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Made my G556e cooler & *quieter*

post #1 of 26
6/4/04 at 4:13am
Thread Starter 
After having my ECS G556e for about a week, I can say I like almost everything about it except for the noise. During light use (web browsing or any other standard, simple tasks), it is extremely quiet because the fan never kicks in (thankfully this applies to DVD playback as well). However, when doing anything really taxing (gaming or benchmarks), the CPU fan spins up to quite a loud volume - much louder than I'd prefer. As someone else pointed out, I believe there are about 10 different levels that it steps up. When it gets to the highest level, I can easily hear it in another room.

Anyway, looking at the CPU upgrade pictures in the pdf manual got me curious. In the photos, there's no thermal compound (silicone grease or whatever) between the CPU and it's heatsink/heatpipe cooler. I opened mine up, and sure enough, it was bare metal to metal - something that would make any PC DIY-type freak out.

I applied some generic silicone heatsink compound and reassembled. The difference is impressive, to say the least. It takes a lot more punishment to make the fan spin up in the first place and when it does, it never seems to reach the hyper-pitched highest levels. I believe it also spins down much faster than before.

Sorry I don't have more scientific results to post, but I couldn't find a monitoring program that could read temps from this unit. Suffice it to say, I would NOT go back and definitely recommend this "mod" to others. It significantly remedied my biggest problem with my new notebook.

Now I'm curious about how the GPU cooler is set up...

Hope this helps.
-Steve
G556e 1.7 (Dothan), 512MB, 60GB 7200rpm
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post #2 of 26
6/4/04 at 4:22am
I made my Alienware quieter and cooler by only using Minesweeper and Notepad. Hey, it was either that or play in a bathtub full of icewater; and I heard that's not good for the computer.
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post #3 of 26
6/4/04 at 9:49am
did u try mobilemeter to monitor ur cpu temperature?

oncei get my 2.0 dothan im going to use arctic silver 5 on it
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post #4 of 26
6/4/04 at 10:31am
Thread Starter 
Sorry, as far as I can tell, Mobilemeter does not report cpu temperature for the 556. Neither does Speedfan or MBM5.
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post #5 of 26
6/4/04 at 11:01am
welp u are just like me

my cl56 isnt fully ACPCI compliant so it cant read cpu temperatures

i guess the g556e cant either
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post #6 of 26
6/5/04 at 1:48am
Wow, this is great news. Can you post some pictures so I can do the same with mine? I am getting a bit annoyed by the noise. Do you also know where is the 2nd memory slot? I can only see one expansion memory slots. I would like to replace Internetishop's 512MB with my own since I had 2 512 sodimms from the same manufacturer before I purchased this laptop.
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post #7 of 26
6/5/04 at 6:48am
If you can read the cpu temp using mobilemeter does that mean it is acpi compliant and it should be able to in someway control the cpu fans through acpi.

I know there is the speedfan program and the dell inspiron control program but none of these manage the task on the Acer 8006.

Is there a .ini file somewhere in window xp depths that could be edited??
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post #8 of 26
6/5/04 at 9:39am
No heatsink compound on the CPU?? Thats madness!!!

Does anyone happen to know if the M6N has thermal compound on the CPU?
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post #9 of 26
6/5/04 at 4:28pm
How easy is it to get to the GPU heatsink?
I would bet 10 to 1 that there is no compund there either and thats ehy folks are unable to get a big over clock on thes units.

Could someone please post pics of the internals, particularily the heatsinks?
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post #10 of 26
6/6/04 at 1:35am
Thread Starter 
You don't need me to post pictures; they're in the manual. If you don't have it, go here:
http://www.ecsusa.com/downloads/dl_g556e.html

...then look at the last chapter.

FWIW, I did try to burrow down to the GPU yesterday, without success. What a pain! I pulled out ~20 screws and still didn't reach the darn thing. Sorry, but I finally quit after reaching a point where I couldn't find any more screws to remove and the back side still wouldn't separate.


The CPU, OTOH, is extremely simple to reach (as you'll see in the manual). It would seem that it was meant to be end-user-upgradeable. Hopefully they'll continue to make PMs (past 2GHz) that are compatible with this socket/chipset/etc.

Oh, and the second DIMM socket on the g556e is under a metal lid (held by 2 screws) under the keyboard. Just pop the grill off, then remove the keyboard (single screw) & you'll see it right in the middle.

