Inital Repairs
So when I got this HP G60-100EM it had 2 faults, which I knew about when buying the laptop and I was fine with, In short its Keyboard unit was bad and a few keys didn’t work and its System fan had just recently failed although in the lead up to shipping it showed signs it could go any time.
Guide on how to open your laptop here
The Fan Replacement itself was simple enough and ill post a how to dissemble video here so you can see how it is done, but if you do decide to do any repair on a HP G60 PLEASE HEED THESE POINTERS
I've been in and out of my unit so many times I am a self proclaimed expert on the matter but there’s a few things some people may not realise until it’s too late, and if you intend to replace or clean the cooling assembly you will have to strip the laptop to the motherboard
And I made labels on keys I didn't use so much for the time being as shown in this image
Guide on how to open your laptop here
The Fan Replacement itself was simple enough and ill post a how to dissemble video here so you can see how it is done, but if you do decide to do any repair on a HP G60 PLEASE HEED THESE POINTERS
I've been in and out of my unit so many times I am a self proclaimed expert on the matter but there’s a few things some people may not realise until it’s too late, and if you intend to replace or clean the cooling assembly you will have to strip the laptop to the motherboard
- Pop the keyboard up carefully the connector is near the bottom of the unit so pop it out from the top
- after the keyboard is out there is a connector just below the Wifi button disconnect this by lifting the lock up and sliding out the connector its all too easy to rip that out when removing the black bezel
- If you intend to go deeper into the laptop you may want to pop the touchpad’s connector too at this point
- You have to remove the WIFI Card if you plan to get down to the laptops motherboard and there are 2 small screws under the hard drive which will need to be removed. The Ram Can stay plugged in
- You may want to instead of disconnecting the BIOS battery pop it out of its plastic holder this will save you having to deal with the bios clock
- Watch out for 2 tiny screws one is under the black bezel above the power jack the other holds the left speaker in place
And I made labels on keys I didn't use so much for the time being as shown in this image
Quite easy Temp fix for the issue until my new keyboard unit arrived.
Higher feet
Another good way to increase airflow any laptop in general not just with a HP G60 is to get feet that raise the laptop higher than normal. In this image you will see the comparison between the stock HP feet and the feet I got at this eBay store here. The feet im using is 15mm(L)x 6mm(B)x 4.5mm(H) here is a link to the item for easy buying Click me!
As a side note they also do authentic OEM stickers and is where I get mine as you can see in this image of my latest batch.
Upgrading the Ram
Ok this is a heads up on this fact. Do not trust the HP G60 Specs website, it is a lie. For instance this HP G60 is a 100EM according to HP's site is designed for up to 3GB only. This is false I'm currently using 4GB of memory without any issue and the laptop uses it all (Providing you’re on a x64 OS) the higher model G60-348CA for instance which uses the very same motherboard says it has 4GB (4096MB) of memory with a maximum of 4GB. This was a tactic to get users to opt for the higher models id expect.
Things to note are this
Things to note are this
- Stick to DDR2 667 MHz or 800MHz ram, DDR2 Ram slower than 667MHz will NOT work and will cause in my tests the HP to fail to boot and leave the power light flashing.
- Make sure that both your ram dimm’s are both the same timings, look for what “CL” it is, if you can’t find see it ask. If possible you want CL5 this is the faster 800MHz DDR2 CL6 is slower. If you’re going for 667MHz DDR2 aim for CL4 DDR2.
- No matter what you WILL loose 256MB of memory to the onboard Nvidia 8200M G, Increasing the amount of memory will not make the Graphics take more memory as some do but you cannot reduce how much it will take, However Upgrading to 4GB leaves you with 3.75GB for use, more than enough for anything the HP G60 is capable of.
- Try to get Double Banked ram where ever possible with 8 Chips Per side, In my personal experience the time I used one with only 4 Chips per side caused the laptop to have issues with the screen going black, BSOD's and other such symptoms even though the memory ran through memtest fine.
Upgrading the CPU
Now I can only speak for the AMD Version of the HP G60 line here but I Thought I'd pass my input on this. You can upgrade the CPU in the laptop! Also worth noting you are not restricted to the family of AMD your machine runs, for instance my HP G60 Shipped with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 QL-60 but now I am running an AMD Turion x2 Ultra ZM-82.
