Laptop active cooling to passive mod?

[RejZoR]

I was thinking, could I turn my archaic AMD E-450 APU laptop into passive cooled one to cut down on noise? I just cleaned it and re-applied thermal paste today and noticed the chip is tiny. And I have a lot of space there. If I'd replace the fan and tiny heatsink with a large aluminium heatsink, I wonder if that would work. The biggest I could find at 10mm thickness was 100mm x 60mm from eBay. If I drill it to screw it over the APU it should provide quite some surface are. It would be off center, but I think heat should spread out anyway. It might run tiny bit hotter, but it would be zero noise.

The E-450 APU is a 18W part, so that is tiny bit worrying. Then again, if I monitor temperature with working original heatsink and afterwards with modded passive, I don't think it would just fry itself instantly.

Anyone ever done anything similar?

 

[micropage7]

nice idea but i think it wont work
laptop heatsink designed to be cheap enough so you will find simple heatsink that pushed by air to cool it
you can improve that, but to make it passive you need to know the max temp on it since passive could bring it more hot

or you may consider drilling it to get more air

 

[AsRock]

Same kinda thing i was thinking of doing with a ASUS eee pc 1015PN, unit gets so hot it's killing fans. But the design is flawed just has bad cooling and 100% relays on the fan to be working and is bound to fails due the amount of heat that passes though.

I been thinking of picking up a aluminum case to put it in and leave the original cooling intact but attach it some way to the casing.

Just waiting on some funds to do it.

 

[RejZoR]

@micropage7
Drilling more ventilation holes is a possibility since there is just a plastic case bottom cover.

The idea is, I don't know how big cooler I'd need for passive. I'm assuming it would never get too hot instantly, so I'd have some time to compare stock cooler with passive and see if temps go dramatically too high to see how it is.

I was hoping for a 100x100x10 heatsink, but I couldn't find one on eBay. I could mill that one in such a way that part of it would get to the exhaust vents. That would be ideal. But I guess I could get it to work with with the 100x60x10 one...

 

[brian111]

If you do decide to try it you can always put your cpu's top power percentage under 100% in the Windows power settings. Perhaps start with 50% and see how it goes.

 

[londiste]

Passive heatsink still needs something to create the airflow. In laptop, there is not much that would create that.
There is a huge difference between large heatsink with minimal airflow and large heatsink without airflow that should not be underestimated.

 

[RejZoR]

I got the idea from passive cooled laptops that I've come across. Granted, those ran Celeron N3060 and AMD E2 9000e that are lower wattage, but still. I don't think those have a massive aluminium heatsink inside. This one will. I got 3 large heatsinks for 5 bucks so it's worth experimenting.

I remember ACER Aspire One from years ago which could be modded to handle heat better. It had a heatsink literally made out of U shaped metal. If you sticked bunch of VRAM heatsinks into the U shaped metal duct, it removed the heat significantly better. Which made it a lot quieter and cooler. This one would be a bit more hardcore mod.