Y500/Y510P spring mod with spacer guide

[ghoul 29]

Hi!

edit: merged with Conscriptvirus's post so it's easier to follow:

This modification is very dangerous, can lead to broken chips.

Don't say i didn't warned you...

I did this mod yesterday and it's really not too hard or expensive.

edit: he's right, it is easy

Lenovo did a sloppy job with cooler, too much thermal paste, weak springs, overheating and throttling machines...

First of all, disassemble the machine.

Then do a repaste, with bare minimum amount of thermal paste, and remove cooler again, check thermal paste spread.

This is a picture of my heatsink attached with no thermal paste on. You can see there is a small gap between the GPU and heatsink which isn't very optimal. Optimal would be the GPU touching the copper heatsink and thermal paste filling in the scratches and micro-holes on the copper.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]9243[/ATTACH]

Remove screws from cooler, by removing little plastik washers, keeping the screws to fall out.

Here are some more pictures:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]9244[/ATTACH]

The circled things are the plastic washers that need to be removed. I ended up using a xacto-knife blade to cut them off. Remember, once the plastic things come off, the screw will fall through. Also, keep track of which screw goes to which hole.

My gpu heatsink was not paralllel to motherboard, so the corner without screw was slightly bended upwards.

Twist the gpu heatsink, so that corner is pushing gap pad a little bit harder. Be very gentle, you dont want to broke your heatsink.

You can check level by putting your heatsink on flat surface with gpu screws removed, cpu screws stays in place for now.

Then place a 0,5mm spacer under the spring like seen on the following pictures

These are screw number 4 and 5.

Screw number 6 is using a weak spring, so use double spacer, or change it to a stronger spring:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]9245[/ATTACH]

That's what mine looks like after it's done. The washer fits really nicely.

Put back plastik spacer, so screw stay in place.

Do the same process with cpu heatsink.

You can do this to ultrabay as well, but take extra caution, since there is no backplate, and it can lead to warped/broken board.

Lastly change the gap pad over cpu vrm area, because it is too tick, I used 0,5mm piece:

Aaand it's done!

Put back heatsink, use as little amount of thermal paste as possible, and enjoy 10-15+ lower temperatures.

Spacers was lying around, i had the spring from some old heatsink, so dont have exact types and diameters,

but Conscriptvirus did the mod also, his mod is better to look at, spacer perfectly fit into heatsink holes

I bought these washers:

Crown Bolt M3 Zinc-Plated Steel Flat Washers (5-Pack)-37428 at The Home Depot from home depot. They were 45 cents for a tiny bag of 5. Ended up buying 3 bags of them.

According to that site, the inside diameter is 3 mm and the outside diameter is 0.2785 inches.

Now, YMMV so keep experimenting and be careful. I ended up adding 2 washers to each screw hole and a third one to the weaker spring that Ghoul was talking about.

Results:

Battlefield 3:

Before: CPU 95C, GPU: 95C After CPU: 80C, GPU: 80C

Planetside 2:

Before GPU: 97C + throttle. After: GPU: 82C

edit:

I also did cpu mod, ended up adding a washer to screw 6, despite of changed spring, gained 1C-3C.

I can run XTU stress test under 85C with -95mV and 3,4Ghz 4core.

GPU and CPU idle is under 50, without notebook stand with fans.

Thanks to Conscriptvirus for his effort and pictures.

If it worth to be sticky, Mods, please make it one.

Regards

[conscriptvirus 19]

Reedited to OP

[hlmasterchief93 10]

looking for a way to cool down my y500

anyone have good experience with this mod?

[ChazzB 10]

i would love a follow up on this. I just bought a Y510P and the ultrabay overheat is a buzzkill, and i am seriously thinking on doing this mod.

[ghoul 29]

Try it for yourself

We wrote down our results, but i can give you a little update.

It is as good as it was written down. But if you want to overclock your cpu and gpu, it can be modded further.

I also did a chassis cut mod, where i removed dust filter, the inner bottom chassis element was also cut, sou you are able to see gpu heatsink.

Gpu heatsink was tweaked with additional little copper heatsinks glued to the gpu plate.

Chassis was cut where ultrabay is intaking fresh air, like seen on the following picture:

But most of these were for cpu and internal gpu.

With all these mods i was able to run the cpu undervolted with 100mV, and overclocked to 3,6 1C; 3,5 2C ; 3.4 3C; 3.4 4C Ghz, gpu is running at 1200Mhz, memory is at 1350 with reasonable temps. around 85

Ultrabay is a different story..

i was able to drop ultrabay temps, when load was below 80-90%, with not so long peaks to 99%.

