I have an old laptop which I revived with the addition of a SSD. The problem now with this laptop is that it gets very hot causing thermal shutdowns in the middle of work. I thought of a lot of solutions and finally repasted the heat sink, bought a cooling pad and removed the bottom cover. It is now running fine. Now that I am free with my projects, I am thinking of converting this laptop to a tablet pc. Now my question is that "Can I weld a copper pipe directly to the existing one?" Will welding it increase the thermal capacity of the PC? Or will there be issues due to other scientific reasons?
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I think, it is necessary to find a cause of overheat. This may be due to bad thermal contact somewhere:
- between integrated circuit and metal pad through thermal paste or pad
- between metal pad and heat pipe
- between heat pipe and heat exchange plates
Heat exchange plates could be blocked by dust/dirt.
Heat pipes may be damaged and should be replaced. Typically, all heatsink system of notebook is replaced.
Fan may be not creating enough air flow due to thickened old grease or contamination.
May be there is any software problem which causes CPU overloading.
Continuous and cyclic IC overheat leads to breakage of BGA solder balls which connect IC to board and irreparable breakage of flip-chip joint between IC crystal and flip-chip substrate, so, overheat problem requires solution.
Simple copper pipe has much lower heat conductivity than thermal pipe, except if it is filled with circulating liquid.
Vladimir
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If the existing heatsink is made of copper, then yes you can solder more copper onto it and it will probably dissipate more heat.
You can probably weld copper, but it's not commonly done.
If the existing heatsink is made of aluminum, your best bet would be to use thermal epoxy to attach your heatsink extension.
It is also possible although difficult to braise aluminum to aluminum using special brazing rods.
Drew
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