Good luck.
-Steve
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post #11 of 26
6/7/04 at 12:07am
Thanks!

I understand about the "more trouble than its worth" factor.

Too bad, because I still suspect there is no heatsink compund on the GPU.

Pity, because a dab of the stuff can't be THAT expensive to add during the initial build.

Still, for the money, this looks like a great laptop.
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post #12 of 26
6/16/04 at 5:41pm
I think i'm going to tackle getting my hands on the gpu on my mitac 8050. As everyone knows radeon's are notorious for heat. And having the 9700 w/128mb in the mitac - which I'm pretty sure it is - right next to the cpu, generates a lot of heat. I think i'm going to try to add some AS on the gpu core and see if that helps dissipate the heat better.
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post #13 of 26
6/16/04 at 7:01pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by laozx
As everyone knows radeon's are notorious for heat.
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post #14 of 26
6/16/04 at 8:11pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sharakkhal
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post #15 of 26
6/16/04 at 8:16pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by laozx
Heh. I've never heard of ATI cards accused of running hot. They actually run quite a bit cooler (and require much less cooling) than Nvidia cards, in general.

I will concede that they are probably the hottest part in a Centrino notebook, though.
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post #16 of 26
6/16/04 at 8:21pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sharakkhal
Heh. I've never heard of ATI cards accused of running hot. They actually run quite a bit cooler (and require much less cooling) than Nvidia cards, in general.

I will concede that they are probably the hottest part in a Centrino notebook, though.
Interesting i guess i've heard diff. from other radeon users. But from my experience, my 9800 pro in my desktop is the hottest thing in my watercooled system. You can easily put your hand by the card and feel how much heat is generated. To each his own though yea?
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post #17 of 26
6/16/04 at 8:26pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by laozx
Interesting i guess i've heard diff. from other radeon users. But from my experience, my 9800 pro in my desktop is the hottest thing in my watercooled system. You can easily put your hand by the card and feel how much heat is generated. To each his own though yea?
Yep. Check out the Nvidia desktop cards. Almost every one of them is a double-height (using 2 expansion slots) card so the default heatsink assembly fits.

It's amused me for the past year or so that Nvidia has been playing second chair to ATI, with slower hardware that also runs hotter.

Not that this is an ATI or NVIDIA bashing thread, just found the comment odd.
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post #18 of 26
6/16/04 at 8:40pm
Yea i've used both company's cards, my last one was a geforce 4 4600ti. I haven't used the latest fx cards so I can't comment on the heat on those. But the 4600ti didn't seem too bad. I was surprised personally that the ati got really warm, and I read on some other sites previously that they did run hot. But yea this is by no means a ati vs. nvidia bashing thread. I really like both companies. I think they both need each other to keep competing to come out with faster and more technological advanced cards for the consumers
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post #19 of 26
6/21/04 at 5:13pm
Cool! Where can I get a G556e that has Dothan in it? Internetishop doesn't list them.

Can't wait to get one.

-Joseph
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post #20 of 26
7/23/04 at 3:20pm
Quote:
I applied some generic silicone heatsink compound and reassembled. The difference is impressive, to say the least. It takes a lot more punishment to make the fan spin up in the first place and when it does, it never seems to reach the hyper-pitched highest levels. I believe it also spins down much faster than before.
Hello,

I'm also an owner of a G556 (the non-e version, but oughta be the same) from a sale, and am having a noise problem. The fan was going quite loud even under negligible load, while the air it blew was quite cool, signifying bad heat exchange. So I followed the example and took it apart -- indeed, there was no thermal compound on the CPU.

I applied some (generic stuff) and put it back together, and it seems like the noise has dropped a few notches, but certainly not as much as I'd hoped. The fan never actually stops, even when the computer isn't doing anything.

One detail caught my attention, however. There was a very soft, silvery pad between the actual copper heatsink and the CPU, which seemed to be loosely, perhaps too loosely, attached to the heatsink with some green goo. You can see it on the attached picture from the manual, pretty much where the arrow is pointing.

From what I could tell, that whatchamacallit was doing the job of an actual thermal compound and maybe protecting the CPU from pressure. I didn't dare to touch or remove it (it seemed so soft and fragile), but I wonder if you did anything about it? Like remove it altogether, or put actual thermal compound between it and the metal heatsink? I'm worried whether the heatsink would fit back on if that extra pad, about 1 mm thick, was removed.
LL
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