But when load was constatly above 90% ultrabay got hotter and hotter by time, with the mod it was slower, but still climbed up to 97C and throttling...

So ultrabay is a f***ed up design, becasue of lack of air movement through the heatsink. ( not mentioning upper faults which were fixed by my mods. )

There are two things you can do, if you have the will, courage and knowledge.

Do a hardware fan speed increase mod as Bagyusz did excellently, a fellow mate from my local forum @prohardver.hu.

Lenovo IdeaPad Y széria (Y40, Y50, Y400, Y500, Y410p, Y510p) - PROHARDVER! Hozzászólások

Or, insert an Y500 fan, Genuine New Laptop CPU Fan for Lenovo IdeaPad Y400 Y500 See Pictures | eBay

Which by the way was a PITA, better prepare your dremmel, major cutting was necessary.

But the results were spectacular. With Serious sam3, where after 10 minutes playing ultrabay was started to throttling, check those temps:

Lenovo IdeaPad Y széria (Y40, Y50, Y400, Y500, Y410p, Y510p) - PROHARDVER! Hozzászólások

And it was done by standing still at a scene, where both gpus were loaded CONSTANTLY @99%.

So yeah, Lenovo f***ked it up badly, but as seen, an EC firmware mod, where ultrabay fan speed is increased, those temps can be kept managable low, without throttling.

Shame on you Lenovo, beacuse those ultrabay design flaws could be eliminated by a simple firmware, but you are unable, or not wiilling to do it, despite the large amount of complaints.

And all of these test were done on a Logitech AltoX notebook stand, with no additional fan involved.

Have a good mod!

[Jason335i 11]

How is the cooler on the ultrabay graphics module? Is it as sloppy?

[hannse12 10]

i would love an update on the hardware mods you did Ghoul! some pictures of the actual ultrabay card would be nice, so we can see the approximate cuts that were made.

my questions are:

which would you recommend to lower ultrabay temps? a fan controller mod, or simply replace the fan?

i honestly wouldn't know how to go about building a seperate fan controller that would rev the fan up higher than the board is allowing, and unless i can get some pretty detailed instructions on how to do that, i will forgo that option

your mod seems more viable, but i would like a view of your card before i start cutting around my own .

it also looks like you're using your own mesh on the bottom, and not just removing that dust filter; is that correct?

also how did you undervolt and overclock the cpu? do you have an xm cpu in there?

would love to hear back from you !

[ghoul 29]

i would love an update on the hardware mods you did Ghoul! some pictures of the actual ultrabay card would be nice, so we can see the approximate cuts that were made.

my questions are:

which would you recommend to lower ultrabay temps? a fan controller mod, or simply replace the fan?

i honestly wouldn't know how to go about building a seperate fan controller that would rev the fan up higher than the board is allowing, and unless i can get some pretty detailed instructions on how to do that, i will forgo that option

your mod seems more viable, but i would like a view of your card before i start cutting around my own .

it also looks like you're using your own mesh on the bottom, and not just removing that dust filter; is that correct?

also how did you undervolt and overclock the cpu? do you have an xm cpu in there?

would love to hear back from you !

First of all, mesh is the original

Did a picture from the other side, where you can easily spot where cutting was involved.

I wouldn't rush things that much if i were you.

Try it with removed bottom plate, to see, if there is an improvement.

Then try the spacer mod, with and without bottom cover. If coverless seems good, then try the intake mod.

If you achieved that much of temp drop, with your games/apps you are using, what is satisfying, no throttle, around 80-85 max with oc, stop.

The fan mod is irreversible, fan controller mod is better in that point of view, and if you managed heat with those mods, no need to do it further.

However, if you want to, need to....

You can see where inner chassis element was cut, in order to get way more fresh air into the laptop. You can extend heatsink with some copper pieces, i think with external cooler it can be even better, since you can blow air onto gpu heatsink directly, and more into chassis. ( I'm not using any...) Why block it, if almost the whole bottom plate is mesh. Come on Lenovo, really?

And the ultrabay...

The mod stucked at wip status, so other side and inner pictures will not be published, since i think they belong to ghetto modding...

The right side fan is the one i broke during first assembly, so i had to reorder.

But it is good for measurements and comparison.

You can see the fitted fan, compare the original fan to the new one. it is bigger, thicker. The new fans diameter is almost the size of the original one's metal plate.

