First post, better late than never I guess. So I've got this HP envy M6 which I use as my daily machine around college however it's got a brushed metal wrist rest which gets really sweaty and horrible. I'm exploring options to try and reduce surface temperatures (aswell as looking at vinyl wrapping the wrist rest to help) and was wondering is it possible to do something like a thermal wrap on the primary heat pipe that cools the CPU/GPU?
I've got similar thinking to heat wraping an exhaust on a car to keep the heat contained and make it more efficent, but does the same principle apply to heatpipes?, or could It make the cooling less effective?
I'm doubtful that wrapping the heat pipes on a computer would do much other than increase the internal temperature of the components being cooled, computers like laptops are not known for having the best cooling solutions in the first place and wrapping the conductive heat pipes would in theory decrease its ability to use the air around the pipe to transfer the heat to, if the heat pipe was pressurized by moving air through it it could have a positive effect but since that isn't the case and it works by having air passed over top of a heat sink and heat pipes to aid in transfer heat to that heat sink, it could help in cooling the wrist rest but may cause a host of other cooling related issues.
I'd look at adding some type of insulating material to the bottom side of the plastic that the wrist rest is attached to, that at least would slow down the heat transfer to the metal your resting your wrists on.
Yeah this laptop does (or atleast did) run on the hot side, prior to fitting a larger battery, applying new paste and clearing the fans it would shutdown very often, so yeah cooling performance is still most important (possibly even more so when I change to an intel CPU)
Putting an insulation sheet was what I was going to turn to next, good to know that is still an option. I'll look at doing that instead then, thanks a lot :)