[General Topics] aveemashfaq:
Hardware mod to make Chuwi faster

I have experience with these chinese thin and light laptops. They usually skip out on heat sinks. I suspected the same case here and it is definitely true. As it turns out, there is a small thermal pad on the processor which is stuck on to a laminated steel shield that works as a heat sink.:eek::eek::eek: I decided to do something about it. I added a heatsink and the results are nothing short of mind boggling.

First step is to open up the four screws on the four corners of tablet. We use a T5 screw driver for it.

After that, we need to pry open the back aluminium panel and separate it from the front panel. I have marked locations where you can insert your tool without any worries. Other places have some component which might get damaged in the process. Please note that this view is of the back side of the tablet and if you have the screen side facing up, the locations will be mirrored.

It is a good idea to detach the battery first before we do any sort of mods to our tablet. Here is the battery connection which you need to unplug first. Here it is in the unplugged position

Then we pry out the steel shield with a screw driver. Look at the position where it is safe to pry from this image. The white border is the outline of where the steel shield is. Please note that the new heat sink is already attached in this image.

The steel shield is pretty much useless for heat dissipation. It more or less protects the heat from escaping into the aluminium body of the tablet. Here is an image of how the shield looks like from both sides.

You can see that it is pretty much useless with laminated back which is a heat insulator and thermal pads which are not efficient in heat conduction at all. We have to replace it with the heat sink of our choice.

You have aluminium and copper plates that are precut to the size of the processor that we can use. You can find them on online stores. I had an aluminium heat sink at home from another DIY project. So, I took that and chopped down the fins. This is time consuming and I suggest that you prefer buying a copper plate of 20mmx20mm instead. Anyways, this is what I did.

I took that aluminium heat sink and chopped the fins off of it. I glued it on to the processor using thermal glue.

It is important to use Thermal plaster because you don't have any mounting holes and there is slight risk that the heatsink will move around and short the connections. I applied the thermal paste onto the heat sink, stuck the heatsink on the processor and let it dry for 30 minutes.

It adds enough thickness to the processor that now the processor can come in contact with the aluminium body. So, apply thermal paste on top of the heat sink as well and then put the back panel on. Don't forget to connect the battery wire before putting the panel on.

After that, boot up your laptop and you can instantly see the difference. Earlier, the atom would thermal throttle with 15 seconds of usage and the speed would decrease considerably. it was laggy as hell. Now, I don't see any thermal throttling at all. It is responsive from the get go. I can watch full HD youtube videos without a lot of framedrops. The only caveat, the backside gets warm and with a full load on CPU for extended periods of time, it gets hot to around 50c. But performance is so good that I use it as daily driver to browse the web. Don't expect i3 levels of performance though.