Gadgetory

today we're going to be troubleshooting some issues that GM's video editor Andrew Coleman has been having with his laptop so Andrew does pretty much all the video editing for the site on our own rigs which means I was not privy to the fact that this is what he's dealing with at home this is the primary system as I understand it and it's it's not in great shape so this is a lenovo something i'm not do we know what model this is how spotlessness lenovo ideapad why 480 i'm going to be taking this thing apart at least them in part to try and figure out what's going on so the issue as I understand it when running just about anything including Windows the system will sometimes freeze it will exhibit frozen mouse behavior shutdowns when rendering animations you may have seen the CPU cooler TLDR or the 570 ex review those both had some pretty cool animations that we did they're made on this system rendered on our machine in the office but made on this system and when that happens the CPU hits about 98 degrees Celsius should not do that and the GPU also on 98 Celsius and the hard drive somewhere in the high 70s which is also pretty damn hot so we're going to try and fix it but we'll see how that goes before we get into the work here this content is brought to you by our patreon backers if you want to help us out making behind the scenes videos or other videos we've got the behind the scenes video coming up for the EVGA vrm testing then you can help us out by checking out our patreon page patreon.com/lenguin below thank you to those of you who are already supporting us there so let's get into the content this is the Lenovo IdeaPad Y 480 I guess as I've been as I've just seen we're going to go ahead and open it first mmm so um so there's the idea bad and I've got a dust allergy which is going to come into play here so let's just just kind of do the basics here so CPU is hitting whatever 98 100 Celsius really doesn't matter at this point higher than t.j.maxx rule out ah I'm sure or very damn close to it and I can already tell what the problem is the problem is probably all the dust I just I would look at this thing I just cleaned it off and it looks really pretty good compared to where it was a second ago ah so dust isn't great Andrew docks the system which means it's really never opened it's just kind of kept like that closed all the time probably work on the we should work on that hinge - um oh this is important so this is the side of the laptop you may notice that you can see some copper sticking out of it the plastic housing is broken here and that copper I'm thinking may have sucked in some of the dust we just dealt with so I think the heart of this issue will be thermals I guess we could go ahead and demonstrate the issue you have like a blender file or something I can open we've opened up a GN logo 3d file and blender I'm gonna hit f12 to start rendering it and in 3 oh that is getting loud that is some warm air coming out so CPU that 20% load or there abouts temperature is fluctuating 70s to 80 and we're not doing a CPU round reading while we're doing a GPU render GPUs on 100% load temperatures is at 82 now 83 it has climbs about 10 degrees in the last 1 minute or so and it's still climbing so we're going to start hitting some thermal limits minimally on the clock rate if not on the system being stable so we're at 2.4 gigahertz CPU GPU is what 885 megahertz is a GTX 650 M I've got a thermocouple probe here k type I'm going to touch the copperfin this doesn't tell us anything about the component temperature just tells us that the heat sinks working well but if you touched it with your hand you would be touching about 70 degrees Celsius of copper like just having my hand where it is measuring the temperature is pretty uncomfortable so that's really more of a fixing totally cooling by removing dust will solve some of that but that's also more of a the the copper is exposed and that's what exposed copper is going to do want it to heat sink GPUs up to 90 Celsius it's been like 40 seconds since the last update so that's right three minutes total we're running we're in the 90s starting to smell like burning dust the cpu last check was like in the low it would fluctuate 64 to 80 and now it's fluctuating 75 to 85 I just saw 92 pop up by 75 to 85 reliably and that's not a CP render so that means the GP is burning up the CPU gb is 91 92 Celsius hard drive has gained 3 degrees it's at 47 now so if you ran this prolonged rendering overnight or something hard I would probably be pretty unhappy as well okay so I think I've seen enough it'll crash eventually it certainly happened enough up until this point so we don't need to duplicate it so we'll freeze or crash GPU after less than probably 5 minutes or thereabouts of rendering we are at run the 90s Celsius and CPUs approach in that range as well so let's figure out what we can do to fix this so I have not worked on one of these laptops either in a very long time or ever no I have worked on the Lenovo but not in quite a while it's maybe a bit of a learning process but shouldn't be too hard really for those who don't know I used to do laptop test engineering so this was part of the day job many years ago these screws are like cemented in there I don't know if this is being has been shown on the camera or not but I'm putting the screws in a tray top of the tray for this and I'm putting them in order so oriented same as the laptop bottom right screw bottom left screw that way I can reinstall them correctly later laptops are notoriously tricky with their screws they often use different types and sizes of screws and what you're working on so it is important to document them the crack in the bottom of this to just connect the battery okay that's good OSU the problem let's drive getting dust off the stuff you do have to be careful the tools I'm using to get dust or for household cleaning you don't want to use them on for example memory be better off using just a blower can which I've also got some generic you know department store kind of anti-static compressed air will do the trick you don't want to rub ESD ready components are basically these types of things all over sensitive components okay so how do we get to here this is often where companies hide tiny screws under the CG any optical drives and they also like to hide them under the the feet so there's rubberized feet but they are generally marked so you know there's something on to them like there's a little symbol next time like this symbol here well but generally be next to a foot with something under it this one's like you already stripped out I haven't even worked on it I'm I think I can fit a square head screw in there I can see all the dust is an ear fan keyboard screw hard drive hard drive try like once on the head that screws not supposed to be in that hole that screws not the right size for that hole yeah something's holding that down just probably that stupid thing now that's too far off center oh we got to get this screw out to get anywhere unfortunately no matter what screwdriver I put in there it's going to spin I've got like one grab point so I've probably one good shot before I strip it out worse I tried the square heads and even allen keys and they almost fit but not quite sure what we