Dell Latitude E6430 Upgrade

My work Dell Latitude E6410 was replaced with a Dell Latitude E6430. Aesthetically, I preferred the E6410. The boxy look worked for me. The E6430 is clam shaped and the area around the keyboard is covered with a soft rubbery material. In general, I don't like that material because once it starts to breakdown, it gets very sticky.

Specifications:

• Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3740QM CPU @ 2.70GHz
• Memory: 16GB
• HDD: Samsung SSD PM830 2.5" 7mm 256GB
• Video: Intel HD Graphics 4000/NVidia NVS 5200M

Unlike the E6410, the bottom plate is slightly more difficult to remove. You have to remove the hard drive and 3 screws. Once the bottom plate is removed, the guts of the laptop are easily accessible. The laptop has 3 mini PCIe slots. There are 2 free mini PCIe slots on the upper right hand side of the laptop (see below). The 2 free slots are stacked on top of each other.

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3740QM CPU @ 2.70GHz

NVidia NVS 5200M

Intel Southbridge

The Intel Southbridge has no thermal compound on it and the heatsink doesn't actually touch the chip. This is a candidate for a copper shim. There's a fairly large gap and my guess it's somewhere between a 1.0mm and 1.5mm. I would recommend getting a multipack (see this listing on eBay for example) and use the copper shim with the best fit. In my experience, I've run into issues where the chipset controller can overheat causing system instability.

Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (633ANHMW)

Upgrade Options
The stock Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3740QM CPU @ 2.70GHz looks like it can be upgraded. The Dell Latitude E6430 comes equipped with an Mobile Intel® QM77 Express Chipset (Intel® BD82QM77 PCH). The Intel QM77 is compatible with Intel® Core™ i7-3940XM CPU Extreme Edition @ 3.0GHz and Intel® Core™ i7-3840QM CPU @ 2.80GHz. I'm not confident about the extreme edition, but the i7-3840QM is promising. Although there's not a large clock rate increase, the cache size is significantly larger. The i7-3740QM has a 6MB cache whereas the i7-3840QM has a 8MB cache.

Per the specifications for the Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3740QM CPU @ 2.70GHz, the maximum memory supported is 32GB.

The Dell Latitude E6430 came with a 256GB SSD. 256GB isn't enough space for me, so I bought a 2nd HDD caddy for an additional 1TB HDD. The good thing about Dell Latitudes is that they're common enough that the 2nd HDD caddies have the correct molding so that it doesn't look awful.

2016-02-19 Update

Even with the standard cooling mod switching out the stock thermal compound with Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound, under moderate stress, the Dell Latitude E6430 quickly heats up to 105C. I found website that recommended put additional heatsinks on the heatsink within the remaining space in the case. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find that website, so I can't link to it, sorry. If anybody runs into it, let me know and I'll add the link here.

You'll notice here that the first thing I did was scrub off the black paint on the heatsink. Personally, I think this helps. The paint potentially insulates the heatsink and doesn't let it release as much heat as possible for the sake of aesthetics.

This was my first attempt at helping the heatsink by using a strip of thermal pad and 15x15x0.5mm copper shims.

2nd attempt with 32x22x5mm heatsinks from ebay.com.

The thermal pad wasn't very good at transferring the heat so I switched out the thermal pad with double sided thermal tape. I got a strip of 100x100mm 3M thermal adhesive tape from ebay.com and used that to mount the heatsink onto the thermal pipe and moved 3 copper shims on a thermal pad to the left side of the heat pipe.

On the right side, I placed 2 copper shims over a strip of thermal pad.

There was some left over space, so I used 2 20x11x5mm heatsinks from ebay.com.

The Dell Latitude E6430 still hits 105C but idles much lower (in the high 40's) and the E6430 can take a heavier work load.