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Luke122
08-13-2008, 04:04 PM
The laptop pillaging continues!

Todays victim is a Toshiba Satellite P30. 17" LCD, 1gb ram, DVD Burner, 80gb hdd, Mobile Radeon 9700, and Harmon Kardon speakers. (sounds AMAZING)

So basically, the only problem with this machine was the heat and the battery life. A new battery is around $150, but with the weight of this thing (almost 10lbs, no joke), I decided that it wasnt really worth it.

I cracked it open to see what the heatsink/thermal paste was like, and maybe just clean it up. What I found was pretty slick.. a socket 478 cpu! It turns out that it's a p4 3.2ghz, 533mhz fsb, 1mb cache, mobile cpu.

OK, so.. I just happen to have a socket 478 board that I've been waiting to try, with 1gb ram, a 36gb Raptor HDD, and a Radeon 3850 AGP card. The 1.6ghz cpu I had in there was definitely the bottleneck in that system.

I'm going to test the 1.6ghz proc in the laptop, since that's enough power for what i need the lappy to do (movies + music + internet).

I dropped the p4m cpu into the board, and booted it up, and it works just fine. Recognized it immediately as 3.2ghz cpu, and she's FAST. Just one problem.. it's HOT. Idling at 60'C isnt a healthy situation for a processor. I reseated the heat sink (stock intel heatsink), used AS5 paste (no, not too much.. I was careful of that), and made sure we had good airflow, and it's now idling at 58'C.

....

So here's my question to anyone who might know.. could this CPU be lower voltage than the desktop (1.34v), or is it just going to run hot all the time?
Ap1thy
08-13-2008, 04:19 PM
I would wager that the stock intel heatsink for the 1.6 wouldnt be up to the task of cooling the faster (an obviously much hotter) 3.2GHz cpu.

Would it be feasible to try a new hsf combo?
Luke122
08-13-2008, 04:28 PM
Actually, I should have clarified that.. the stock Intel HSF combo I'm using came from a p4 2.4 prescott, which are notoriously hot. Should be no issue with overheating.

A bit of quick searching online has revealed some pretty wild reviews of the laptop.. things like "I would kill myself if I knew how bad this was when I bought it" or "DONT BOTHER".

LOL..

I just underclocked the cpu to 2.4ghz (downed the fsb from 133mhz to 100mhz) and it's stable at 55'C for now..
Luke122
08-13-2008, 04:37 PM
Wow... direct quote from an Intel product info sheet.

Mobile Pentium 4 HT 538 3200 MHz
Cache: 1024 KiB
FSB:533
Mult: 24x
Vcore: 1.15/1.4 V
TDP: 50/88 W
Socket: 478
Release: June 2004

50/88W !!!!!! No wonder this thing is so hot!
FuzzyPlushroom
08-13-2008, 05:19 PM
Wow, 88W from a single-core chip? Damn!

Those Satellites are pretty bad. Hot, generally mediocre, and the one I used for a while at school (P4 2.8 ) was pretty poorly put together. The DVD drive failed dramatically, as the icing on the cake (loud noises, computer wouldn't boot)...
Luke122
08-13-2008, 05:29 PM
Yeah, that's basically why it was given to me for free. :D Runs fine, just hot and battery is toast.. you get what you pay for I guess.

But yeah.. 88w.. insane hey? I'm looking for some cheapo watercooling now.. any suggestions? I'm checking out a Thermaltake ProWater 850i system.. $190CAD for everything but a GPU block.. Any opinions on it?
widefault
08-13-2008, 09:47 PM
If there's no heat-spreader on the chip you may have contact problems with the core. That's an issue I've had on Pentium-M boards that use the P4 mounting bracket. Most of those come with a custom heatsink that has a raised area that will contact the core. Normal P4 heatsinks don't even touch the core without mods.
nevermind1534
08-13-2008, 09:52 PM
It sounds like it has the heat spreader on it, but that's a good point. Thermaltake wouldn't be my first choice for watercooling, though. You can get the flexible line at most hardware stores.
Luke122
08-14-2008, 11:46 AM
If there's no heat-spreader on the chip you may have contact problems with the core. That's an issue I've had on Pentium-M boards that use the P4 mounting bracket. Most of those come with a custom heatsink that has a raised area that will contact the core. Normal P4 heatsinks don't even touch the core without mods.

No worries there, this CPU looks exactly like a regular socket 478 p4 cpu, and I even double checked to make sure it was making good contact with the cooler.

I tried more grease, then less, and found that less was better. I underclocked it down to 2.4ghz, and its SOLID at 55'C. I mean it's hardly fluctuating at all.

It turns out that my ram is bad though.. I had 2 sticks of ddr-400 (PC-3200) here, so I used them, but I kept getting really strange errors about files missing during the windows install. I swapped cd's, drives, cables, and finally tried the ram.. and that seems to be the culprit.

The mobo will support 2gb of ram, so I'm looking at some Mushkin ram to complete the project.. thoughts?
nevermind1534
08-14-2008, 12:07 PM
What about these (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820146841), or these (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227210)? The ones in the last link have the best rating on newegg, and seem to be good for overclocking. I have OCZ Platinum Rev. 2 in my computer, and they're great. Just be careful with the mail in rebate and make copies of everything that you send in, because rebate-zone.com will randomly deny a small percentage of the rebates that they get. If yours gets denied, and you have copies of everything, they can help you get the check on the OCZ forums.
Luke122
08-14-2008, 10:36 PM
Thanks for the tips! +rep