can do with a lot of force that screw is not going back in there that screws going into the garbage that's good let's I've already improved this laptop substantially remember help me remember this white one goes there I don't think it actually matters but I know it does matter white one goes into the auxilary white auxilary eight black maybe that screw does have to come out just happens to line up with heavens line up with where the tension is on the keyboard I want another man oh my god there's so much dust got one clip out this this plastic clips again there goes a maglev fan by Sonnen they make Corsairs maglev fans Shh how many people know that now there's a cable right here get out it it's a lot of dust coming out of here onto my table shells got like so many cracks in it already I'm scared to apply any force to it something uh-huh got it sneaky friggin bastards that's why you don't apply force figured it out without hurting anything worse than it already has been start working with the topside a lot of plating a copper like material not quite hard cop or anything but we've got stuff to work with where does that even situate that's all for the contacts down here anyway so now we got to actually start cleaning this thing I'm going to start with non sensitive areas so here's a look at the main part of the problem fans lot seized from dust but I would be surprised with spinning that speck a lot of dust and there even if it's been suspect there's just so much crap it's gonna not move as much air because the dust is taking the place of all the air probably going to open the window and blow that outside I'm going to see if I can take this shell off and if we can take the shell off and individually expose the fan which not all laptops will do but some that I've worked with have then we can individually clean out the fan so they're out there so much dust like even if you just look here this is like capacitors dressed but we can get off I clean that off it's going to be hard to put back together correctly it's one of the most complex laptops internally I've ever worked with I feel like this is not how it originally shipped but also that screw was not taken out so I guess it is you ready for the unveil here's your problem good news big copper heatpipes bad news no way to dissipate the heat just take a good look at the hat I'm thinking while we're this far down we have cleaned this out take these off take this off do new thermal paste on the CPU and the GPU and then seal it back up we're just going to take friggin forever okay can you grab me a paper towel and some thermal paste it's mostly like hardened at this point no point it's not really doing anything the thermal pads that we're here on the memory I have some dust in them you can see on this one that use iasts pretty probably but they still do something it's just questionable why is there like plastic covering everything in this computer it's probably to keep dust out but like GTX 650 M never before seen like actually plastic nice it's okay just like that um it's trying to prevent metal contact between the so okay so we're going to skip throw pads for cost reasons I don't want to put expensive pads on this and it'll be fine without them anyway this thermal compound is not Arctic cooling compound it's actually compound I have from a factory that I've sucked into this tube and it's really damn good so we're going to put that here and we're we have we here in here and that's it I put some compound here a little generous someone's going to be like when we go let's torch thermal paste but this is a GPU folks it's fine that's not the same as a CPU or cover up the compound before someone tries crimes against humanity call let's resealed this goes like that this connects here you know I actually put those in right now not gonna prevent anything okay so this is captain tape this can withstand about a hundred Celsius which it's not going to get anywhere close to that temperature but I want to put something in this was originally held in with adhesive I can tell because I can look at it and see there's residue on it so I'm going to hold it down with probably better at heesu than what was in there originally and it's not electrically conductive yeah okay that'll work well auxiliary mean it's not stress testing yet we're just seeing doesn't turn on does a key word Mouse work that is not uh-huh and it's not spinning I know I this cable okay we've got video fan is spinning a mouse works keyboard works scale it back up what if I do a wheeled it fun is Jesus okay my moment of truth so as you can see TV temperatures are in the sub 70 range 65 68 GPU temp is 68 steady generally it's dropping a bit right now based on the render tasks but spend 68 up until now hard drive is about 44 so last time we ran this test before tearing the whole thing down and working on it we basically we didn't even finish a render pass in blender and we were already hitting thing very high eighties we were at or around 90 this time we're at about 68 Celsius for just a one render pass complete in blender so that's a pretty significant improvement even just I would have been happier the 15,000 improvement over Andrews reported 98 Celsius originally I've been happy with probably had 10 Celsius improvement honestly but if we're getting 20 then great I'm not gonna question it they sound this was a short pass but it sounds like we're getting at least 20 15 20 C improvement maybe more depending on how this functions when there's like a longer burnin period CPU temps also about 20 C improvement hard drive was in the 40s so that was fine too the only reason that would heat up is because it's sort of sandwiched between the hotter components overall looks good the fan is working better I can actually feel air coming out of the side now rather than heat just radiating out of it haha the copper heatsink alone is cooler about six or seven degrees and obviously again not a measurement of performance but the fact that the copper heat sinks cooler means the fan is actually pushing air through it and dissipating the heat that it collects or conduct so I think I can call this a success looks like minimally cleaning the fan probably did about all of the work but new thermal paste does not hurt that was a good thermal paste to the stuff that was on there's basically plastic so not bad overall laptop went together exactly how it came apart I've damaged on the little prying tool ensured that none of the edges got chipped which I've certainly done in the past when I was new word to pulling laptops apart where you start prying it up with like a flathead and you really screw up that plastic finish on the the shell that didn't happen here so we use proper tools so pretty sweet I am I guess as a value-add pretty happy with this tool kit too but that's when I actually paid for so I got a bias because I paid for it and I want it to be good but it actually is pretty good for this task so patreon like postal video if you want to helps out directly or in this case help people like Andrew improve their computer significantly with a few mods and uh links in the description below for Twitter social media things like that you can tweet at us that game Naxos and subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you you