Processor downgrade from i7-4910MQ to something with way lower TDP value

[d4005]

In an attempt to keep my laptop quiet, I'm willing to sacrifice power massively so I'm wondering how low I can go in terms of CPU that will still fit in the same chipset/MB that I currently have with my i7-4910MQ. I'm assuming that a really low-stressed slow CPU will not need to trigger the fans. That's my main goal.

I have an Intel NUC that has an i3 in it and the thing doesn't even have fans built into the box and never gets hot either (I've even left it doing video conversion for 48 hours).

 

[Scott]

Get yourself some CLU and re-paste with that. Just make sure that your heatsink is copper and that it doesn't come into contact with any of the components (it's highly conductive). It should make a massive difference to your temps. I would also give it a good clean out. to make sure the cooler is working to its potential.

 

[d4005]

Get yourself some CLU and re-paste with that. Just make sure that your heatsink is copper and that it doesn't come into contact with any of the components (it's highly conductive). It should make a massive difference to your temps. I would also give it a good clean out. to make sure the cooler is working to its potential.

Giving the internals a good clean out I'm willing to take a crack at, but re-pasting the CPU, no way. I have zero confidence that I can take a CPU that's already been pasted by someone that does it daily as part of their job and be able to do a better job and not ruin the whole thing. I can't afford the risk of all that potential downtime. I had already considered taking it into a local PC repair shop and seeing if they'd do it, but even doing that there'd be no chance of them starting it right there on the spot and handing it back over to me with an intra-day turnaround.

I'm beginning to accept I'll need to buy a new machine and was pleased to recently realise that I've had this thing 2 years and 3 months, that's long enough to start accepting I can "upgrade" from this i7 to a much more passively cooled i3. I'm switching my mindset to accepting a lower performance but a quieter machine.

I will still clean this puppy out at the weekend though so I can have a much quieter transition time to the new machine. This thing has never ever been quiet, just a bit quieter.

 

[Scott]

I'm confused. You originally asked about replacing the CPU which would involve repasting it regardless? You would be surprised how poor the pasting jobs are that come out of PCS. I've not seen a good one yet. However, it's not so much the quality of the pasting job that's the key..... it's the quality of the paste. The CLU TIM has a very high heat transfer value which allows the heatsink to work at its most efficient.

Your best bet is to monitor the temperature of your CPU as it stands and see if the fans are coming in too early. It's possible that they are set to come in at a far lower temperature than is necessary.

 

[d4005]

I'm confused. You originally asked about replacing the CPU which would involve repasting it regardless? You would be surprised how poor the pasting jobs are that come out of PCS. I've not seen a good one yet. However, it's not so much the quality of the pasting job that's the key..... it's the quality of the paste. The CLU TIM has a very high heat transfer value which allows the heatsink to work at its most efficient.

Your best bet is to monitor the temperature of your CPU as it stands and see if the fans are coming in too early. It's possible that they are set to come in at a far lower temperature than is necessary.

But I can replace the CPU with the heatsink already pasted to it can't I? I assumed I'd be able to order a slower CPU with heatsink pre-applied and just swap it in.

You might be right about the fans coming in too early, but I'm thinking more that it's a case of the CPU getting hot too easily/quickly. I can get the temp right up into the mid 60's without ever going over 15% CPU usage in a normal room temperature. If I have it doing something challenging, like video conversion, it'll hit the mid 80's in no time at all. If I hadn't throttled the CPU at 50% in the power settings in control panel, then it would hit the high 90's in no time at all too.

A clean-out should definitely help, it'll probably drop my temps by 10 degrees, for a few months. I'm still keen to swap out the CPU and drop in something like an i3-6100U, which is the CPU I have in my Intel NUC and needs no fans no matter how hard I push it. It's passmark rating is only about a third of my i7, but at least I can use it all. I'm only using half the power of my i7 currently and it still isn't staying cool.

 

[Wozza63]

No, if you wanted to replace the CPU you would need to add paste when you attach it to your current laptop cooler.

Take a look at Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, you can greatly throttle your CPU, although it seems like a waste. Throttling it will result in less heat.

 

[d4005]

No, if you wanted to replace the CPU you would need to add paste when you attach it to your current laptop cooler.

Take a look at Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, you can greatly throttle your CPU, although it seems like a waste. Throttling it will result in less heat.

Well that was fun. I appear to have completely screwed my laptop with that Intel utility. It's now in an infinite boot loop where it loads up the bios screen with fans at absolute maximum and after about 10 seconds reboots and tries again. Pressing F2 or F7 to enter a boot menu has no effect. All I did was disable turbo boost and accept reboot.

EDIT: Somehow I recovered. I disconnected from power (after 20 reboot attempts) and tried one on battery only and my attempts with F2 to get into BIOS settings succeeded. I managed to load the defaults and save. After a brief disaster with it trying to do an EFCI? EFHI? boot, which kept saying no bootable software found on the device (no idea which device it was looking for) I disable that type of boot and it worked. Once back in Windows, I reloaded the Intel extreme tuning utility and the thing I'd tried to do came back with a fail message about it being unable to change the boost setting so it's still enabled.

PHEW !! The temps at startup were up in the high 70s and have now cooled down to my usualy mid 60s. I think I need to clean this dusty beasts internals and see what I get from that.

Terrified to go near that Intel Extreme utility now. I have spotted in the basic tuning section step 2, where you can control the multiplier which is currently at 37. I'd quite like to lower that to something like 25 but I'm scared. Is that what you meant by throttling the CPU? Or somewhere else?

 

[Wozza63]

Wow! That's odd, never had any kind of issues with it, although a no bootable software error message would point to the SSD/Hard drive as the issue.

And yes, that's what I meant by throttling the CPU. I've got a preset that drops to 1.5GHz max. It makes the laptop pretty slow, but makes the battery last a lot longer.

 

[d4005]

Wow! That's odd, never had any kind of issues with it, although a no bootable software error message would point to the SSD/Hard drive as the issue.

And yes, that's what I meant by throttling the CPU. I've got a preset that drops to 1.5GHz max. It makes the laptop pretty slow, but makes the battery last a lot longer.

Will that throttling there be any better than the standard control panel power profiles I've made? I made half a dozen copies of the high performance base profile and I changed them to have max CPU usage when plugged-in as 25%, 50%, 75%, 99% (max without turbo boost), and 100% (with turbo boost). I have 5 shortcuts on my desktop to powercfg.exe with params of /setactive <guid-of-profile> and it works great. I verified it was really working with some video conversions and monitoring temperatures. The higher the number I used, the faster the conversion and higher the temps got. My default running speed is 50% for now. Hopefully after a weekend de-dusting it'll reduce from ~65c to 40s/50s.

 

[Wozza63]

Interesting, I guess that would do the job too! Didn't know profile switching was available via cmd. Both probably do similar jobs.