P150HM power supply upgrade and other not so well documented upgrades

[Corry]

I've seen lots of posts alluding to this, mentioning cable swaps and the like without any real details. I guess I'm late to the HM mod party. Sad because prices are on the rise. Anyhow, As I said in other threads, the GTX485M in mine is trying to die a slow painful death. Its beyond irritating! Heres hoping the newer cards can be forced to be compatible That said, I'm planning the whole slew of updates to my HM. Ordered a 2960XM from the bay. Will eventually need the updated firmware to go with it

That said, in prep for everything, even if I end up having to go with an older card, power and cooling will both be issues it seems many have already solved, or at least "solved". The power supply issue seems to be people are grabbing certain model dell/clevo/etc power supplies and either swapping cables, connectors, or both. Some dells might need a wire tied to ground. (the small one on a big supply since they wouldn't waste a high current capacity wire on data communications!) Do I have that correct? Are those 4 pin power supplies really just using 2 of the 4 connectors? I'd have to measure the gauge of wire on my 180W supply before deciding to shove more power through it. I realize many have done so without issue, but if that pushes it beyond the AWG or ISO specs, I'd rather try and find the correct connector to solder on to the original wire if its true that theres only a max of 3 wires in those 4 pin supplies. I'd also prefer to use them since the strain relief on my cable bit the dust a long time ago and has been supported with a lot of electrical tape....to beyond the choke....to keep the strain off. I'd like something that looks like "new" again

Second - Cooling- Both here and on NBR I've heard mention of using small heatsinks. The aluminum tape over the radiators is self explanatory, and even the one of adding more fins to the radiator....while serious props to him, not something I think Ill be trying to duplicate. At least not while my laptop is my only computer...What sort of heat sinks are people installing and where? How much effect does it have? I think I saw one more where someone added additional heat pipes to the heat spreader. That looks doable, but I couldn't figure out how the case supported it. I'm in the process of designing a 3D printer, so the thought has crossed my mind to 3D print a new case to support such mad scientist work That's a longer ways off in the future though....that's what happens when you decide to forget the kits and strike out on your own because you want to be difficult Can't even use the RAMPS board everyone else is using, so I have to do some of the electronics/firmware work.

Anyhow, if there are threads to these, I cannot seem to search for them. Search on the forums doesn't seem to get "all the words" and matches "some of the words" so I either get threads about the p150hm and something else like GPUS, or threads about power supplies for other computers. Same thing with cooling. Spent most of the day trying to comb through it all, and found a lot of good info, like the info about putting the 2960XM in the machine on NBR from jaybee. (thanks for that!), but not the other stuff. Even in that thread which included some mentions of the power supply I couldn't find specifics! Maybe it just really is *that* simple, but since its a power supply, I want to make absolutely certain before I do anything that might blow my machine up!

Thanks guys! Glad you all are here breathing new life into my old HM!

[jaybee83]

for power supply details, best ask meaker over at NBR, hes the man for the job. he already detailed out a thread on how to properly mod a psu to look professional, just dont have the link handy atm

as for those mini copper vram heatsinks, they have a slowdown effect when it comes to temperatures rising, but they dont affect the finally reached max temp, so theyre only good for a retardation effect while trapping the heat inside the chassis instead of actually transferring it outside. might improve on that by using an additional cooling stand though

as for gpus, the fastest compatible cards would be 7970m and/or 680m, the former of which needs a modified vbios whereas the latter needs a specific vbios and modified drivers to properly work.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

[Corry]

for power supply details, best ask meaker over at NBR, hes the man for the job. he already detailed out a thread on how to properly mod a psu to look professional, just dont have the link handy atm

as for those mini copper vram heatsinks, they have a slowdown effect when it comes to temperatures rising, but they dont affect the finally reached max temp, so theyre only good for a retardation effect while trapping the heat inside the chassis instead of actually transferring it outside. might improve on that by using an additional cooling stand though

as for gpus, the fastest compatible cards would be 7970m and/or 680m, the former of which needs a modified vbios whereas the latter needs a specific vbios and modified drivers to properly work.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

I'll have to find the NBR thread later I guess using the NBR search tool as google didn't turn up much last I checked. The only REAL issue I have is wheter its literally just a connector/cable swap? If it is, and I suspect it is, then theres no problem at all. Otherwise, I'll have to get the details

The GPU limitation I'm aware of. I would like to know more about it, as I know a tiny bit about bios but happen to know a professional BIOS programmer that also doesn't get on forums. I also offered to pay for prema's new motherboard so he can work on it. I think another forum member wants to do the same, so hopefully we can cover the financial aspect, then hopefully he'll just get the time aspect covered eventually.