Please excuse me the quality of the cutting of the chassis, i was in a hurry, eager to see results, and since then i had no time to correct it.

Top cover of inner fan housing had to be removed, due to thickness. And between new fans baseplate and inner housing i had to insert around 1mm of spacer, thickness... ( Between the baseplate and rotor, in order to lift up the fan, not to touch chassis. )

I strongly suggest, try other mods first, even combine them, leave fan switch as last resort.

(There were lot of discussion about undervolting via Throttlestop or XTU. Overclocking can be done via unlocked bios or Throttlestop)

[programmargorp 10]

I would be quite scared about exceeding the mounting pressure with this mod and cracking the GPU/CPU die if I went with this mod :/

[hannse12 10]

wow! thanks for the update!

i originally had heat issues, and i thought the heatsink was broken because the gpu heatpipe was not soldered to the cpu heatsink, but that makes sense, because you don't want the gpu heat spreading to the cpu as well. i simply repasted with some mx 4, and im getting around 60-70 on the gpu @ 1ghz, stock voltage, and around 80-85 on the cpu at stock voltage, with throttlestop on. i does occasionally hit 90, but it stops there (only if i'm doing 100% on the internal gpu, and high cpu usage). i haven't really pushed the gpu very far, mostly because it's working great atm, and i'm a bit hesitant as i know finding parts for them is getting rarer and rarer (still pissed i can't find a dvd drive or hdd bay with the right bezel, means im basically stuck with sli, or a big fat hole).

i might go back and do the screw mod, since i too was unimpressed with the pressure on the heatsink, and i have some of those copper heatsinks on the way, as well as some new 1mm thick thermal pads for the vrms and vram.

has anyone seen any flexing of the pcb because of the screws?

[freedomlh19 10]

I just received my Y510p + SLI GT755. I was contemplating redoing the thermal paste, I think since Ghoul found they didn't do an incredible job on it, I'll crack her open.

Ghoul, was there anything being cooled via thermal pad?

[ghoul 29]

wow! thanks for the update!

i originally had heat issues, and i thought the heatsink was broken because the gpu heatpipe was not soldered to the cpu heatsink, but that makes sense, because you don't want the gpu heat spreading to the cpu as well. i simply repasted with some mx 4, and im getting around 60-70 on the gpu @ 1ghz, stock voltage, and around 80-85 on the cpu at stock voltage, with throttlestop on. i does occasionally hit 90, but it stops there (only if i'm doing 100% on the internal gpu, and high cpu usage). i haven't really pushed the gpu very far, mostly because it's working great atm, and i'm a bit hesitant as i know finding parts for them is getting rarer and rarer (still pissed i can't find a dvd drive or hdd bay with the right bezel, means im basically stuck with sli, or a big fat hole).

i might go back and do the screw mod, since i too was unimpressed with the pressure on the heatsink, and i have some of those copper heatsinks on the way, as well as some new 1mm thick thermal pads for the vrms and vram.

has anyone seen any flexing of the pcb because of the screws?

They will heat up each other eventually, since both heatpipe is soldered to common fins.

Those are great temps, but good luck with the mod, if you are doing it, and any feedback is welcome.

Main pcb did not flexed, but the heatsink did. When used too much spacer with cpu, the fan housing bended so much, it pushed the keyboard up...

Be extra careful.. Ultrabay PCB is weaker, smaller, no backplate, don't wreck it.

I just received my Y510p + SLI GT755. I was contemplating redoing the thermal paste, I think since Ghoul found they didn't do an incredible job on it, I'll crack her open.

Ghoul, was there anything being cooled via thermal pad?

Don't do it. If the unit is new, test it first, if it has any flaws.

Don't loose warranty, without being sure there are no issues, other than high temps.

Ultrabay can be opened, because there is no sticker on it.

Yes, VRAM chips, GPU VRM, CPU VRM coils.

[programmargorp 10]

@ghoul does the copper heatsinks sitting on the aluminium plate actually get hot? It feels like you're just adding heatsinks on the mounting plate, which isn't actually doing much. @hannse12 I don't see why the motherboard would flex alot at all since the strain is being placed on the x plate on the other side of the motherboard. Unless you place enough pressure to actually break that (which by then you probably would have cracked the die anyway), there shouldn't be a problem.

Still would have concern about cracking the die with the extra mounting pressure from the spacers though.

