HP Envy M6 1105dx constantly overheating. Possible fix but need help from community.

[Ravipe]

Hi guys,

It's 2015 and I believe it isn't news that this Envy series (plus some Pavilions from the same time) have ridiculous issues regarding overheating while gaming and some times even just by watching a Youtube video or browsing.

I have bought this laptop 2 years ago and when I started to notice the constant shutdown due to overheating (system temperature 90D error), my warranty was already gone and I could only rely on HP customer service (which didn't help me at all) and the large community that are dealing with this same problem everyday for a long time now.

I not a newbie to computer hardware and obviously I checked (like everyone else) the vents, use some vacuum to take any dust, etc etc. Some people even said that the problem was the thermal compound that was applied wrongly. Well I didn't want to dismantle my whole laptop to check that cause some people did do that and helped very little with the problem.

Another popular solution was to go to the energy management options and prevent the A10 to be used at 100% of it's capacity. I have to say that I had some joy doing that for a while but there a couple issues with that. First and most important is: I have paid for a gaming laptop and should be able to use it in it's full potential and not having to sacrifice performance in order to not burn my legs, hands or prevent a shutdown due to overheating (I would like to share that my temperature easily would go up to 130ºC!!!! And you don't need to be a genius to know that is ridiculously high even being capable to cause injury to the user!!!! Shame on you HP!). And second, handicapping my processor stopped worked at some point and I got back the nasty shutdowns due to overheating again.

I had a strong feeling that this problem was related to bad drivers. It's nor uncommon to find different hardware to work erratically after an update. You see that all the time with GPU's updates. So I tried again to uninstall all drivers and it's registers with DDU and update them again to the very last update possible with HP Support Assistant. The problem PERSISTED. Then I bought a license for Driver Booster which is a software that I used with success in the past on previous machines and it did find different updates (some even newer versions than what the HP software would install). I have noticed some improvement but eventually the laptop would overheat and shutdown. FAILED AGAIN. Then I realized that problem could be with the Catalyst packages. I had installed the latest version of it (14.12 Omega) with the hope that the problem would be fixed on it but the problem persisted. Then I completely uninstalled Catalyst all drivers that it would be installed with it and rebooted my laptop.

Surprisingly the overheating problem was gone!!! Yes, you read it right. I downloaded and ran Piriform's Speccy to check the temperatures and the gpu was @57ºC, motherboard @59ºC, storage @43ºC and unfortunatelly the CPU was still a bit too hot @80ºC but surprisingly steady and holding up even when I started to play different games (BF3, Half-Life 2 with Cinematic Mod 2013, Heartstone, etc). So that made me think that the overheat problems starts in the first because of one of the drivers that the Catalyst package installs. Which one I do not know and less which version of each driver would still be safe to install in the laptop.

Thus I come humbly here in this forum to ask for help from the community and HP. I believe we are very close to fix this problem and we can do it if we all work together.

 

[jimpz]

Generally, OEM's like HP, design' custom' drivers for the graphics they use. Only relatively recently (1st Nvidia, then AMD) has one been able to download a 'mobile' driver from them & not the OEM driver & have it work. A laptop can never game to the same level as a desk top w/ the 'same' specs. One major issues is a laptops ventilation & overheating. Which may have been controlled by HP's driver. Using AMD's may push it too hard. A TRUE(as much as possible) gaming laptop, generally needs to come from a company that designs it that way, such as Sager, Dell's Alienware among others.

 

[EmileBV]

I have the same laptop as you and trust me, this computer is simply stupidly designed. Yes, changing the drivers and trying to reduce the load on the CPU might help a bit but the real issue is that the very only fan this laptop have is very far from being enough. The Envy m6 is sold with pretty awesome specs that seems like an awesome deal but one way of marketing is showing the qualities to hide the bad parts. If you look into the specs of this laptop, you will never find anything about the cooling. This is simply because it sucks.

The lonely fan this laptop have is taking air from under it, out of tiny little "holes" that covers less than the fan's size. Also, Most of the heat from the laptop is getting dissipated by some kind aluminum paper I believe. (I'm actually not sure what this aluminum thing is made for but you will see it if you ever open the Envy m6 from under) This means that the heat get dissipated UNDER the laptop.

This leads us to the conclusion that the ventilation hole that provides air to the cooling fan aren't only too narroy, but also, it pulls HOT AIR into the system. This is the same for the exhaust holes, they are made out of very thick plastic molded bands, and if you look carefully inside of it, you will see smaller plastic fins, making the space for the air to come out extremely restricted.

So, as a conclusion, the Envy m6 have a very poorly designed cooling system that have no room to put out its air efficiently and who takes its air from under the laptop, from air that is getting warmed up a lot by the bottom part of the case that actually dissipates the entire system's heat under the case, at the same place where the intake air comes from.

Don't expect getting any good result from this laptop, it's never been made to be used as a gaming pc anyway, it is clearly presented as a "family notebook"

Sorry if I break your hopes but this issue isn't about what's inside the computer. But about how it has been made at the very beggining.

 

[Ravipe]

I have the same laptop as you and trust me, this computer is simply stupidly designed. Yes, changing the drivers and trying to reduce the load on the CPU might help a bit but the real issue is that the very only fan this laptop have is very far from being enough. The Envy m6 is sold with pretty awesome specs that seems like an awesome deal but one way of marketing is showing the qualities to hide the bad parts. If you look into the specs of this laptop, you will never find anything about the cooling. This is simply because it sucks.