I didn't realize there was no additional airflow for those heat sinks people spoke of, so yeah, without them being outside the case, I can see how it wouldn't do anything but delay, so thanks for the heads up so I could stop wasting my time!

I did a fair bit of work on it tonight. Its my only machine right now, so yeah, its back together. I did put the aluminum tape on, got the 2960XM in there, repasted everything with the gelid gc-extreme paste (seems to have the highest thermal conductivity of the pastes....liquid metals I may try later once I figure the heat sinks aren't likely to be coming off again for a while!) I also, somewhat controversially, lapped the GPU heatsink. Mine was pretty badly warped so I'm glad I went through with it. Even still, I know laptop heat sinks don't have a ton of spare material, so lapping can make things worse rather than better. In this case, I could see there was a fair amount of pressure offered by the mounting system, so I had some breathing room. The paste that was on there initially was an atrocity, so between those 2, GPU temps are way back down and the machine is running pretty smooth again. I didn't lap the CPU heatsink. 1, theres a non-conductive tape on it. It likely doesn't make contact with any of the surface mount components anyhow, but I'd rather make sure I replace it if I remove it. The bigger issue though is I'm not sure theres enough spare material there. If I decide to go for it, I may skip the roughing and just opt to smooth things out a bit more, make some larger areas of contact between any pits. Reason to do it is the guy that installed it had some really acidic fingers. I have a fingerprint across the heatsink that's etched in! I don't know if the grease on the persons finger was *that* acidic, or if there was a reaction with the TIM they installed. Regardless, its there, surely detracting somewhat from heat transfer, TIM makes up for it somewhat. I think if I opt to try though, I'll order a replacement and have it ready, have my micrometers out to periodically check the amount of material removed, and be ready to junk....or salvage the pipes/radiator and junk it. I should have taken pictures, but I was in a hurry. This is my only computer at the moment! (That's a whole other story though, and not interesting in a computer sort of way!)

[Khenglish]

Yeah the little heatsinks are pointless and just delay heating up and cooling down with no real improvement.

As for lapping the CPU heatsink, it helps even more for the CPU than the GPU assuming both are equally warped (it varies). The non-conductive tape is unnecessary and can be removed. It is very difficult to improve on the heat pipes. The heatsinks for SM series laptops have dual 6mm heatpipes for the GPU core vs dual 5mm heatpipes for the GPU core as well as a solid radiator if you want to improve GPU cooling. For the CPU you can get the P170 heatsink instead of P150 for the copper radiator (HM, EM, and SM heatsinks all work). I'm not sure if the copper radiator really helps much though.

As for power supply, the big 330W power supplies do have 4 individual wires (5 if you count the unused ID wire) for each prong on the connector. 240W and under supplies do not, and just have 2 wires (3 if you include the unused ID wire), which split out to the 4 prongs on the connector. If using a Dell 330W PSU yes you solder the green ID line to ground. The ID line can be ignored on the 240W PSU.

For GPU yes 7970m and 680m are the best you can get. The 7970m must be a clevo, and it must be the V1.2 version of the card. V1.1 will not work. The V1.2 will have a blank screen until you flash on a non-enduro vBIOS (P570WM vBIOS, or Dell vBIOS). Blind flashing the card to the proper vBIOS does work. Any clevo or MSI 680m will work with the proper vBIOS flashed on, but the vBIOS must be a particular older version, and you cannot blind flash it. It must be flashed prior to installation. Dell 680m cards may or may not work. I do not know.