Discovered the thermal pad gap on my old laptop was way bigger than I thought

I was digging into a 2015 Dell Latitude that kept thermal throttling no matter what I did. Replaced the paste twice, cleaned the fans, still hit 95C under load. Then I found a forum post from some guy in Germany who measured the gap between the die and the heatsink on the same model. Turns out it was 1.5mm, not the 0.5mm I assumed. I had been using thermal pads that were way too thin. Swapped in a 2mm pad and the idle temp dropped 15 degrees. Fixed a three month headache with a single measurement. Has anyone else run into this with older laptops?

2 comments

2 Comments

jason56227d ago

Holy cow, I've seen people fix throttling by stacking two thinner pads together for that exact reason!

dixon.daniel27d ago

Don't you find that's how it goes with a lot of things though... like you think there's one perfect way to do something but really it's just trial and error with what you've got? It's like fixing a squeaky door hinge, sometimes you just need a little more of whatever's already there.