[ghoul 29]

@ghoul does the copper heatsinks sitting on the aluminium plate actually get hot? It feels like you're just adding heatsinks on the mounting plate, which isn't actually doing much. @hannse12 I don't see why the motherboard would flex alot at all since the strain is being placed on the x plate on the other side of the motherboard. Unless you place enough pressure to actually break that (which by then you probably would have cracked the die anyway), there shouldn't be a problem.

Still would have concern about cracking the die with the extra mounting pressure from the spacers though.

Actually, they do get hot. I don't understand, why you say, baseplate isn't doing much. But please, explain then, what is the purpose of the baseplate? (Which is not alu, it is some kind of alloy.)

Cpu backplate is hard enough, baseplate will do almost all the flexing due to strain.

Ok, then don't do it This mod is not for the faint hearted.

(Actually pressure in this case is not problematic, since baseplate can flex. However uneven pressure on the chip, mostly during assembly, can be, and you can corner the chip. But cpu baseplate flexing can introduce 3 type of issues:

- Cpu fan housing is connected to cpu plate, with flex it is moving too, it will not be level with motherboard and it can push keyboard up.

- With too much flex it could reach SMDs next to haswell ic, and cause shorting.

- When it is reaching side of the cpu, increaing pressure on it, the center of it will come up, decreasing the pressure on the ic, even lifting it up from it. )

[Lazerlord 10]

I'm not sure if I should do this mod. How do I know if my Y500 has thermal issues in the first place. It's seems pretty good, but then again, I'm not overclocking to ridiculous amounts. Currently have 1150/2500 on the GPU, and am waiting for the five-post rule so I can get the modded bios to increase voltages a little. It keeps it at .925 at the overclock, but default I've seem it hit 1.025. Anyway, I don't think I'll be doing this, it's a pretty powerful laptop to begin with, I I don't think I'll risk breaking it.

[loki 10]

They will heat up each other eventually, since both heatpipe is soldered to common fins.

Those are great temps, but good luck with the mod, if you are doing it, and any feedback is welcome.

Main pcb did not flexed, but the heatsink did. When used too much spacer with cpu, the fan housing bended so much, it pushed the keyboard up...

Be extra careful.. Ultrabay PCB is weaker, smaller, no backplate, don't wreck it.

Don't do it. If the unit is new, test it first, if it has any flaws.

Don't loose warranty, without being sure there are no issues, other than high temps.

Ultrabay can be opened, because there is no sticker on it.

Yes, VRAM chips, GPU VRM, CPU VRM coils.

Mind suggesting the size and brand of thermal pad?

p/s: 'm new here.

[TheLittleStar 14]

Heatsinks of lenovo y500 with factory processors i5 and i7 are different or not?

btw...I used the guide but apart for my ultrabay.I used only mod with washers and there's -2c underload now.Atleast that something.

[lenovo188 10]

So if I decide to repaste cpu and gpu on y510p since I already ordered Arctic silver 5, do I need anything else besides the paste and washers? Do I also need to replace those pink-ish thermal pads as seen on this

, or can I just leave them as they are?

[angel_grin 13]

anyone tried this? its originally for the xbox but it has the same 4 pin connection. i think it can work. i contacted the seller if it is compatible with laptops.

Customised Speed Xbox 360 Slim Fan Mod Accelerator Controller | eBay

[lenovo188 10]

So I didn't do the spacer mod (yet), just repasted with arctic silver 5 and on my y510p with i5-4200 (-102,5mV undervolt) and single gt 755m (-125mV undervolt) while playing LoL all on max setting and 1080p im getting ~66°C cpu and ~67°C gpu at 18-19°C ambient temp. By running prime95 and furmark at same time, im getting -85°C cpu (turbo boost goes only to 2.7ghz, it's throttled by current) and ~82°C gpu (no throttling). Are these temps ok?

[CrazyBuch 10]

I didn't. But I think it's compatible. You can try.

[nhiaxeng 10]

I did this mod with brass washers sized #6 from Lowes.

[angel_grin 13]

is it ok to remove the plastic covers in the motherboard?

[AcidPanda 11]

Could anyone confirm that this is the right spacer size?

S 50pcs M3 3mm Metal Plain Washer 3 X 8 X 0 5mm FOR M3 Screw E | eBay

[lenovo188 10]

Could anyone confirm that this is the right spacer size?

S 50pcs M3 3mm Metal Plain Washer 3 X 8 X 0 5mm FOR M3 Screw E | eBay

Its the right size, and a tip: Dont cut away those white plastic holders, just pop them out, put the washer, spring and screw together and reuse the plastic holder so its easier to screw the whole plate back to the motherboard