These laptops get HOT and very quickly. I have mine elevated on a riser and further elevated off the riser plate so I should get enough air flow. However some games (Spider-Man 2) are just absolutely computer killers and this setup will only work for about a few moments (say 30 min) before the whole computer shuts down. I can tell when the computer is running hot when the backlight of the keyboard shuts off, then shortly afterwards the whole computer turns off, probably to protect itself.
Now the question or request rather is what other cooling options are available for these 16” laptops? I was looking into cooling mats, but I really don’t any good results from them, maybe 1c different. I do clean the inside of the laptop regularly.
I have a FW16 and it does Ok cooling wise. Here are some suggestions.
When your FW16 shuts off. What does it actually do. Does it force power itself off, or does it force reboot ?
Look at the temperatures, and see which ones are high just before it shuts off. Maybe try to log some history of the temps. The main thing is to find out if it is the CPU or the GPU temps that is causing it to switch off.
Try forcing the FANs onto full all the time by using “ectool fanduty 100”. Then see if it lasts longer than 30 mins or not. If it lasts longer that way, then there might be a bug in the fan control code.
When it happens it turns itself off, but the power button is still light. I usually have to leave it sit for a minute before it will let me manually turn it back on. Then restart the computer once the OS loads to get the keyboard backlight to come back on.
I should have mentioned it is running Windows 25H2 (some MMO games I have don’t run on Linux) and can’t use those commands.
I’m using HWiNFO64 portable (v8.40-5900) I can see the CPU (Tcl\Tdle) getting around 102-104c, (52c idle) and the GPU running around 64-67c (44c idle) when taxing the system.
Are your fans working? Did you replace the liquid metal with better thermal material (PTM)? It should never shut down like that unless something has failed. Mine started doing that when the liquid metal became insufficient, so I had to open it up and replace it.
This is not normal behaviour. I used mine for gaming (SpiderMan, Helldivers, BF6) for 1.5 years now, and it never had thermal issues (after I installed PTM in mid-2024).
liquid metal can oze out on edges for cpu die/center when that happens the cooler plate touching the die/center has no liquid/thermal content between to lead the heat up into the cooler.
Then laptop cpu overheats and goes up to 100C which causes laptop to shutdown and become un-bootable/power on during the cpu chip is still at 100C which is a prevention to avoid more damage.
With liquid metal, you need to open laptop and remove cooler plate and move the liquid metal back ontop of the center for it to cool down correctly again. But while att it, like others said go for new thermal Honeywell from framework that will cool better, my 2nd gen has it and dang what it does the work. On light use the fans are 0rpm most of times, but when i do heavier work the fans kick in and cools off but not loud either. Quiet still which i’m impressed
And done, I’m glad I did this now. It was a slight mess to clean up, that glue holding the foam was the most difficult part removing. Temps are holding strong at 46c idle CPU & 85.9c underload. I think this solved my problem.
I took some before and after photos to show what’s going on.
From my understanding it takes a couple of thermal cycles for PTM to get to it’s best state, so you should see a little improvement over the next couple of uses as well.
Uh you could of left foam sealing around both ends stay, you didn’t need to remove it. But oh well now laptop isn’t suitable for new liquid metal later if you decide to apply thermal grizzly liquid metal or so.
I have FW16 Gen 1 (7700HS) and for the power it’s the best-cooled laptop I’ve ever had. Dell Precision Mobile, for example, would get so hot you wouldn’t be able to keep palms on the palm rest for long without being scalded.
FW16 has the side exhaust with both top and bottom intake, which provides sufficient airflow even when the bottom grills are occluded.
Ehh, na I would suggest to remove all of it from what I saw. It did ooze out of the side and hardened around the IHS and when using 91% alcohol to get the LM residue, very small harden pieces were still being picked at around the IHS and in the foam. Also the alcohol ruined that foam so ehh.
If I wanted to switch back I bet I could get sizes to fit the CPU from somewhere.
After repasting my gpu, doing the copper shim mod on my cpu, cleaning the vents, and cutting some holes in the top my laptop temperatures are now quite chilly compared to what they were before. My CPU at 100% utiliztion clocks about 4.7Ghz and caps around 85c, with an occasional spike to 87c. I’ve not seen it hit 90. My GPU hotspot temp stays under 70c.
