Awesome14

Over the last 10 years I've found laptops throttle the processor speed in order to keep fan noise down. I prefer the fan to run noisily, and the processor to run at full speed. I've developed tried and true mods for lappies and have demonstrated their effectiveness. I have two Lenovo W541 laptop workstations with I7-4940MX processors and discrete nVidia graphics. On one I overhauled the cooling. Copper shim between CPU and hsf, AS5 on both sides. Shims between hsf and inductors near CPU and gpu, and shim on the gpu. Used 'thinkpad_acpi' Linux kernel module to set fan to max speed. Ran mprime (prime95 for Linux) AND Unigine Heaven, alternating, to cure the AS5. Then ran mprime. Temps were slightly high. But laptop processors tend to run hot. The I7-4940MX is a 3.1 GHz, 4.0GHz. Turbo processor. The modded machine ran at 3GHz. continuously running mprime, for weeks. The unmodded machine with the same max-fan-speed software tweak and stock thermal-interface material, throttled to 1.7GHz. at the same running temps. Clearly, laptop manufacturers are robbing performance off the top, by inferior cooling hardware and materials. Granted, getting the cooling mod to all fit together correctly with smooth, flat surfaces requires hours of work and materials not normally found sitting around the house. I normally do not mod the CPU die. I abrade copper surfaces down to 1500 grit paper, and then polish with scapings from a bar of buffing compound. Everything is done on 1/2" plate glass to maintain flatness. The final mirror polish is done with the compound granules on a clean, damp cloth. Desktop processors mostly have slightly raised corners, so smoothness is not as much of concern. You're going to get thermal-interface compond completely covering the center of the processor. The ideal is to fill the microscopic gaps between the cpu die and the hsf, but where there is metal on metal, have it be. Metal to metal provides 100s to 1,000s times the heat transfer of thermal paste. But, on a desktop, there are more effective cooling solutions than moving air. Most user are satisfied with their laptops, because the processor doesn't run full speed long enough to make a difference. But I enjoy tweaking, and I do processor-intensive work, like batch editing 100s of large images, video rendering, security testing, password recovery, network testing; that are all severely compromised by poor, stock laptop cooling solutions.

I found this: https://photonicsguy.ca/projects/t530 It's a nice how to on altering the whitelist on the W530/T530 laptop.

I'm Brian, I got my first PC from my Dad, when I was 13. I've been on the net since before web browsers and search engines. I've built most every subsequent desktop I've ever had. I'm pretty good at cooling, even with TEC chips! I have a digital junkyard in my basement to scavenge the occasional part. I'm an electrical engineer specializing in DC analog. I do some code hacking, but I don't write stuff from scratch. I'm a pretty good linux developer, and even admin. I've developed on Windows also. I discovered a hack for Asus wifi adapter BIOS white lists. I just swapped out an Intel Centrino single band 2.4 Ghz card for an Intel 6270 AC dual band card that didn't even exist the last time the laptop got an OEM BIOS update. This works on every Asus laptop I've ever tried. To swap out the wifi card, boot into the BIOS setup program and leave it there. Hot swap the wifi adapter, and quit without saving. Load the operating system ( only tried with Linux, but I've been using the same method since the Intel C2D days. Do a normal shutdown, and it just works from then on! Lenovo is trickier. You can hotswap the wifi adapter, and the machine will boot with the new adapter, but when you exit the BIOS setup with discard changes, the lenovo system goes backwards and does a full boot! The Asus systems exit the BIOS setup and go straight to loading the os. I've only owned Lenovo and Asus laptops, so I don't have experience using this method with other makes. I also remove the HSF on every laptop I buy, and insert a copper shim between all hot surfaces (processor, gpu, sometimes video ram), with Arctic Silver 5 properly applied to both sides, and put the HSF on top of the shims. I have one i7 laptop rig set up with copper shims under the HSF, and it runs 'mprime' 24/7. It's been running for years with no heat problems. But I did go through 3 AC adapters that overheated and failed on that machine, due to the increased load of mprime! So, I cut the dead AC adapters apart with a razor knife, replaced the fried output caps, and got a nice huge passive copper heat sink and mounted it on the SMPS unit of the AC adapter, with a nice glob of cheap thermal paste! That keeps it nice and cool! But the copper-shim method works so well that laptops so modded will literally take everything you can throw at them, without overheating! I recently modded a Lenovo W541 copper shims on the cpu, gpu and video ram chips (the HSF has pads for the those chips. The cpu is an i7-4710MQ. This machine is under test running mprime 24/7. I've never hacked BIOS firmware, but I'm thinking about it, because it looks like the Lenovo white list problem has no easy fix. Or, maybe someone else has done it already. I don't worry about bricking anything, because I always back up the firmware with a programmer. I've brought bricked boards back to life! I had one with a soldered on CMOS! I had to remove it, install a socket on the board, and program a socketed CMOS chip. I've been daring with hardware. There's just so much one can accomplish with hotplugging! I also perform board-level repairs on motherboards OK, SO HELLO everyone!