Octane VI 17.3 guide(not quite) for better cooling

[zeeqon]

Hello,

I would like to begin with an apology, I'm not usualy writing reviews/tutorials or anything like that but recently I have managed to achieve some spectacular performance and I would like to share the "knowledge" as I wish I found a guide when I was going through this. This will be long as I think context helps.

I will start with my specs:

Chassis & Display
Octane Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD 144Hz 72% NTSC LED Widescreen (1920x1080) + G-Sync
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 Eight Core Processor i7-9700K (3.6GHz) 12MB Cache
Memory (RAM)
32GB Corsair 2666MHz SODIMM DDR4 (2 x 16GB)
Graphics Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2080 - 8.0GB GDDR6 Video RAM - DirectX® 12.1
1st M.2 SSD Drive
1TB SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3500MB/R, 3300MB/W)
Thermal Paste
COOLER MASTER MASTERGEL MAKER THERMAL COMPOUND

Now a bit of history:

I always wanted a "top end" gaming machine and I always hated laptops, as a true gamer I knew that laptops had big trouble with cooling. However, I managed to land myself a job as an IT Support at a small company and I had to keep using one of them "normal" computers which was as bad as my ability of writing tutorials. I was going to clients often to sort out different issues and I suddenly felt that I need a laptop and now I was able to afford one. I then decided I want the "best laptop" money can buy with a 3k spending limit. A colleague at work then recommended me PcSpecialist (based on what I'm about to write you might think that I don't like PcSpecialist but hold tight, it's a whole story).

I chose Octane VI for a few reasons.
1. It was running a desktop CPU. I was a bit worried about the cooling capabilities but looking at the forums here I noticed that most people were ok with the temps so I decided to go for it.
2. You could fit a RTX2080 desktop GPU (I really wanted the supreme laptop).
3. The chasis was not very crowded and it made it easy to clean/upgrade/teak, etc.
4. I like big machines, big screen, running 144hz.

I was finally able to order it on 12/02/2019 and it came home one-two weeks later (I was sweating bullets by this time, I was so excited.

I quickly installed windows, drivers, CC, all the good stuff, had a few issues with Nvidia Control Panel (wasn't showing up) but nothing to put me off, I mean... working as as IT Support makes you a bit less sensitive with stuff like this, it's "normal" for me to encounter problems and fix them.

The next thing I've done, installed BF5 (it came with the laptop), take everything to absolute maximum and enjoy. After a minute, fans were at full blast ( I wasn't expecting anything else to be honest) and I decided to install Hardware Monitor (will refer it as HWM in the future). I was a bit shocked to see my temps were 100°C on all cores, GPU was doing 85°C (that was ok). I have to mention that I haven't tweaked any parameters at this point so the laptop was doing it's thing with factory settings.

I started browsing forums, looking if anybody else was getting this kind of temperatures using my setup, didn't find much. While I was doing this, leaving HWM running I noticed that even when I'm not gaming the processor (which was running at 4.9ghz, factory as I said) was still doing temperatures in excess of 70°C (in idle).

My first thoughts were: Either they put the "cheap" thermal paste ( I had paid for the "better" one) or the paste was applied incorrectly or maybe a combination of both. So I took the laptop apart (heatsink), I noticed the paste was covering the entire surface of the processor and then I started getting a bit scared. I cleaned everything and reapplied some thermal paste (Arctic MX4), I also noticed the heatsink has a scratch right where it was sitting on the processor and it wasn't completly straight. Put everything back together, no changes. Of course I reached PcSpecialist, sent them the Laptop back, told them what the problem was, and asked them to change my heatsink as I didn't think it was sitting properly on the CPU. The process was easy, I'll give them that, they are extremly polite and happy to help. This is what they came up with.

"I now have your system and have begun investigating the thermal issues you have been experiencing. So far I have found that your system idle temperatures are 50°C on the CPU. The high's of 70°C+ are being caused by the system being put under load performing startup tasks. In my testing the CPU reached over 80% usage performing the startup tasks such as loading steam, discord etc... After leaving the system on the desktop for about 10 minutes I found that the system settled back down to 50°C at idle. When testing the thermals under load I found that the cause of your high temperatures are due to the CPU boosting to it's performance clock of 4.6GHz all the way up until the CPU reaches 95°C+. Only once it reaches this threshold does the CPU scale back to it's stock speed of 3.6GHz. Once it has scaled back the temperature levels out at 70°C and maintains the 3.6GHz clock. I am currently in the process of using the Intel XTU utility to manually control the boost clocks of the system in hopes of preventing the system from getting too hot to begin with. Once I have dialled in some sensible settings I will let you know what they are to see if you are happy with them as this will reduce the maximum performance of the system in order to provide better sustained performance."

They sent me the laptop back, temperatures were a bit different then what I thought they would be but not much different so I was happy with this.

Playing with XTU I started to keep my CPU in 3.6ghz and only take it higher when more processing power was required for higher FPS (usually in shooters).
Keeping it in 3.6ghz I was able to play most of my games with maximum details 1080p at around 75-85°C with the fans running 80%, not bad right ?

It then went like this untill november 2019 when I decided to clean my laptop and reapply thermal paste, used the Arctic MX-4 again. The result ? I arranged an RMA two days after. The reason ? I'll copy and paste part of the RMA ticket I wrote.

"Two days ago I removed the dust and reapplied thermal paste (Arctic MX4), since then my computer peaks at 95-100°C while in load all that in 3.6ghz (on all 8 cores), before I could take it to 4.4Ghz-4.5Ghz for it to put up this kind of temperatures, I thought I didn't apply the thermal compound properly and redid the job with same results. I looked on forums and I noticed that there is a "fix" to get temperatures to drop down on this chasis by putting something betwen the brackets of the heat pipe (so it would apply more preasure on the heatsink), I didn't know if I would lose my warranty for trying that so I didn't. What I've done instead was to apply more pressure on the heat pipe while doing a stress test and I could see the difference straight away, with constant pressure the temperature dropped by up to 15°C in some cases. "

At this point I would like to apologise for my English as it's not my first language and I do tend to make mistakes when I'm under pressure, moving on.

The laptop came back, had it's motherboard changed (one USB was gone so they replaced my motherboard) however I haven't seen anybody with this problem on the forum so don't let this count as a bad mark. The heatsink was also changed and that made me very happy. The laptop was finally ok now, running 75°C in 3.6ghz, same games, the only difference now I had two external monitors, 1x 2k 144hz and 1x 1080p 60hz ( you do need a lot of screens if you work as a support, or I'm not sure need it's the word, but it's nice to have). So my laptop was cool enough (even though it was loud).

Fast foward to a few days ago.

I decided it was time to clean my laptop again, I like to do it every 3-4-5 months to keep things smooth (I do take great care of my stuff, I hate waste, my laptop is being used as a desktop mostly as I have two external monitors and I chose to do it this way so I don't put a lot of psysical stress on it, it still looks like brand new).

Given that my warranty ran out by now I decided I try that fix I was talking about, it's called "clevo paperclip mod" and I won't link it here as I don't know if this is going to void your warranty or not, nor do I recommend it for non-techy people. So, what have I done ?

Well first I thought I would for once try another cooling paste rather than the Arctic MX-4 I used for the last 6 years or so. I spent a couple of hours doing research and I decided to give Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut a chance as it had good reviews by home consumers ( I don't watch sponsored content when it comes to things like this, I like to know the opinion of regular users not people that get paid to review stuff).

I also ordered Arctic Silver ArctiClean Thermal Material Remover & Surface Purifier to be able to clean everything properly.

Upon taking the heatsink out of the laptop much to my surprise, there was a lot of thermal paste, when I say a lot, I mean, I never seen anything like that in my life, with the excess that spread around the GPU I could've done like 3 different computers. On top of that, the CPU wasn't evently covered.

It took me around an hour to completly clean the old thermal paste(most of it was on the heatsink and I didn't take a picture unfortunately). I then applied the Thermal Grizzly following the instructions they supplied (they give you a little spatule so you can evenly spread it on the CPU/GPU). I know there are a few ways of applying thermal paste, I have tried them all, but, at least for me this has had the best results. I also added some wooden 2-3mm pieces under betwen the heatsink brackets. It looks like this:

 

[zeeqon]

Sorry I couldn't post it all, so here's the continuation.

I got inspired from the mod I was talking about, I chose to use wood as it compresses (less chance of damaging anything). I added nothing under the GPU side of heatsink as I never had problems with my GPU, it never went above 85°C.

Again, I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS for non techy people, as you can easily damage you motherboard/cpu/heatsink if you put too much pressure on them, I also don't know if this voids warranty so I've only done if after my warrany ran out.

The results ? Well let's discuss the results.

Started my laptop, left it at 3.6ghz as I usually do, started XTU, did a CPU stress test.
High Peak 76°C
Low Peak 50°C
Average 66-76°C
Fan Speed 35%-55%

Started Wolcen, max settings on 2k played for a few hours. The laptop kept quiet with a high peak of 85°C and an average of 75-80°C and fan speed around 50%, so it's cool enough and it's quiet enough.
I then put my fan at 100% to see what I would get and it and boy, peak of 75°C with an average of 65-75°C.

For the sake of testing I put my CPU on the "factory" settings, 4.9ghz on all 8 cores, 4.9ghz cache all the good stuff, using it as it was intended for a desktop. I ran another CPU stress test.
High Peak 100°C
Average 85-95°C
Fan speed 100% of course
Now I don't recommend running you laptop like that constanly as it will shorten it's lifespan but it's a good thing to know that if you want/need you can take it to such speeds without getting thermal throttling (thermal throttling comes on every now and then for a second or so, no FPS loss noticed, no spikes, laptop didn't turn off, kept it like that for 2-3hours while playing Wolcen just for a little FPS boost and for fun). Just for the sake of comparison these are the kind of temperatures I would reach in 4.3ghz before this "fix".

I'm extremly happy with this, now I have a quiet gaming laptop with very good performance, I can play in 3.6ghz and have it quiet, good fps, good temps or I can take it up to 4.9 (even tried 5.2, but I won't go there, but it's sustainable, there's thermal thorttling but not enough for a shutdown) for extreme gaming or for extreme processing speed.

I do have to mention that every now and then (3 times in 3 days so far) the fan can go at 80% while playing some games, however it doesn't stay like that for long.

Again, I'm sorry this is more of a story rather than a guide and it is quite long. However if you have any questions please shoot them away and I will try to answer as best as I can.

Would I recommend Pc Specialist ? Yes I would, even tough they are not perfect (who is ?) they tried to help me as best as they could, they replaced my Heatsink even though "there was nothing wrong with it in their opinion", they offered me free transport for my last RMA even tough normaly you have to pay.

Dear PC Specialist, please find a way of increasing the amount of pressure the heatsink puts on the cpu/gpu of this make and model, I do belive this will increase your customer base. Most people don't like to mend with their machines, that's why people buy MacBooks, Iphones, etc (maybe not the best comparisson), I don't mind doing this, I like to mend and teak and test, but not everybody does. Also please change the way of applying thermal paste, this will reduce the instances when people return their products. This is just my humble opinion, I'm not a specialist nor do I claim to be one.

I am sorry there are no screenshots with temps and stuff, but why would I spend two hours writing this if it wasn't true. Feel free to request screenshots/test/benchmarks or anything you feel like, I will try to deliver.

PS: I do have a cooling pad, but it hasn't been turned on for tests after the mod had been installed, upon turning it on, the temperatures would get even better, however the results for that are inconsistent, sometimes it stays the same, sometimes it helps with 3-5°C but the laptop always sits on it for better air intake.

 

[Scott]

Your findings with the paste are always my worry on here. I too have had exactly that same experience with my systems and quite a few temperature issues seem to be attributed to a lack of understanding when installing the heatsinks. I have always said that PCS should address this with training. More often than not I recommend people avoid the aftermarket paste as it then means the standard paste with the coolers/heatsinks are applied and there is less chance of a poor paste job.

I have also done the same mod as yourself with matchsticks and I can confirm it makes a difference. The amount of difference it makes is down to how poor the heatsink mating face is to begin with. They are never the same, it's just your donald duck what you get. Mine was pretty good so the difference with the matches wasn't huge. I've seen others having startling differences using additional pressure.

Like you say though, this is only really at enthusiast level.

Out of curiosity, have you looked at undervolting? I would love to get my hands on an Octane with a 9700 in it to see what it could do. I would have suggested the 2060 for you in your system as I think the shared heat sink with the 2080 and the 9700k is too much for it to handle, but it would be fun regardless

 

[zeeqon]

I have also done the same mod as yourself with matchsticks and I can confirm it makes a difference. The amount of difference it makes is down to how poor the heatsink mating face is to begin with. They are never the same, it's just your donald duck what you get. Mine was pretty good so the difference with the matches wasn't huge. I've seen others having startling differences using additional pressure.

Like you say though, this is only really at enthusiast level.

Out of curiosity, have you looked at undervolting? I would love to get my hands on an Octane with a 9700 in it to see what it could do. I would have suggested the 2060 for you in your system as I think the shared heat sink with the 2080 and the 9700k is too much for it to handle, but it would be fun regardless

Hello Scott,
You are right, the ammount of difference is a combination of heatsink mating, quality of thermal paste, how well the thermal paste is applied and airflow.

I have tried undervolting but I didn't get a noticeable difference to be honest, however if you go to deep with it you get spikes in games, the CPU seems to choke.
That being said, I must admit I am a total noob when it comes to Overclocking or Underclocking so in all fairness I don't think I had a clue what I was doing. All I know is when I put the Core Voltage Offset to like -0.045 it started choking, and it still made no difference in temperatures, but that was before this mod, who knows now. I'm going to try to learn a bit about the process and do a few tests in the weekend.

To be honest the heatsink has quite a good design, they don't share a lot of heat between each other. Many times in CPU heavy tasks I had the processor at 80-90°C and the GPU at 50-55°C which is the idle temp for the GPU in my laptop.

 

[ubuysa]

A fantastically informative and helpful set of posts. Thanks for taking the time to share this. [emoji846]

I think you're missing a trick though, if you market the sticks as something like 'modular thermal conductivity inserts' you could sell them at £30 a set and make a killing. [emoji1787]

 

[Scott]

Hello Scott,
You are right, the ammount of difference is a combination of heatsink mating, quality of thermal paste, how well the thermal paste is applied and airflow.

I have tried undervolting but I didn't get a noticeable difference to be honest, however if you go to deep with it you get spikes in games, the CPU seems to choke.
That being said, I must admit I am a total noob when it comes to Overclocking or Underclocking so in all fairness I don't think I had a clue what I was doing. All I know is when I put the Core Voltage Offset to like -0.045 it started choking, and it still made no difference in temperatures, but that was before this mod, who knows now. I'm going to try to learn a bit about the process and do a few tests in the weekend.

To be honest the heatsink has quite a good design, they don't share a lot of heat between each other. Many times in CPU heavy tasks I had the processor at 80-90°C and the GPU at 50-55°C which is the idle temp for the GPU in my laptop.

You would be surprised how much they share when they are both loaded. I'm coming from a 6700k with the GTX1080.

With CPU intensive tasks the CPU is very stable and I can stress it to the max without hitting the thermal limit. Simply playing GTA V at unreasonable settings has my CPU over the throttle limit and I've hit the hard temp limit before. The Thermal performance of the heatsink is fine for either piece of hardware being maxed out but when both are stressed it's too much for it to handle without careful settings.

 

[zeeqon]

A fantastically informative and helpful set of posts. Thanks for taking the time to share this. [emoji846]

I think you're missing a trick though, if you market the sticks as something like 'modular thermal conductivity inserts' you could sell them at £30 a set and make a killing. [emoji1787]

Thank you Ubuysa, the whole reason I made the "guide" or told my story was to help other people. I've read through it a bit and I made some pretty embarrassing mistakes. I will try to edit it a bit when I have some free time.

That is quite a good advice to be honest, but I never had a business oriented mind, plus I don't know how usefull they would be to users that don't have Octane, so my market is rather small I think.

 

[zeeqon]

You would be surprised how much they share when they are both loaded. I'm coming from a 6700k with the GTX1080.

With CPU intensive tasks the CPU is very stable and I can stress it to the max without hitting the thermal limit. Simply playing GTA V at unreasonable settings has my CPU over the throttle limit and I've hit the hard temp limit before. The Thermal performance of the heatsink is fine for either piece of hardware being maxed out but when both are stressed it's too much for it to handle without careful settings.

While I do agree with you, it's next to impossible for them not to share heat, due to physics I somehow belive (I don't know for a fact) that the Octane 3 is different than Octane 6, atleast when we look at the heat sink in particular. I couldn't find a picture online but I saw how Octane 3 heat sink looks and the one on Octane 6 (with rtx, not gtx) it's slightly different so I think in a way the new design is a bit better. But yeah, overall it's impossible for them not to affect eachother.

 

[Scott]

While I do agree with you, it's next to impossible for them not to share heat, due to physics I somehow belive (I don't know for a fact) that the Octane 3 is different than Octane 6, atleast when we look at the heat sink in particular. I couldn't find a picture online but I saw how Octane 3 heat sink looks and the one on Octane 6 (with rtx, not gtx) it's slightly different so I think in a way the new design is a bit better. But yeah, overall it's impossible for them not to affect eachother.

Could you take a pic of it.... just out of curiosity.

From your images above it looks pretty much identical to mine, with the shared heatsink pipe linking off of the CPU plate over to the GPU plate.

This is a bridge to share the cooling across both fans when one side is working especially hard.

 

[zeeqon]

I don't have time to take my laptop apart now as I'm working on it, but I managed (after a long search) to find a picture online. Here it is.

It appears to me that there's a better segregation between the two and also you can see to the left of the RAM a radiator, that helps disipate some of the heat as well. But again it's pure speculation, I'm not an expert.

 

[Scott]

Thanks for that, appreciate it

The thing is.... they don't want to segregate them, the joining of the heatsink is deliberate as it's an exchange across both chips to gain the most efficiency. Obviously they don't want to have too much though, it's just a shared resource.

The fans are exactly the same and the GPU side looks identical. The CPU side has that small extra radiator pipe coming from the cooler and it only has one joined pipe going toward the GPU.

On mine there are 2 thick pipes from the fan to the CPU then one follows through to the chipset above the GPU and another follows round to the GPU same as yours does. The chipset one seems to have been replaced by the slightly beefier cover at position 9 that you mentioned.

Space is the limitation though so they have done about as much as they can I guess.

It will definitely be worth having a go with the undervolting though. It doesn't matter which octane you purchase you are limited by power unfortunately. My system maxes out the power while maximising as much frequency as it can. At this stage it stays under 100c even under extreme load. Normally it'll peak around 90..... which is high, but it's par for the course now with an Octane.

I have liquid metal on a de-lidded 6700k with the matchstick leverage mod, undervolted by 150mv and overclocked to 4.3Ghz (up from 4.2). I can push 4.5 without issue but the power runs out unfortunately. This was why I was always a fan of trying out a 9700k over the 9900k on the Octane. The power to drive 16 threads would outweigh the benefits of the addition threads IMO. The 8 cores running at optimum, in my mind, would out-perform the 9900k.

 

[zeeqon]

Following our conversation I have decided to do a bit of research in regards to undervolting. Thanks for getting me curious !!!

I found out about Throttle Stop (used 8.70.6). And after Tweaking with some settings I got some really nice results.

For Throttle Stop

I disabled BD PROCSHOT
Set Speed Shift - EPP to 0
FIVR
CPU Core -125.0mV
CPU Cache - 125.0mV

Cores
1 Core Active 4.9ghz
2 Core Active 4.9ghz
3 Core Active 4.9ghz
4 Core Active 4.8ghz
5 Core Active 4.8ghz
6 Core Active 4.7ghz
7 Core Active 4.7ghz
8 Core Active 4.6ghz

It peaked at around 96°C (In the screenshots you'll see close to 100, but I've done a lot of testing and I couldn't reset that so you'll have to belive me).
But those peaks were just spikes really.
The average temperature (while playing Wolcen, maxed settings, 2k) was betwen 78-90°C, ocasionally jumping a bit over 90°C, and very rarely spiking around 95-96-97°C
GPU temp didn't go over 75°C in my test.
Fan sat at 100% of course
However I noticed a slight FPS increase 5-15FPS in some cases compared to my previous result when I ran it in 4.9ghz.(before undervolting)
With this settings my CPU sits at around 50-55°C in IDLE or with normal use (no heavy load).
I think you're totally right about the difference betwen 9700k and 9900k but again I just read a few things so I don't claim to be an expert.

Overall I don't think I'll keep my laptop with this settings as default, only when I'm playing.
I will do some more tests in the future.

I read about delidding in the past and putting liquid metal but people were saying that it's not the most reliable thing to do for a portable machine as the liquid metal can slip out and cause a short. So I don't know if I'm brave enough to try this.