I was thinking of an expansion card of some tiny fans for cooling. Maybe on/off switch with 3 settings for in/off/out
It should be simple enough to do right? Not 100% sure how effective it would be for cooling the laptop but I thought it would be an easy and fun idea to try
All it would really do is draw power from the usb-c connection.
Thoughts?
Welcome to the forum.
Would it be for cooling the laptop, or the user?
I’d love to see a little fold-out fan for cooling the user.
If it’s for the cooling the laptop how would you be moving air in / out? If you haven’t looked, the expansion card slots are closed off inside, no path to push air through. Or are you talking about the FWL16 expension bay?
I’m not a mechanical engineer but the idea seems kinda hard, especially on a framework 13 where it would be difficult to really cool anything if the existing cooling system is not made for it. Maybe they could ship later an improved framework 16 cooler when no GPU is attached but that seems to be as close as we would get to it.
For expansion cards, even if air could get through if the fan was at the bottom and we opened the side of the card, it would need to hit some kind of thermally conductive material (copper heat pipes) to cool the system. That currently is not present in frameworks (well, not accessible from the expansion cards rather). And if we were to make it, that would meanthat we would make other expansion cards very hot, which could very well be a problem for example for the performance of external expansion SSDs or potentially a bigger issue / fire hazard as the melting point of plastic is low (60 to 65°C for some PLA used in 3D printing) and the CPU can get up to 100°C.
For sure, it’s a great first project! If you modded your laptop, nobody could prevent you from 3D printing a case for an expansion shell, put a usb C connector, some electronic for a DC to DC conversion, a blower-style fan (those regularly used in laptop that blow air to the side, the same as those in the framework maybe as they are conveniently already up for sale in the marketplace) and open the side of the card for airflow, then add some heat pipes to your laptop between the heat pipes already present and your dedicated port to cool off your framework. You would need to solder your new heat pipes to the old one though or at least add a thermally conductive material between these and have a way to rather permanently secure the new heat pipes, Linus Tech Tips have a video where they showed an improved modded M3 air with fans where they soldered heat pipes if you need help, don’t remember the name of the video though and its a pretty complicated process but nothing out of reach if you have time and a bit of money.
If you’re just concerned about performance it would be infinitely easier and effective to change the thermal past for some good thermal paste if you’re comfortable enough with this process which should be easy after a few videos on youtube. If you’re more advanced, you can try liquid metal though it is electrically conductive meaning it is a whole new project as you would need to seal the cpu area so no liquid metal get out of it and fries your motherboard, be cautious on this one, but it’s very worth it if done properly (up to 5°C improvement). This works because it increases the conductivity between your CPU and the existing heat pipes, meaning more heat can go out. Also if you do that be wary of screwing back the cooling system as it need a specific pattern and force level to be effective, see youtube for that and possibly framework guides, idk if they have one on this. This methods would get much better results thermally than a fan and heat pipes extension, even good thermal paste can make a lot of difference. I ercommend arctic MX4 for long term user, MX6 for performance, or thermal grizzly kryonaut but its pricier.
If you’re talking about the FW 16 expansion bay I guess if you have a lot of skill, money and patience you could redo a totally custom cooling system, but that would be a very advanced project (and very fun too!).
If it’s destined to cool the user, it would be much easier, that could also be a fun project but if you’re looking for convenience I would recommend a usb fan in a usb A expansion card. Arctic sell some.
So my thought came from those cooling pads that they sell for laptops. Nothing fancy like a cpu heatsink or anything. It’s just a fan for blowing hot air out or maybe cool air in.
Clearly its going to be a very small fan
Yeah thats what I tought too, I think it the design in blue cannot be made as usually fans for laptops only intake air as that is the most efficient way of moving it in a constrained space like the inside of a laptop so the red design would be the one I would work on.
Don’t forget the dissipator part of the heat pipe need to be in front of the air outlet like in this picture: https://storage-asset.msi.com/global/picture/news/2019/nb/gt76-20160801-10.jpg
So your either need a heat pipe already with a heat spreader at the end or you need to make one yourself, watch out for the required length of the card though as this will limit your heat spreader height, get it as close as you can while fitting into the card as this will help performance theoretically speaking.
I have a couple 30x30x10mm blower fans like that. They can push a decent amount of air. Only thing is that blower style fans like that can only work in one direction, blowing air out the side. The shape and way the blades fling air just doesn’t work properly in reverse.
