Homebrew Laptop Cooler :)

[WangChung]

My friend has an Asus G1S laptop which got hot as hell to begin with. After I upgraded the hard drive to a 160GB 7200rpm Hitachi, Speed Fan was reading HDD temps that were hitting 60*C or more, not to mention the GPU which saw 100*C in some times of extended gaming. I had already modded the laptop with AS5 which dropped the GPU and CPU temps a degree or so, but nothing big. After that I cut a vent hole right under the laptop's fan and placed a nice mesh grille, which helped the temps of the CPU somewhat but the GPU was still getting pretty hot. Turns out that the G1S has a quirk that A)fan speeds can't be manually controlled period through BIOS or any 3rd party software, and B)the fan speed is regulated off the temperature of the CPU instead of the GPU, meaning as much cooling as I was going to get passively it wasn't going to help with gaming temps.

My friend had previously bought a laptop cooler from Best Buy (RocketFish or some crap) that gave up the ghost by means of a shot bearing. It didn't appear the cooler was doing much anyway, since the 80mm fan was dead in the center of the laptop, and the HDD and laptop fan were on the far left and right of the chassis. I searched for quite some time for the best solution for his laptop, and inspired by silverphoenix (http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=151491) I decided to make a laptop cooler especially made for the needs of my friend's machine.

I wanted to make sure that the cooler could be USB powered, as he is in a Navy special forces unit and travels quite a bit. The less cords the better! With that in mind, the next task was to find a fan that would actually START under 5v power, not just run once flicked. I was trying to go for as cheap as possible without being too cheap, and in my testing my best find was a 140mm Scythe fan. Each fan only uses 240mA which is adequately supplied by a single USB port.

The cost of materials was a little higher for me, as I didn't already have some things like the cable wrap and rubber fan screws, my goal was to stay under $20 but ended up being like $30. Still not a bad price considering anything comparable is just as much or like $60 with the NZXT cooler. The USB cable was sourced from the billions left over from HP monitor and printer installs from work, any old A-B USB cable will work. As far as the letter tray goes, the ONLY place I've been able to find one like this is Wal-Mart, and cannot online. All others have a space on one side, making it uneven. I suppose you could use one of these, but I like symmetry. Oh, the model of fan is Scythe SY1425SL12H 140mm fan (HERE). Apologies for the cell phone pics, but I didn't think the detail came out that bad. A little bit of soldering, heat gun action, and patience, and we got this:

[WangChung]

More pics:

[WangChung]

The temps dropped tremendously! HDD temps went from 60*C to 35-38*C, CPU temps went from 70*C to 60*C. Only thing that irks me is the load temps of the GPU only dropped to 93*C average, still see 97*C max temps but I attribute that to the "feature" of the G1S fan affinity. DEAD SILENT OPERATION, just increased wind noise but to be expected when pushing this kind of air. Overall I'm quite pleased with the result, and next time my friend is back in the sandbox he should have no problems what so ever.

[cozwin]

well if your mega worried about gpu i suppose only thing you could do is underclock it? other then that maybe look more closely at the cooler itself see if you can change anything or possibly change fan i think some places do seel the small fans used in laptops.

[WangChung]

well if your mega worried about gpu i suppose only thing you could do is underclock it? other then that maybe look more closely at the cooler itself see if you can change anything or possibly change fan i think some places do seel the small fans used in laptops.

Not really worried, according to the other forums these temps are "normal," and unfortunately there's no other room for different fans than what's already in there. The heatsink assembly is pretty much a set deal too. Here's a pic of it from when I did the AS5. I modified the image and flipped it so it's aligned exactly how it is in the laptop if you open up the back, just imagine the thermal paste on the bottom of the copper squares.

The twin heat pipes are for the CPU and are cooled via fins actively from the fan. The GPU is cooled passively from the keyboard backplate and from the connection to the body of the fan casing which is aluminum. I def think it could use a better design, but whatcha gonna do?