Alright, I’m sorry to have made you wait, but I’ve just redone the ‘Mod’ and pictured every step of the way.
So, I had a problem with my Framework 13 with a Core i5 1240p.
Back then, running W11, the fan spun up at very mild work loads like watching YouTube and when charging with the lid closed. I repasted the CPU several times just to discover that the high fan speed and subsequent noise persists. Temps with very loud fan noise were in the mid 60s at worst.
I tried everything in software but to no avail. I couldn’t do anything about it.
I isolated the problem down to the power delivery circuit, which suffered from poor thermal transfer to the CPU Cooler through the thermal pads. It desperately tried to cool down through the PCB and then to the CPU.
Even in Frameworks official documentation of the CPU cooler for the 12th Gen CPUs, the thermal pads aren’t compressed evenly by the ICs.
What I’ve done to solve that problem is, I removed the thin pads entirely and left only the thicker pads, meant to reach down to the ICs. To bridge the air gap, I added some thermal paste in the manner Linus and Alex from LMG would have with thermal putty (K5 Pro) on a poor RTX4090.
To follow my steps, it’d be handy to begin with a clean slate, that means all the thermal paste of the CPU removed, and the thin thermal pads removed from the cooler or power delivery chips.
This is how the clean motherboard is supposed to look like.
That’s just the clean cooler with the thin and arguably useless thermal pads already removed.
Red ones go, blue ones stay.
Now to the thermal paste. It is just as easy as to dab a little onto the chips marked in red, the ones in blue are optional but won’t hurt to also cover. They just weren’t previously covered by a thermal pad, so I saw no need to add some for my laptop. It worked just fine anyway
With every IC covered with a dab of thermal paste, it should look a little something like this:
After remounting the CPU Cooler, you can button up your laptop and enjoy it with now 90% less fan noise.
I really do hope it helps you out. I can’t tell 100% for sure because my current experience is limited to a single unit.