I have a laptop that gets rather hot and has poor cooling. I don't need to take it anywhere so I was wondering if anyone had experience putting a laptop in a container of mineral oil. Is this a viable method of cooling? How expensive was it?
I'm prepared to disassemble the laptop completely and ditch the screen for an external monitor.
would be a lot easier to just figure out why it's overheating. My DV6 overheated and turns out it's a common problem and a tutorial online showed how to fix it.
If the stock cooling is working exactly as it should then you could simply take it apart and put desktop heatsinks on the board. I think mineral cooling is an excessive mess for pretty much any computer.
Ha. Its a dv6. Here is an image of what it looks like:
is yours the same model? Mine is a 3163cl. What was the fix?
Putting a system in mineral oil is basically an aesthetic, sure you get cooling improvements, but that doesn't out-weigh the trouble of building one in the first place where their are better alternatives.
Just to put this in perspective, here's someone who did it just for the hell of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V06LLTNxc4&list=PL8mG-RkN2uTxaG7pz3feWGG2AwCM-W4nG
the heatsink on the cpu gets clogged easy , take the entire laptop apart and clean it out , here's the instructional video I watched , but theres a few videos on it.
That sounds really retarded.
DO IT
You can buy the mineral oil from farm supply stores. It's used for constipation in farm animals. That's the cheapest way to get it. It's still very expensive. You're looking at at least $30 in oil. Shipping was $20. I got mine at valleyvet.com
Have to agree. Doesn't really make since to mineral cool a laptop. But I guess if you want to keep it stationary, you could. Just seems kinda much for a DV6. You're cooling setup is probably gonna be as much as the machine is worth.
I got my dv6 at a pawn shop for 230$. Might seem like a lot but it has a i7 2670qm which is about 5x the speed of the 200$ netbooks they have at best buy right now so not too bad a deal.
But yes it would be silly to mineral cool a laptop that only gets 5k in passmark. I imagine the oil a tank and pump could get up to 200$ easy
Thing is... to use mineral oil setup, the hardware must be SUPER CLEAN AND NO DUST.
Oil is much thicker than air and if it's clogged enough to slow down air, there's no way oil will get pumped through propperly.
That being said... you're gonna have to strip it down and clean anyway and doing so will fix the overheating issue.
Thanks for all the info guys. I've taken the laptop apart almost completely and cleaned the fan. Its running a little better now but not much. I'll consider replacing the laptop heatsink with a desktop one and just leaving it as a desktop. That seems like a better idea than mineral oil based on your feedback. Thanks again.
Did you clean out the actual heatsink , or just the fan blades? You have to take the heatsink off the motherboard and actually clean out the fins otherwise cleaning the fan blades does nothing at all.
Also , replace the thermal paste!
Years of running hot makes the stock paste turn to junk and it has to be replaced before it'll run normal again.
I mean I have the same laptop and did the exact same ting and it works perfect now.
I cleaned the heatsink fins and the fan blades. I don't have any thermal paste on hand right now, so I can't replace it.
Sure it would work well if down rite :)
I hate lapttops. I have space so a decktop is fine by me. The point of a laptop is small size factor.
Cooling it with mineral oil kind of makes a laptop redundant to start with which I totally agree with.
