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I have a Dell G7 7588, which was a fine laptop until Dell released BIOS 1.5. Now it overheats like crazy. I was able to mitigate the problem a bit with undervolting, but in BIOS 1.13 (you think I’d learn to not trust their BIOS updates) undervolting was disabled. Long story short, I repasted to try and fix it, however one of the heatsink screws stripped immediately when I tried to turn it. I used a dremel to cut a slit in the screw and get it out that way, however I nicked the loop for the screw hole in the heatsink. It wasn’t bad, but there is a line in the hole now. I used a slightly larger headed screw to screw it down, but my temps are still super bad, in fact there seems to be no change, even with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut paste. I’m worried I ruined the heatsink and need to replace it. Does anybody have experience with this? Should I replace the heatsink? Or is there some trick to holding it down better if this happens?
The heatsink must apply some pressure on the CPU. I does not need to be a lot. Enough to allow heat transfer from the CPU thru the paste to the heatsink. you might want to measure the temp of your heatsink compared to the CPU core temp. Core temp will be higher but if it is too high, you have a problem. I can’t tell you what too high is but I am sure you can search it and find an answer. Cuts as you described in the heatsink should not present a problem.
