Serious Overheating Problems

This is not normal, obviously.

Here's what you need to do:
1- Get some thermal grease. Any kind will do, but Arctic Silver Ceramique is what I recommend. Make sure you get GREASE, NOT EPOXY. If it's a 2-part thing, it's an epoxy, not a grease.

2- Remove the CPU access door

3- Remove the screws that retain the heatsink in the order shown on the heatsink; do not remove the screw on the first pass. Loosen them up a bit, in the order shown, and then go back and repeat the process to remove them completely.

4- Wriggle the heatsink around gently. This is to break the "seal" between the P4 and the thermal pad, which is strong enough to rip the P4 out of the ZIF (I've done it myself several times, and I know other people that have done it).

5- Clean all of the residue from the pad off of both the CPU and the heatsink using q-tips, paper towels, cotton balls, etc. and rubbing alcohol.

6- Intel's thermal pads have a thin piece of aluminum foil in them. Make sure you remove that as well.

--NOTE--
DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT use a screwdriver or something like it to scrape the pad off. Use your fingernail if necessary, but nothing harder. Otherwise, you're going to really be screwed, unless you know someone with a machine shop and a good granite surface plate.
--NOTE--

7- take the top off the heatsink. Remove the 4 or 5 or whatever it is tiny screws, and then use a small flathead screwdriver to disengage the 4 tabs (2/side) that hold the top of the heatsink on.

8- Clean out all the crap in the heatsink using a paintbrush and canned air. DO NOT hit the fans with canned air, unless you hold them in place with your finger or a screwdriver or something. If you let the canned air spin up the fans, what's going to happen is that you'll over-rev the fans, fry the bearings, kill the fans, and have to RMA the whole damn thing to get it working again.

9- Reassemble the heatsink

10- Apply new thermal grease as per Arctic Silver's instructions (on their website @ www.arcticsilver.com)

11- Put heatsink back in computer, screw it down in the order listed on the heatsink's cover. Again, just tighten them down a bit on the first pass, and then tighten them down all the way the second time around.

That should solve any overheating issues. I'll post pictures of the whole process, if you need me to, if I can get ahold of a digital camera...

Great instructions. I would like to add that - if you havent done this before i recommend you find a friend or someone from the local computer joint to give you a hand. cleaning the metal surface of the heatsink is a fairly time-consuming and physically exhausting process and it takes the right equipment and skill.

Not to discourage you but - do it right if you must do it at all.

NOTE :-
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If you are not confident at all then its better to let Sager handle the mess. Dont screw up and void the warranty.

NOTE 2 :-
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Try raising the notebook off the surface with erasers / staples boxes etc. under all four rubber feet. This will facilitate cooling.

gsferrari, I have found that the TIM used on Intel's heatsinks (the Tualatin P3s and the P4 heatsinks, anyhow), and the one on my 5620 are dead easy to remove. It's the pink crap with the consistency of bubble gum that AMD had been using up until recently that's a pain in the ass to take off. The black (carbon-based?) stuff Intel is using is dead easy to take off. Your fingernail will do it without a problem.

Also, raising the notebook off the desk is a possible cure, but it shouldn't be overheating in the first place. Raising it is a stopgap measure; it eliminates the symptom, but not the problem. It'll work, but it's not the right way to do it.

I cleaned out my 5660's cooling system and used a thermal compound. The aluminum foil comes off easy and the black stuff takes a good deal of acetone. if any of you have a fabrication lab at school/univ/work then take the heatsink and CPU there and ask them to do a little cleaning with acetone / RCA cleaning for the heatsink.

acetone will also help clean out the gunk inside the heatsink fins. Careful with the fans as mentioned above.

basically - get everything shiny and clean before you use the thermal compound. Using abrasive sandpaper of varying grit to "lap" the heatsink will improve the results but is not absolutely required for this basic mod. I recommend it though because a perfectly even surface will help immensely.

Acetone will work, but I've used rubbing alcohol before, and it works just as well. It also has the distinct advantage of not being highly toxic to your liver.

