Ways to reduce Heat / Increase Battery life

Laptops MiniBook
#1

While I have only had the Minibook 8100Y 16/512 model for just under a week, I have been looking at ways to reduce the heat coming from the unit and/or increase the battery life. I wanted to start this new thread to keep everything on topic as well as collect more options from other owners here in the forum.

@Biosham wrote:
This is normal temperature. You can change the fan, replace the thermal paste with a more heat-conducting one, put the thermal pads so that the heat is transferred to the case. With this mods temperature can be reduced by 10-20 degrees.

@thk12345 wrote:
you can further lower the temperature of the cpu by replacing the stock thermal pad with fujipoly thermal pad.

Running Fedora 32, intel_undervolt measures are all at -50 for the CPU as well as cpufreq set to max at 30% seems to get a ‘normal’ usage of the device without much effect on performance. I might just replace the thermal padding later on - however anyone would like to add their experiences? Are there any soft-mods that we can do to the kernel or other to help in this? Thanks for sharing!

Minibook EC patch (fans turn off now)
#2

How can you replace the thermal pad? When removing the bottom cover I was able to remove all five srews on the back metal heat sink (see picture), but then the black plate was not moving any direction, like it was glued. Anytips on how to remove the black plate to access the cpu?

afbeelding
afbeelding738×492 126 KB

#3

I have not yet gotten to this step yet.

I am just now ordering the replacement SEPA fan…

Maybe some of the other members that have already been through this could chime in?

Stay cool!

#4

I confess that changing the Ventilation fan improves the amount of sound from the device. With the new one it is as if there were no fan, I mean there is a little bit of fan noise but NOTHING like if was before. If you do not like the noise coming from the device, I suggest you change the fan - many have done it in this forum, search and find! :slight_smile:

#5

I was able to remove the Minibook heat sink and replaced the thermal pad between cpu and heat sink. It is a big improvement!

Removing the heat sink is easy. Remove the five screws I’ve highlighted in the picture depicted a few posts above, and then gently wiggle/rotate the heat sink till it come loose. It’s only the thermal pad which is causing this.

I removed the pad, cleaned cpu and heat sink with alcohol and placed a Gelid 12 W/m.K pad back on the cpu. Use a 1mm thick pad. And use an electrical-isolating pad.

I already have replaced the cooling fan, have the EC mod installed and using XTU to undervolt the 8100Y. Changing the pad did not do anything regarding preformance for me. But the thermal behavior is so much better. The bottom lid doesn’t warm up anymore. The keybosrd remains cool.
And when running a 5 minute XTU stress test with the original pad the cooling fan started to run after 30 seconds, and did increase five times in speed. With the new pad the fan only started after 1.5 minute, and only increased three times in speed during the same test.

It therefre does improve the cooling performance significantly! As the cpu is already running on its design limits due to the XTU undervolt (max 9 watt, max dual core long time 2.7 Ghz) there is nothing to win in performance.

So overall my expirience with tweaking the Minibook cooling/performance:

  • EC mod. silence the fan when no cpu load
  • Replace fan. silence the fan siginificantly!!
  • XTU undervolt: Improves CPU performance with approx 20%
  • replace thermal pad: silence the fan (or when not using XTU it can increase performance)
#6

Does anyone have a link for the replacement fan (UK if possible).
Cheers
Nick

#7

I ordered this one: they currently promote it with a 10-day shipping.