Things to note are this
Things to note are this
- You can go Athlon 64 X2 to Turion 64 X2 / Turion x2 Ultra but the CPU has to be a Socket 1 Generation 2 (s1g2) 1st generation CPU's may not work correctly. I've not tested this while the Pin Layout is the same and on paper the g2 version of the socket is just a more capable version I do not know if its backwards compatible
- If you have a Turion my personal recommendation is to not "Upgrade" to any Athlon 64 X2. The Athlon's have less power saving features and in my experience run hotter. Get only Turion's you will thank me later
- If you have an Athlon 64 X2 and want to upgrade, Go Turion You will get a faster CPU at lower temps thanks to the design of the CPU. The Athlon is a Desktop CPU that AMD for some reason rushed into laptops to originally compete with Intel Core 2's but they are not that good for mobile computing due to there power design
- If you do upgrade this is in my opinion what the max clock you should look at as the cooling design of the HP G60 is lacking at best. Athlon 64 X2 = 2.00GHz, Turion 64 X2 = 2.1GHz and Turion Ultra = 2.2GHzThe Best Performing CPU (which is also one of the coolest for your HP) is the Turion Ultra's ZM-80 (2.1GHz) and ZM-82 (2.2GHz) these feature twice the Cache memory of the Normal Turion and Athlon's.
- Also The Ultra's have independent core control so one core can work at full speed while the other might be in an idle state for example using the ZM-82 Core 1 2200MHz Core 2 550MHz
Upgrading the Hard Drive
One of the things HP Really cheated users out of was the hard drive in my HP G60 they gave me a WD Scorpio 120GB Sata 150 Hard drive. when I contacted HP to ask what is the possibility of using a second generation sata drive which was mainstream when the G60 was made (hence my comment on them being so cheap out) they told me that while a HP G60 can use a Sata 300 Hard drive it will only operate at 150 speeds. I've found this to be false the AMD HP G60's can use Sata 300 Hard drives at full Sata 300 speeds.
Things to note are this
Things to note are this
- Go for a Sata 300 if possible there is no performance loss even when HP state otherwise and can only increase performance
- Watch for the power usage the hard drive has try to read up on a hard drive before buying especially if you’re considering a performance hard drive at 7200RPM rather than the normal 5400RPM ones. If they have a higher power draw then the hard drive will get hotter! I've found the HP G60 can really get a Hard Drive Toasty under heavier loads.
- Set in your power options in Windows Vista and 7 to "sleep" your hard drive after 1 min. This seems to have had no Performance Impact but seems to help keep the hard drive cooler
Modding the GPU Cooling
When HP Was designing the G60's I think the janitor at Nvidia was giving out advice. In short Nvidia recommended that Laptop manufacturers like Lenovo, Apple, Dell and HP use a pre determined Thermal Pad to sit between the GPU and the cooler itself to conduct heat between the two, Unfortunately it was later found that the thermal pad actually acted like a thermal insulator rather than conductor holding more heat in the GPU than passing it to the cooler. This lead too many failed laptops and a class action lawsuit against Nvidia. While the lawsuit was won and at the time anyone with an affected machine could get a free repair changing the thermal pad and motherboard if needed, we are now rather past that period. However all is not lost! There are things you can do to aid the cooling and get better cooling than even the Nvidia replacement was!
What you need to do is get yourself on eBay and look for a "Copper Shim" Now, I can only speak for AMD G60's in this but I needed a 20mm x 20mm Copper Shim that was 1mm thick. You would need exactly that for best results and nothing more than 1.1mm thick. Next get some high quality thermal paste. Arctic Silver 5 is a tech's most popular compound and for good reason it produces good results!
When you get the items this is what you should do:
What you need to do is get yourself on eBay and look for a "Copper Shim" Now, I can only speak for AMD G60's in this but I needed a 20mm x 20mm Copper Shim that was 1mm thick. You would need exactly that for best results and nothing more than 1.1mm thick. Next get some high quality thermal paste. Arctic Silver 5 is a tech's most popular compound and for good reason it produces good results!
When you get the items this is what you should do:
- Disassemble your laptop to the motherboard and remove the cooler.
- Remove the thermal pad and any left over thermal paste on the CPU itself and cooler, I Recommend using a Q-Tip / Cotton Bud or two and some Rubbing Alcohol
- Get some Brasso or similar and buff the copper shim to a nice shine and then clean it with rubbing Alcohol, this is to remove any blemishes on the copper surface to help aid heat transfer, allow it to dry
- Following the instructions on the Arctic Silver Packaging apply paste to your CPU and GPU
- Carefully place the Copper Shim on top of your GPU as cantered as possible
- Apply thermal paste to where the copper shim will make contact with the cooler (the non copper square)
- Now with trying not to slide or twist the cooler lock it back into place
- Check to make sure the copper shim is still in place and not touching anything it shouldn't around the chip itself it should look something like this
That’s it! You should notice the GPU may drop in temp while gaming and will drop in the heat after gaming very fast now as it should be :) Enjoy!
Modding the HP G60 Casing for additional CPU / GPU Ventilation
This is not for everyone but if you’re eager to try to get a few more degree's off this may be for you. In short with how the HP G60's casing was designed the GPU especially seems fairly suffocated as the CPU has some venting from the Ram cover.
