u/That_Chemical_4588

Preface: I have a lot of soldering experience from hobbyist grade RC cars and helicopters in my youth.

I recently bought a 100w chinese no name soldering station off Amazon to solder some 12ga wire/6mm bullet connectors. Put on the largest chisel tip, cranked up the heat to max and let it sit a few minutes, tinned the tip and got to work. It took me unusually long (45ish seconds)to heat the work until the solder flowed, kind of. Joints looked cold.

So I dug out my antique 90s Ungar(now weller) 45w #7760 for the first time in decades, and within 5 minutes I had some beautiful flawless joints.

The chinese unit's heating element looks just as big as the Ungar's when I changed the tips.

What is going on here, did I just buy some amazon junk , or do they use a different wattage measurement protocol for rating irons now?

I was repasting my X1 Carbon Gen 6 8650U. It has a mild undervolt of -80mV. I had a spare square of ~100x100mm silicone thermal pad laying around, and I decided to take the pad, fold it over, and use it to cover the copper heat pipes to add thermal mass, doing some minor trimming with scissors and using the scrap to cover a small area of leftover exposed heat pipe, covering everything over the CPU up to the fan.

After doing this modification, my ThinkPad is completely silent. The fans only come on when it is plugged in and the CPU has been running at full bore for 5 minutes, drawing 20-25W doing Windows updates. Even when the fan comes on, it's not at full bore, either. Otherwise, in normal use, when I'm working with it unplugged, my laptop is completely silent. The bottom cover sometimes does get quite warm, but this is not an issue because I seldom use it directly on my lap, 99% of the time usually on a desk.

Not bad for a mod that only took a few minutes and a few dollars.