Minibook X hinge repair, thermal mod and other ideas megapost

First of all, I want to plug my other thread because I need the help of someone with a Minibook X to fix my touchscren :slight_smile: If you have one, please check here if you’d be able/willing to help out:

The rest of the post is entirely too much effort and nerding out for a budget laptop but it’s kind of fun, considering how boring everything is nowadays. If anyone’s tried something like this, please share your results!

Hinge Repair
I took my Minibook X on a trip to Western Africa and about midway through I noticed that the right hinge collapsed on the keyboard side and was wobbling and causing the two parts to make contact and rub together. I was pretty worried because the laptop was always safely in my backpack but it could’ve been smashed in a bus or something, which could’ve broken parts.

I already fixed the issue so I don’t have a “before” photo but you can see where the parts were rubbing together:

When I got home I immediately opened it up (just the visible screws on the bottom) and thankfully it turned out that both screws holding the hinge just backed out by themselves. Nothing was broken or stripped. The screws themselves were just hanging out nearby so I just screwed them back in and that fixed the hinge perfectly! Super easy repair, can be done in like 5 minutes.

Rubber feet
Another issue was that all four of the rubber feet came off on like day 1. I found all but one and used superglue to stick them back on, and they’re staying solid for now. It seems like a minor issue but actually you suddenly can’t put it safely on a rough surface, it’s wobbly, and the lid can get scratched in tablet mode.

Obviously you can glue any piece of rubber to it, but if it’s not the same thickens, it would be wobbly. There are some rubber feet on Aliexpress, but if anyone knows the exact ones that fit here, please share a link!

Thermal mod
Since I already had it open, I decided to do the classic thermal mod. It’s just putting some copper shims or thermal pads to transfer heat from the CPU to the chassis. I already had all the parts from doing this mod to a Cube Mix Plus. I removed the black film (which was not super necessary based on some tests), put the copper in the CPU indentation with some thermal paste, and then all the thermal pads I had left.

In Cinebench R20, it lets the CPU run about 1W higher initially or about 0.7W indefinitely:

CPU efficiency
Speaking of Cinebench, I also tested it at different frequency limits (using Throttle Stop) with some extra cooling to sustain the speeds. Basically you can get better efficiency by going down to 2Ghz, everything takes longer but you use less total power. Below 2Ghz it actually becomes less efficient

To make that makes sense if I’m on a plane for example, and want to export photos from Lightroom while watching a movie. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, I’m still watching a movie anyway.

Untested ideas
So looking at the inside, there are actually a ton of mods that come to mind.

Extra USB ports
The motherboard looks identical to the 13" Freebook, and on the Freebook, the breakout board with the 3.5mm jack (top-right corner on the X) also has another USB-C port. I’m pretty certain that you’d just need to get that spare board somehow and cut a hole in the side of the laptop to get one more USB-C port.

For me this wouldn’t be super useful though. I’ve never needed more than 2 USB-C ports, it would be much better to have USB-A so you never needed a dongle. The empty connector circled on the left looks like it could a header for a USB-A port or SD reader as it only has 4 pins. It doesn’t seem to be powered though so I’m not 100% sure. There’s “Intel SD Host Controller” in the Device Manager so I think that’s possible.

2nd SSD
There’s unused space for an M.2 socket at the same place where the Freebook has it. Unless it’s been disabled permanently in the bios somehow, there’s a decent chance you could solder on a socket and have a second SSD drive. There’s even a place for the retaining screw so I think they were clearly thinking of this option.

Again for me personally the standard 512GB is a very reasonable amount so I haven’t bothered looking more. You could probably check if it’s getting power at least before trying anything further.

Edit: Doesn’t seem like there’s any power at the pins. So it might be disabled elsewhere or there’s some power component not installed on this motherboard. Not worth the effort IMO.

Cooling
There’s another unused 4-pin connector on the right side of the heatsink, clearly visible in my thermal mod picture. One of the pins is ground and another is 5V, so I think it’s more likely to be for a fan than USB. (No PWM signal as far as I could tell though) The shape of the motherboard even has a circular cutout, and there are vents on the side of the laptop, so I think this was clearly also considered by Chuwi.

Ideally you’d want some sort of heatpipe design, but in my testing it was enough to just blow air at the bottom cover to keep it running at 9.5W indefinitely, so I think sticking a standard laptop fan and having it blow air over the stock cooler would be enough. I’ve actually ordered a fan from Aliexpress but it hasn’t shown up yet. There’s about 6mm of space there so I think that should be fine.

