Buy Now - Clevo D900F

By Kris Verbeeck

Remove the backcover. If you need a tutorial for that, please put down your tools and use them for something else. Toothpick or something.

This is what Clevo does best: jam a mountain of hot components in a notebook and get away with it with massive cooling. The engineers actually foresaw they might need even more cooling but obviously omitted a fouth fan in the center.
The left fan is the one covering the MXM module. Remove the fan first. After that, remove the four screws holding down the heatsink to the MXM module. Not sure if it matters, but you might as well follow the sequence outlined on the stickter.
Out with the old.... Two more screws holding down the card to the motherboard.
The heatsink. They used soft metal backed by some paste to make a deformable patch, designed to take the exact form of the GPU core.
Off course, the heatsink doesn't fit. There's a possibility that the HD5870 machines will fare better as the landscape of the HD6970 and HD5870 are comparabl. Here, however there was little choice: break out the Dremel!
This is how my heatsink turned out. Some important pointers. Make ABSOLUTELY sure not a single scrap off copper remains on the heatsink body. If it ends up somewhere on your motherboard, you won't like the outcome.
The heatpaste we deliver is absolutely fantastic, but it's difficult to spread it like your regular paste. Instead, dot the core and it will flow evenly over the core when the heatsink is applied.

We had some issues in the past where we experienced some unexpected shutdowns. One of the possible culprits are these three DC/DC chips at the back. I added a patch of thermal material, which evacuates some heat to the motherboard.

The old bracket can be recovered. They don't match exactly, but if you keep the insulating layer on the bracket there should be no issue.

There is, however, an issue with the cooling. The exelent, big, powerfull fan does... Nothing. At all.

So, I broke out a few thermocouples. One will do, but bragging is fun. These will close at 60 degrees and only open again at 40.
So, now we need a 5V source. The harddrive is obviously powered by 5V. So, we took the decoupling caps of the harddrive and used them to get our 5V source. The harddrive requires a fair deal of juice, so the harddrive won't miss what the fan takes.

You'll need to cut the cable of the fan. Do it somewhere in the middle so you can strip both ends and recover the fan to it's original state if needed. I glued the thermocouple to the side of the heatsink with crazy glue. I taped it, to make sure that even if the glue fails the thermocouple won't travel around. Isolate all leads to avoid shorts.

5V - thermocouple - red fan lead.

The black lead of the fan goes to the GND on the HD decoupling cap.

That did the trick rather nicely. The card stayed cool, even under load and scored a niffy 12k in Vantage. The fan is on most of the time but it doesn't matter all that much as the fan is relatively quiet. We also check the external displays and they work just fine as well.

In the end we installed, or rather tried to install 12GB of 1333MHz memory. Didn't work. So after much fiddling about, I updated the Bios. Which I should have done much sooner, as that did the trick. There's a possibility this might solve the fan issue as well, but we did not revert back to the original state. Might want to give that a go first.

The below links may only be used for the Clevo D900F notebook. If it is used for any other platform, we reserve the right to refuse returns or warranty. You will have to rework the heatsink to fit the card.

If you'd like to receive the thermocouple as well, put a note in your Paypal purchase.