The lonely fan this laptop have is taking air from under it, out of tiny little "holes" that covers less than the fan's size. Also, Most of the heat from the laptop is getting dissipated by some kind aluminum paper I believe. (I'm actually not sure what this aluminum thing is made for but you will see it if you ever open the Envy m6 from under) This means that the heat get dissipated UNDER the laptop.

This leads us to the conclusion that the ventilation hole that provides air to the cooling fan aren't only too narroy, but also, it pulls HOT AIR into the system. This is the same for the exhaust holes, they are made out of very thick plastic molded bands, and if you look carefully inside of it, you will see smaller plastic fins, making the space for the air to come out extremely restricted.

So, as a conclusion, the Envy m6 have a very poorly designed cooling system that have no room to put out its air efficiently and who takes its air from under the laptop, from air that is getting warmed up a lot by the bottom part of the case that actually dissipates the entire system's heat under the case, at the same place where the intake air comes from.

Don't expect getting any good result from this laptop, it's never been made to be used as a gaming pc anyway, it is clearly presented as a "family notebook"

Sorry if I break your hopes but this issue isn't about what's inside the computer. But about how it has been made at the very beggining.

I completely agree with when it comes to the poor design of the machine and the ridiculous cooling project of it. Just to clarify I never expected for this laptop to have a gaming desktop performance and also I'm well aware that there are better designed, with better specs gaming laptops in the market from other brands (Alienware, Aorus, MSI, etc etc). The reason why I consider the Envy as gaming laptop is simply because I can indeed play many of recent games on it (Battlefield, COD, Watch Dogs are just some of them). Obviously I would never expect to run them in Full HD with all sets on Ultra but can play most them comfortably in HD with settings on Medium. Anyway I'm well happy when it comes to the performance of the laptop itself (specially for the price it was I couldn't get a better deal). The only issue (big freaking issue) is the stupid cooling problem.

I have been doing some tests and reboots using the last Catalyst driver and it seems that the driver that causes all the problems is the "AMD Display Driver". It is the only one from the whole package that makes my laptop to go into overheat. And I am pretty sure that he is the one to blame because the system overheats almost as instantaneously. And as soon as I uninstalled it I could play any games for hours without ever overheating. By the way I am using the latest Catalyst driver.

I'm finding this a better solution then cutting down the processors clock. I would be interesting to see if there's a version of this "AMD Display Driver" that doesn't make the laptop to overheat.

Hope this shed some light in future attempts to fix the problem and maybe helped you with your laptop as well.

 

[EmileBV]

Well, I think i found an obvious solution... that I just finished doing.

As I said in my last post, the real problem with this laptop is the fan itself. The physical object that is the computer. The cooling capacity. Call it how you like, but it needs to be clean.

So, I simply watched this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwdapzw8UJA&list=LLmmWTXr532c6BUFkR88WfSA&index=2
And after that I had a better Idea of the layout of the laptop and also I was feeling a lot more secure about opening my laptop and playing around in it. So I did.

It wasn't easy as showed in the video because this guy obviously use a brand new Envy m6, but I was able to open the machine and get a lot of stuff out of it. Of course, you don't need to get the motherboard (or in this case, the "Logicboard") out of the laptop and I would say that you shouldn't unless you have some real problems with the laptop or you plan on completely replacing the parts of it or to scrap it all.

In fact, I simply removed everything until I had access to the fan. Once I did, I removed it and there was the problem: a wall of dust on the heatsink between the fan and the heatpipe. So I got my little Shop-Vac and cleaned everything up in this area, including the fan itself of course. Now the air have as much space to move than when I bought the laptop.

So, this is pretty much the most realistic way of getting rid of the overheating problem. Also, as an explanation, when I (or you) bought this laptop, it had awesome performances, the aluminium was amazingly cold and I was able to play and finish Bioshock Infinite on this laptop without any problem with graphics on low (or medium, I don't really remember). Skyrim wasn't an issue as well. As time passed, trying to play games that were requiring the same performances was getting the laptop a lot warmer than before. And lately, opening any game or application that was a tiny bit performance hungry was making the laptop shutdown after a couple minutes with the overheating error on reboot.

The conclusion? Dust accumulate with time and use of the laptop. So, cleaning up the fan, which is the only way of cooling down the laptop, should be something done at least once every 3 months. Laptops use the same cooling system as desktops, simple airflow throught a heatsink. We clean up our desktops because dust always gets inside of it, so it should be the same for laptops.

I hope this fixes your problem because for me, now I have a constant flow of cool air coming out of the laptop.

/!\ VERY IMPORTANT BEFORE DISASSEMBLING THE ENVY M6 /!\

If you have the model with the backlit keyboard, there will be 2 wires coming out of the keyboard. The very large one is for the keyboard itself and the tiny one on the middle of the keyboard is for the backlights. The backlight wire does NOT have any form of plastic connector on its end, so to unplug it, pull VERY LIGHTLY the black part of the connector and then pull the wire out of it.

DO NOT TRY TO REMOVE THE WIRE BY HOLDING THE WHITE PART OF THE CONNECTOR
This part is soldered onto the motherboard directly with the pins that makes the connection. If you even move it just a tiny bit out of the tiny steel brackets the connector pins will bend, break from the motherboard, and fly everywhere. There are only 4 pins but if they get teared off the motherboard, even if you find them, bend them back to their original shape and put them back inside the white connector, they still need to be soldered on the motherboard. Even if you place back the white connector, the backlights will never come back

as you can tell, this happened to me. I hope nobody do this error, even if the backlight is useless, it was part of the Envy m6's style.