8 threads as well as 32M on 1 Thread.

BEFORE the "mod": Temps for the CPU were 89-90 Celsius.

AFTER the "mod", and running 1024M several times: Temps for CPU were 86-87 Celsius.

So yeah, it helps a little bit, but I wouldnt recommend it. Here's why:

a) Its not a very easy mod. You could easily break/snap/scratch something.

It's not really good looking. Sure you can do a better/cleaner scraping job, but I think it looks sortof better with the mesh on.

c) Checking the thermal config in the bios I found that the "high" fan speed doesnt kick in until 100 C. So overheating isn't really a problem for me to begin with. The mod saved 2-3 degrees for me. I think a thermal paste job would do a better job.

d) More dust will probably get into the fan (though I have compressed air and clean it out every few months).

[Khenglish]

I think the mod would be better looking if you took the whole mesh off and not just around the fan. That way it would be uniform.

[octiceps]

Good info! At this point, I think the only things that can noticeably help temperatures are repasting and using a cooler, and even then, you're probably looking at a 10-15C drop at most. The fact of the matter is, the single fan cooling design simply cannot handle the combined heat output of the CPU and GPU without getting into the danger zone, especially if you are using ThrottleStop and overclocking the GPU.