Toshiba satellite disassembly, overclocking & full modification.

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS, I HAVE JUST PUBLISHED IT SO YOU CAN FOLLOW THE PROJECT AND TO GET SOME SUGGESTIONS.

So how much power can you get from a laptop for under 1K without compromising portability? Lets find out. (bearing in mind something simmilar from alienware is just over 2K)

(This is still under construction, next update due friday)

So what do we have to start with?
The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite A660-11M, with the core i7-720QM processor @ 1.6Ghz, 4Gb RAM @ 1066Mhz, 500Gb harddrive, and Nvidia GeForce GT330M @ 135Mhz, with 1Gb RAM. Not a bad deal for £750.

Although this is fairly fast for a laptop, there is much more to be got out of it:

8Gb RAM @ 1333Mhz  (£70 per 4Gb stick)
OC CPU from 1.6 to at least 2.8, possibly 3.2
Fit water or heat-pipe cooling, as the stock cooling is not sufficient for the original speed (hits 82 degrees C)
Try to OC graphics card a bit.
Fit SSD.  (60Gb Patriot inferno, 275Mb/s write speed, £100)
Construct custom cooling pad to allow constant use & house external HDD and batteries.

Yes, i know the photos go in the wrong order.

Step 1: Disassembly

The disassembly guide is not ccurrently available, so here is the only guide available so far.

Tools needed:
Pot to put the screws in.
Small phillips screwdriver.
Small flat bladed screwdriver.
Weak magnet.
Bright pen/pencil/marker.
Earthed work area.

Comments

[gdart]

Hi i have the exact same laptop , and have been noticing the coolingis rubbish , is there anyway i can improve this as an amateur.

[plunardi]

also i have this laptop, and i have the exactly same problem... any suggestion?

[plunardi]

Water cooling is not always the best option... If you have to transport the laptop what will you do? By the what if the you meant that the pc it's gonna always stay at your home you can do it (sorry for my bad english but i'm italian)

[gdart]

Also. , how can i overclock the cpu.
As the bios is locked.

[zack247]

this seems like quite the endeavor, i had always thought that leds, better speakers and quieter fans were laptop mods, this totally disproves that theory.

i hope you finish this, it looks like it would be pretty epic!
and heres just a word of thought, for that water coouling radiator, im sure that if you made it the size of the old heatsink+fan, that would be able to disperse a lot of heat, and maybe instead of having no seakers you could move them up inotnthe top half, if they are too big,get some thin ones from a old laptop, i know acers have pretty thin speakers.

even slapping in a 1.9GHz cpu could improve performance, and witht hat you could also get a few more GHz out of overclocking.

[The Skinnerz]

Thanks for the feedback!

The current heatsink design i'm working on is a rather large slab of copper or aluminium, so the passive cooling alone would take away a lot of the heat.

As for the speakers, the right hand one should be able to stay.

I do actually have a set of speakers out of an acer, and they look pretty small. I might put the bass speaker in anyway to give it a bit of a kick.

I'm going to keep the current i7 in it, as the 8 threads are useful for running multiple heavy programs, such as playing a game while rendering video.

[zack247]

you are one brave dude for trying to overclock a laptop!
i really hope it works out!

[The Skinnerz]

I hope it works too.

The overclock will be the final part of the project, as the cooling needs to be fixed for the standard speed.

[zack247]

ive been reading this again, and i was thinking about that radiator you were talking about.

first off im gonna say that the fan does get intake, ts most likely from by the cover and the edge of the keyboard, which is still pretty unsatisfactory.

that radiator could be put in the cd drive bay, and maybe you coul use the original fan to blow cool aire over the radiator and out the edge of the laptop, and then use the original fan's spot for the water pump.
assuming the water pump is small enough to fit there, you could even keep the speakers where they are.

i suggest figuring out some form of cooling for the ram too, it can get pretty hot in performance heavy situations.

if you know of any really small blower fans, i would be interested in those, my gateway might not run as hot since i installed 64-bit (which is strange) but i plan to upgrade and fans are a must in my case.

[The Skinnerz]

I've got a second HDD in the CD bay now, so the rad can't go there, but there looks like there is enough room for a small one where the old heatsink is.

The overclocking bit is on hold at the moment, until the datasheets for the clock generator are released, as it is on-board so can't even be done with a pin mod.

The smallest fans I've seen are about 30-40mm, so still a little large for most laptops.

[bhvm]

Excellent Idea, No one has ventured into Modding and Custom fab cooling for Laptops. I'm tuned, Please keep it up!
We can discuss and learn a lot from each other;Feel free to drop in.

[eddles777]

with the spare pci slot, that would have been insane to add a second gpu XD but itll be impossible cus there arent any sold unless you got one from a d.o.a laptop.

[The Skinnerz]

I had considered that, but at this point there are no mini pci graphics cards available, and I don't really need any more from the GPU, overclocking it is just a technical exercise (It works suprisingly well already, and can handle anything except crysis 2).

Should have an update soon, as the new parts are being delivered this week, and I have some free time to start on designing the new cooling.