This can be fixed with adding some vent holes yourself to the underside of your HP G60. Now this will involve Using a Drill, and taking your laptop fully apart to do. but you can do something like this:
This can be fixed with adding some vent holes yourself to the underside of your HP G60. Now this will involve Using a Drill, and taking your laptop fully apart to do. but you can do something like this:
These was taken before the mod was finished and I did clean up the mod more later, now its up to you how perfect you wish to align the vent holes you will make, I Used a 4mm Drill bit in my case and then went over the area with 1200 Grit sand paper and a craft knife to get the odd bits of plastic.
Some may say this mod defaces or makes the laptop ugly but it’s important to remember this is done on the UNDERSIDE of the laptop. How often do you have your laptop on and your staring at the bottom of it after all!
Some may say this mod defaces or makes the laptop ugly but it’s important to remember this is done on the UNDERSIDE of the laptop. How often do you have your laptop on and your staring at the bottom of it after all!
Buffing your pipe for a few degree's more
During my travels across the web I found an interesting article about heat pipes, some discovered that heat pipes are less efficient in transferring heat to the fan if they are blemished like in this image you will see my Cooling assembly before I did anything
As you can see its a very dark and unpleasant colour, this is how HP makes and releases these so I set to work buffing the Copper elements of the cooler (to which I also did another mod in one of the images) to see how it fared as a cooling mod I Used a household brand of Copper polish and cleaned it after with some rubbing alcohol this is what it looked like after
As you can now see it gives a much better shine and more copper look to it and to my surprise it did indeed help! not so much at idle but at full load my temps seemed to be lower and temps dropped faster when coming off load. I was pleased!
Lap that Cooler!
Another thing that can be done is what is known as "Lapping" on the cooler itself, which is to make the cooler have as close to a mirror shine as possible, Now I am not going to write a guide on it as someone has wrote one that's far better than what I could ever put together HERE
However if you look at the last image above you will see the silver and nice looking square that used to be as textured as the rest of the metal cooler and again provided me with better cooling on my Graphics in my laptop!
However if you look at the last image above you will see the silver and nice looking square that used to be as textured as the rest of the metal cooler and again provided me with better cooling on my Graphics in my laptop!
Undervolting the AMD HP G60
Another way you can enhance your AMD HP G60 is by lowering the voltage of the CPU; this will increase battery life and lower CPU Temperatures! For the AMD G60 we will need K10Stat you can get it here.
Instead of me giving a step by step ill link you to a great guide here for it.
In my experience I was able to get an AMD Athlon 64 X2 QL-66 down to 1.875v on load and 0.900v idle, my Turion Ultra x2 gets 1.100v on full load, medium load 0.900v and on idle 0.800v
Just make sure when doing this to use a testing app to make sure your system is stable before dropping any lower!
Instead of me giving a step by step ill link you to a great guide here for it.
In my experience I was able to get an AMD Athlon 64 X2 QL-66 down to 1.875v on load and 0.900v idle, my Turion Ultra x2 gets 1.100v on full load, medium load 0.900v and on idle 0.800v
Just make sure when doing this to use a testing app to make sure your system is stable before dropping any lower!
Overclocking the Nvidia 8200m in the HP G60
You can actually overclock the 8200m in your HP G60 for only a minor increase in temperatures; if you have been doing other tips from here you should be well under the old max temperatures anyways and can afford to overclock the graphics a bit.
First of all grab this from the Nvidia website and install it. Once it’s installed go into your Nvidia control panel and click the new option performance.
From here you have greater control of your laptop but we are only interested in the GPU section. Click this and you will be met with GPU and Shader clocks you can adjust. I would recommend increasing the GPU by 25 and Shader by 50 and trying to play a game for a while to see if your graphics act odd, your system crashes or the graphics gets too hot, if its still fine go up another step of 25 GPU and 50 Shader (Shader should ALWAYS be 2x the GPU value) I was able to get from 400 / 800 to 550 / 1100!
First of all grab this from the Nvidia website and install it. Once it’s installed go into your Nvidia control panel and click the new option performance.
From here you have greater control of your laptop but we are only interested in the GPU section. Click this and you will be met with GPU and Shader clocks you can adjust. I would recommend increasing the GPU by 25 and Shader by 50 and trying to play a game for a while to see if your graphics act odd, your system crashes or the graphics gets too hot, if its still fine go up another step of 25 GPU and 50 Shader (Shader should ALWAYS be 2x the GPU value) I was able to get from 400 / 800 to 550 / 1100!
Performance Before and after
After all of the changes on this page this is how my G60's WEI looks
Click to enlarge the images.
Click to enlarge the images.
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