Battery
This would be the most useful and also sketchy mod :slight_smile:
The stock battery is really small, even my Cube Mix+ tablet had 37Wh which let it last over 10 hours reading books. The included battery is 5mm thick and you could probably use a 6mm one. There’s obviously also a lot of empty space if you don’t add a fan, so if you took our or trimmed the speaker, two cells like this should fit in there. This would be a significant boost, though ideally I’d want 6Ah cells to make it really worth it. Strangely, they all seem to max out at 5Ah no matter what the cell volume actually is.

But as I mentioned this would be super sketchy. Batteries can be dangerous and you’d have to make them work with the charge controller and make sure they don’t blow up etc. I think I’ll try this eventually but I’d probably be concerned about taking it on a plane for example.

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Oh wow, forgot one more topic :smiley:

I’ll just make a separate post as it’s getting silly already. Not a mod per se but maybe a way to improve the battery life if we can find the cause.

So the absolute lowest power consumption from the CPU I managed to see was 1.2W, no matter what power settings, CPU state, etc. I’m not even sure what exactly has to happen for this, it usually is around 1.4W. Check the minimum CPU Package Power here:

But if you look at the Techtablets review of the Freebook, with the exact same N5100 CPU and as far as I can tell even identical motherboard, the CPU power frequently goes below 0.7W. He’s even moving the mouse around causing the popups and it still stays below 1W mostly. I have to avoid breathing to get it to stay at 1.4W :slight_smile:


From this review:

My Mix Plus tablet with a six years old Core M3 7Y30, also could go under 0.7W in power saving mode (it could be measuring it differently, but I don’t think so. It can use as little as 2.5W at the wall when idle with screen off vs ~5 for the Minibook) That’s actually a pretty huge deal and possibly saving 50% of CPU consumption when it’s mostly idle, like reading or typing stuff. Just fixing this could probably give another hour of battery life under low-load usage.

Buut I don’t know what’s causing this as I don’t have a Freebook to compare to. I’ve tried changing to a lower screen resolution and that didn’t help. I also reinstalled Windows from the factory image and that also didn’t change anything. So my feeling is that this is an issue with BIOS configuration, but there’s a million options and most of them aren’t very clear. If anyone has some ideas or a Freebook to compare with, maybe we could find the cause.

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Did you see the new revision of Minibook X that is supposed to have better cooling? The fin density looks like if it had a fan, if it doesn’t that would be super weird. https://twitter.com/chuwidotcom/status/1581090257193213953
Still, a screen downgrade doesn’t sound the best, so I hope there is a way to get rid of some of the bugs in the first revision.
Also, a gread writeup! I have encountered all the issues you have mentioned here.

Wow, no, I haven’t seen the new Minibook! Seems like it was posted when I was traveling and not paying attention.

It does look like there’s almost certainly a heatpipe with a fan there. I do like that it can stay silent but it’d be great if it could run at full power when plugged in. Especially in games I’ve seen it go up to 10-11W with the GPU + CPU maxed out and that’s not at all sustainable.

Although to be honest I’d prefer to have a bigger battery there. Everyone is impressed by the Macbook but has almost twice as much battery, so no wonder it lasts 12+ hours.

The slightly smaller screen isn’t great, but on the other hand it’s without the stupid camera cutout :slight_smile: The panel quality and resolution is pretty amazing though, I run at 120% scaling and it’s very sharp and fits lots of stuff, so I hope that stays the same.

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@mobby Could you share how did you solve the case with the fan? Which model and is it really working? I wanted to improve cooling in my minibook and looking for some advice.

I wouldn’t say I “solved” cooling but I have a fan that is working, finally :slight_smile:

It provides some extra sustained performance and keeps the laptop cooler during light use. But it’s pretty noisy and not very effective at cooling so it stays on a lot even during light use. At least now in the summer. It’s not a difficult or expensive mod, but don’t expect miracles.

Here’s what I did:

You can connect the fan directly to the laptop. Pin 1 is 5V, pin 3 is ground. The other pins should be PWM and tach sensor but don’t seem to be active.

So the fan will be always on when the laptop is on. You might also add a physical switch and stick it through the side of the laptop.

There’s either no fan controller on this motherboard or it’s disabled in firmware. I tried enabling every fan option in the bios and that didn’t help.

The fan controller has a temperature sensor and will adjust your fan speed with PWM depending on how you set it. Connect power from the laptop to the fan controller, the fan controller to the fan (orange is PWM on this fan, tach isn’t necessary)

The temperature sensor goes under the copper heatsink, close to the CPU. The fan goes close to the heatsink to blow cold air over it. I removed the headphone board here but you can probably keep it.

The result… maybe 1W of extra cooling :slight_smile:

It might be possible to improve this with a bigger fan, directing air better, maybe covering the vents, but I got bored at this point. Someone really motivated could probably install a proper heatpipe cooler though!