Hola
My recent venture in switching over to the PTM pad:
Background: Typical scenario like so many have posted, I was getting thermal throttled with 1 core hitting 100C and the next closest one hitting around 88C. CineBench r23 scored didn’t go over 12,500. I didn’t check for power draw during those tests.
Switching over to PTM pad - Notable items worth mentioning:
- Watched Allen Dev’s video - Youtuber showing his venture into using the PTM pad was super helpful in giving me a real overview of the task on hand including some of the trickier aspects to be looking out for (like removing the heatsink). Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uooJGSmWkU&lc
- Using a hair dryer - Using the wife’s hair dryer for like 45 secs made the removal of the heatsink very, very easy. I am very surprised that Framework has not put this in their guide!
- Beware of extra sticky plastic layer on the CPU heatsink - On the CPU heatsink there is a black sponge that surrounds the central rectangle plate that needs to be removed. However, in my case, when I removed this black sponge I also noticed that there was an additional thin transparent plastic layer that remained on the heatsink, and I didn’t see anyone mentioning this before (maybe for most folks the extra plastic layer was removed when the black sponge was peeled off). Pictures below.
Aftermath:
- Sustained power under heavy loads / benchmarking - Laptop is now able to sustain around 54W of power during heavy loads / benchmarking with CB23.
- Thermal limits - I am now rarely seeing any of the cores hitting 100C, I seem to be hitting power limits rather than thermal constraints. Either way, all cores are all within 5 - 6 C during this heavy operations.
- CB23 score - Able to get around 15,800’ish.
Pictures:
