About a year go I bought one of those fanless four port routers. Ordered one with a celeron, they sent me one with an 11th gen i3. Since then, core temps will regularly spike to 100c and it will throttle. Took it apart and found this as a cooling solution, which I’m sure would work fine with a celeron, but they gave me an i3 1115g4, with a base frequency of 3.1ghz, which can’t dump heat into this aluminum slug fast enough. The bios does not let me lower the clocks, or save power anywhere else. My only solution to make this work is to improve the cooling solution.

Would love to do a tower cooler, but can’t find any place that produces one that will fit my mounting holes. Been looking at laptop solutions as well, but again I am running into bracket and mounting problems. Nothing shows dimensions so I don’t waste time and money on solutions that don’t fit.

I have found copper shims, ranging from .3mm to 1.5mm thickness in a 20mmx20mm form. The aluminum slug they used is 45x25x2.73. If I stack these shims with thermal compound in between, would I get better thermal conductivity than just the aluminum slug? Are there any better ideas than what I am coming up with? Would it just be cheaper to buy another router that is cooled correctly?

  • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    The aluminum has a rough looking finish. You could try giving it a mirror polish. Have you tried changing the thermal paste?

    • snekerpimp@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Have tried thermal grizzly, arctic and noctua thermal pastes and a plethora of pads as well.

      Polishing with finer and finer grit of sandpaper? I don’t want to used a chemical polish because it might stick around, right? Could use automotive sandpaper I guess… might give that a try.