Your solution worked great for me as well!
Before added thermal paste:
After added thermal paste (and cleaned dust from fan):
Thank you for detailing the procedure, you’re the best!
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Very nice. What are your specs? I’m hoping for someone with a Core Ultra Series 1 mobo to try before I do.
It’s a Framework Laptop 13, Intel Core i7-1280p
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Oh wow, I never knew that there was software to quantify the temperature of the VRMs on a Computer. Thank you so much for sharing your results, this is actually incredible. And wow, roughly -10°c and virtually non-existent temperature spikes??
That’s a bullseye, but it tells me more than I would have expected.
The average in the before was still far under 85°c, (apart from that one spike) which means that the thermal pads previously must have facilitated some form of contact and thermal transfer, just not enough to keep it from ramping up the fan to some aggressive profile.
What I would like to know is how it behaved when you charged it. I have experienced some goofy behavior with mine. Did yours also ramp up the fan when charging after you closed the lid?
Certainly interesting findings and would explain my experiences with fan noise on my 1340P board. I do wonder though, would replacing the current thermal pad with a thicker pad or adding additional ones for currently uncovered VRMs also help or achieve similar results? I would personally want to avoid slathering my board in K5 pro if at all possible haha.
Slathering is something I’m not looking forward to, either. I do wish Framework would weigh in on the matter.
You’re welcome, my friend
I just did similar to my wife’s FW13 w/ Ultra 7 155H yesterday. I noticed the same issue where the areas w/ extra thin thermal pads were making essentially no contact.
Rather than traditional thermal paste, since it traditionally isn’t good for large gaps that thermal pads occupy, I used Thermal Grizzly Putty Pro. It is good for gaps ranging between 0.2 to 3.0 mm. I removed all the pads; including the thicker ones.
Unfortunately I have experienced very little improvement in fan noise.
I also changed TIM for the CPU for the 3rd time. First it was to Thermal Grizzly Phasesheet PTM, which initially had great results and then was worse than stock. 2nd attempt was with Arctic MX-6, which did the same thing as the PTM. Now I have used Thermal Grizzly Duronaut.
Initially after replacing the TIM, the temps and fan noise are improved…but it doesn’t seem to last.
I simply don’t understand what the problem is here.
Follow-up on my previous comment on replacing the pads with thicker ones. I have replaced the 0.5mm pad which was making poor contact with the VRMs with a 1mm pad in its place. While I have no actual data, subjectively I feel there has been a noticeable reduction in fan noise while charging. While I was at it I also replaced my thermal paste, but the CPU temperature was not the problem in the first place.
I noticed no contact issues with the other pads, so I simply left them and only replaced the 0.5mm one.
Even with the thicker pad there seems to be no issue with die contact or mounting pressure. I suggest trying this if you happen to have some 1.0mm thermal pads laying around by chance.
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@Aida2224 I’d be fearful of the added pressure in the long term! Like a heavy GPU without a support bracket in a PC case: it won’t get a PCB crack after a day, but check again after a year.
Framework released a video on a new FW13 motherboard and some other stuff. Interesting detail: they’re switching to Honeywell thermal pads for (if I’m recalling this correctly, I listened to it in the car and can’t replay rn) all FW13 motherboards. They don’t really say why, only that the performance of the Honeywell stuff is better. But reading between the lines one could see this as concluding that the existing TIM is insufficient.
(starts around 01:58)
Again, I’d love to hear more details from Framework themselves. Ideally, if this fixes our weird loud fans, I’d appreciate steps to reproduce the cooling situation from this new FW13 board.
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I have a 7640U F13 from late 2024 that had similar heat issues. It would hit 100C regularly with low usage and the fan seemed to be going a lot. I replaced the factory paste with generic white (Dynex) paste and it made a dramatic difference. It now rarely hits 100C unless I’m stressing the CPU/GPU and that is very brief until the fan spins up. Now the fan only noticeably runs when the machine is really working hard.
Interesting notes; unlike the above guide, there were no thermal pads on the VRM chips and the heatsink seems designed to only make contact with the APU heat spreader. The VRM chips aren’t intended to hit the heatsink on this model, so I didn’t touch them. The factory grey thermal paste looked to have been applied correctly but at the contact point it seemed very thin.
It should be thin. Ideally there would be none because the surfaces mate very intimately, but in practice the surfaces are not mirror finish flat, and so you need some paste to fill in the dips and hollows. But the paste adds some thermal resistance so it should be a minimal thickness, and will be squeezed out as the surfaces get clamped together on assembly.
Hmm, I would take a wild guess and say its the MOSFETs covered by the thicker thermal pads. I got great results by also adding an additional layer of thermal paste between them and the thermal pad covering them somehow. I know that these are supposed to get really warm in ATX PSUs which is why they usually have heatsinks attached to them. This is only an amateur train of thought, so tread with that info with that in mind.
I really hope this helps.
Wow, thank you for sharing your findings with us.
Personally, I am thinking that the MOSFETS covered by the thicker thermal pads could be the reason for the fan noise while charging.
I think, once I get the time to try some more jank, I can make better founded suspicions and guesses. Unfortunately, I dont know yet how to get around using Prometheus as shown in the based post by @Bertrand_Martin.
What I think of is, just for shits n giggles, removing the thermal pad and slapping a little copper shim like people did with their RTX3000 GPUs between the MOSFETS and the cooler, connected by thermal epoxy, thermal pads or thermal paste. That could hopefully serve as a better thermal bridge than the stock thermal pads at this thickness.
I repasted my 1240p with PTM for the second time after cleaning the fan during the last heat wave.
I noticed that the thinner pads (circled red and marked 'poor contact’ earlier in the thread) were actually making poor contact. I aligned them properly and slapped some random thermal paste in between the components and the pads for good measure.
I also put thermal paste on the thickest pads circled in blue just because…
It’s been 3 weeks now, and my FW13 has never been so silent and cool. Its no more heating so much while charging.
Thanks everybody !
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Came here to say that adding the thermal paste worked wonders for me and now I am back to loving my Framework
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