Acetone is a very effective solvent, but, like alcohol, it is highly volatile, and it has the additional disadvantage of being easily absorbed through one's skin. Once in the body, it will wreak havoc on your liver. Using it to clean a heatsink and a CPU isn't going to cause a problem, but it's still not a good idea to use it unless you absolutley have to, which you don't, since alcohol will work just as well for this.

acetone is the most accessible solution for me working in the IC lab has advantages...oh and buy a pair of latex gloves for this process - cheap/safe and you can use them for applying the thermal compound without worrying about contamination...

search the forum (56xx tech support forum I believe) for the write-up on applying thermal compound and lapping the heatsink by gelatinousfury. Was recently bumped to the top so it may still be on the first page...

Luck

[edit] found link, right below this post

http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=11362

Wow. The heatsink on the 5680 is a hell of a lot different than the one on the 5620.

Anyhow, coming from the standpoint of a cooling forum moderator (www.short-media.com/forums), and a "veteran" air cooler (not by choice- parents won't let me go water), I would have to advise AGAINST lapping that heatsink.

Lapping a heatsink is not exactly difficult, but doing it on a P4, without lapping the IHS on the P4, isn't going to make a major difference. Also, unless you have access to the kind of resources I do, I would not lap a heatsink.

My grandparents own a machine shop; when I want to lap something, I just drive over there and use one of the granite surface plates. The surface plate I usually use is calibrated flat to +/- 0.0001" (or 0.00001, I can't recall for sure). Which means that in theory, having lapped both the P4 and the heatsink in my 5620, they are now flat to within +/- 0.0002" of one another. In reality, it's not quite that good due to the inconsistencies in the sandpaper, but it's far, far flatter than you're going to get it unless you have a surface plate of similar or greater flatness.

Glass is a decent substitute, but it's very flexible. Flexible is bad, because it allows the surface that you are lapping the heatsink on to change shape with each pass. This is not good, and it results in a surface that isn't as flat as it otherwise might be.

Frankly, I don't think you'll be able to do any better than AVC (who made the 5620's, and presumably the 5660's, 70's, and 80's heatsinks) did, unless you've got a surface plate. You might, but I wouldn't risk it. At least try it on a desktop heatsink first.

Actually, just thoroughly cleaning the bugger will take care of 100% of the problem as it will take the machine back to its original performance. The better thermal compound will improve on that maybe 15% to 20%. Cleaning the crap off the parts will improve on that by another 10 percentage points. The fancy lapping, if you don't destroy something, will maybe get you another 5 points.

On the same issue, you need to thing about why your machine is picking up so much crud.

have you recently changed the driver for your videocard?

You wont FUBAR your warranty if you do it right. I did this to my machine 6 months into the warranty and did loads of stuff through sager with the warranty cover afterwards. No probs.

But you are right in asking him to exercise caution and I dont think he is going ahead with it which is a wise thing. never start something you have no hope of finishing

Uh... According to powernotebooks, sager's warranty policy is somewhat more flexible than say, dell's. Opening the notebook will not void the warranty, but any damage you do while you're in there won't be covered.

It's really not that hard to do. It's not any more difficult than opening up the top to install a mini-PCI WLAN card or opening up any desktop computer to install/replace a video card, optical drive, or hard drive. I just AS5'd my CPU and heat spreader today. Used about 100 Q-tips + alcohol and got every last bit of the old thermal pad residue out of there.

How on earth did you manage to use 100 q-tips?

OK, so maybe somewhere between 60 and 80, but it was alot

Ah how disappointing. My 5670 has been shutting off seemingly randomly over the past month until I checked the cpu temp and saw it kept approaching 80C.

Right now, it generally sits at about 60C, but just 40 seconds of intense cpu action (encoding a .wav file) raises it to 70+. Encoding a whole album will kill it.

Clean the heatsink out as per my recommendation and instructions above.

please be careful with the new 'silver' you use too...
http://www.overclockers.com/articles938/
seems a lot of 'silver' thermal paste(s) has actually 0 silver in it.
sticking with a variant of arctic silver seems a prudent guide.