I opened up my HP HDX laptop yesterday to clean it (Warranty was over 2 years ago), and to apply new thermal paste.
My laptop has only 1 fan, 2 sets of fins connected to 2 copper pieces to conduct heat. Around the graphics card, there are these really soft black rubber pieces stuck on the heatsink, and it makes contact with things like the memory modules of the graphics card, and some other parts. There's also this thicker light blue colored rubber piece between the northbridge and the heatsink.
The CPU and GPU chips use thermal paste, but I don't know what these rubber pieces do. Are they used as a substitute for thermal paste? There's a fairly large gap between the heatsink contacts and the chips without the rubber pieces so I figure that normal thermal paste won't work as well. There's no thermal paste between the rubber pieces and the parts it makes contact with. Would it be better to apply thermal paste to that?
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GPU: 9600M GT overclocked when I play games, way underclocked when I'm not
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CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 2.13 Ghz
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GPU idle temp 49 C
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CPU idle temp 39 C
Some people say these temps aren't high, but they are higher than when I bought the laptop (Also, currently in my area, humidex is around 35 – 42 C, around 27 – 30 C outside, 62% humidity. It's been so hot lately that some of my rubber bands melted into a sticky goop…)
Best Answer
The rubber pads are shims that prevent the components from touching or grating and they provide a little, soft support like a pillow, so that the components are not hanging in the middle of the air but also without having them bolted down. This is especially important for moving components like fans and hard-drives since having them hard-bolted to the chassis would create a lot of vibration and noise; having them sit on rubber shims absorbs the vibrations, creating quieter laptops. They are also insulators that prevent potential short-circuits. Do not apply the thermal paste to the rubber shims!
Yes, those idle temperatures are good and yes, it will be hotter than when you first bought it because the laptop now has a bunch of dust inside it which not only prevents airflow as well as a clean system, but also actively warms the system like a blanket. Unfortunately a fan is insufficient to keep the dust out because dust is mostly dead human skin which usually has oil and other stuff that makes it sticky, so simply blowing it won’t make it go away; it has to be wiped away.
It should come as no surprise that the ambient temperature has a big effect on a computer’s temperature. It may seem like electronics are only concerned with the temperature reading on the thermometer, not the humidex since they don’t sweat, except that humidity does indeed affect them, so yes, 35-42°C is going to make a computer run hotter.