[grassle]

Unfortunately the datasheet of my replacement pad material gives no information about liquefying. If it does not, the paste film was helpful; if it does the thin layer of paste should have no effect worth grieving about.

Anyway, the thermal conductivity for the pads is 6.0 and for the paste are probably about the same magnitude. (Here they say 8.2 W/mK for MX-2, but MX-3 that is being advertised as better than MX-2 has exactly that value, and Google finds only this one source -- likely an error.)

Anyway, there should be nothing of significance lost here, deep in the realm of split hairs to quantum fractions... A psychologist probably would diagnose dislocated frustration in this thread (frustration because the real problem -air flow- is inaccessible).

[bjd223]

Originally Posted by safemode

they're perfectly capable of doing what i want, the setup dell has chosen to cool them is the only thing holding things back.

I lifted the keyboard off the unit and removed the bottom door. It was still insufficient to keep temps from reaching 73C. This would seem to suggest that either A. The thermal pads are now the bottleneck at this point, or B. The heatplate does not have sufficient surface area to dissipate the heat from the 3 chips.

A fan was needed to keep the temps from reaching 70C, even with the unit all open as it was.

I have very little hope that the unit can be passively cooled for the time needed to play back an h264 movie. Not unless a seriously better heat plate can be used. Or perhaps very low power TEC's. Maybe not used to cool the cpu's directly, since that would require them to be on constantly, but to cool the heat plate down to below ambient. Then it's just a matter of removing their heat.

I can make it all the way through a full length 720p movie with the Broadcom card. A 1080p movie is harder, and sometimes the CPU will throttle towards the end. These are all H.264 movies in the mkv format.

I can tell you that the Broadcom card can get pretty damn hot itself, but as long as the CPU doesn't throttle, and the BCM card doesn't lite on fire, its all good.