Welcome! I wanted to start this thread as a collection of heatsink, cooling, and thermal modifications that can be done to our passively cooled SF114-32s in order to reduce thermal throttling and to sustain longer turbo clocks. I want to come up with and document creative yet functioal cooling mods we can do to get the most out these cool Gemini Lake SoCs. Pun intended.
I gotta admit I'm really enjoying the ownership of this awesome fanless lightweight laptop and think others have yet to discover it's greatness. In stock form it runs very cool, quiet and it has absolutely amazing battery life. However, I'm a tinkerer by nature and this is right up my alley.
My first mod is going to be hopefully pretty simple and straight forward. I picked up a spare copper heatsink (434.0E603.1002, A02-02625, N17W6, CC29) off ebay for $7.30 after using some eBay bucks and figured it was cheap enough I had almost nothing to lose. I don't know exactly how much it weighs but it can be felt if ever so slightly in the palm of your hand. Regardless it's probably nothing to lose sleep over and worth the expected cooling improvement. Since the SF114-32 is passively cooled I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to try and improve the thermals whenever reasonably possible. I've seen cooling mods done to Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake based fanless computers and the results are usually pretty good. That is what inspired me to move forward with mine.
My spare heatsink arrived today!
As you can see there's not much to it. Its pretty thin as is and comes with bolts, a black insulator sticker and some black rubber risers. I'm going to remove all of these and clean it up as best as I can. What I'm basically going to do is sandwich some thermal pads and thermal paste between the existing heating and this second heatsink in hopes of better heat transfer, dissipation and cooling of the SoC and other surrounding IC. I'll be sure to record some before and after temperature readings to see what if any difference this makes.
