Asus G51Vx shuts down without warning - overheating?

Alright guys, I'm sorry to barge in like this but I'm mad frustrated at my beloved Asus G51Vx.

So I've had this lad since late 2009 and last July, it just shut down on me for no reason while I was doing some work. ( Admittedly, perhaps my frequent gaming did it in. ) It would last about 5-10 minutes before it abruptly shut down. I opened up the back plate, did some cleaning on the fan (really minor stuff - didn't know what I was doing) and it would last til about 30 minutes before it would shut down abruptly again.

I had it sent to a service centre and they sent it back to me because they wanted to reformat the hard disk, because they said they tested the laptop with their hard disk and there was no problem at all. I wanted to salvage my data first, but to my amazement, the laptop really did recover although the tech guys did nothing to it. It would last as long as I let it.

But, yesterday the problem showed up again when I hooked it up to the TV via HDMI. It's been going on ever since, shutting down 15 minutes in.

I'm going to go ahead and deduce that the fan is clogged up with dust. I opened it again, took a look at it, can't really say that it's stuffed up though. But when it shuts down, I can feel that the surrounding area of the fan becomes hot.

I want to attempt to clean this thing myself - just waiting for compressed air to arrive. How would you guys suggest I go about doing it? Should I remove the fan first? Also, which direction should I spray the air to? Attached some pictures.





Should I do it through the vent/opening and towards the system?


Just above the fan downwards?

I googled around for hours, checked the sticky but there doesn't seem to be any definitive guide on how to clean a laptop fan (one guy was spraying the air on top of the fan and the other towards the fan). Any help would really be appreciated. Thank you guys!

p/s: If any of you would so much as to care to draw arrows - I will be indebted to you for life!

 

Hi JackOReilly,
First thing i would do is get a program that tells you temps, that way you can really narrow it down to see if it is an actual overheating issue. HWMonitor is a great free program for that.

If if indeed is overheating, which sounds like it could be the case then you'll want to clean out the fans, always blow out not in. You could also want to repaste the cpu and gpu. This will require removing the heat sinks which will also void your warranty. I see you mentioned you bought it in 2009, so the 2yr warranty could be expired anyway. Get some good stuff like IC Diamond. A combination of blowing out the fans and repasting it could help your temps in turn helping your stability.

 

yeah could be overheating, i did the vent mod and repaste on the gpu and still hit about 91 depending on how hot it is.

the gtx 260m will throttle first then it will shutdown at about 113c i believe.

 

Hello, thanks for replying! I actually bought it in November, so there's still three months away from it being expired but I would rather do this myself if I could. I installed a temp-monitoring software and I will attach the picture below. Apparently only the GPU heats up - the other seems pretty ok considering I was playing a hi-def movie. What do you think I should do? Clean the fan and repaste the GPU? Thanks!

The picture was taken a sec before the laptop shut down. Did you also experience abrupt shutting down?

 

Wow that GPU temp is really high. This was from watching a movie?

I would definitely re-paste and make sure fans are working correctly.

I can't tell from your photos for sure but it doesn't look like you have a lot of dust in your fan.
With those high temps your fan should be running high enough to hear it. Can you you feel air flow coming out of the fan?

I'm also wondering what kind of movie player would cause the gpu to go that high. What are your temps if you run furmark??

Also don't let the compressed air spin the fan too much. That can be hard on the fan.

 

Thanks for the reminder! I read from somewhere that I shouldn't let the fan turn while spraying the air, but it slipped my mind.

I was using VLC Media Player and playing a 1080p H.264 movie, but I gather from your response that it shouldn't even have gone to 118C?

Now I'm going to give my laptop a bit of a rest and then I'll get back to you with the FurMark log. It's looking more and more obvious that I should clean the fan and heatsink + repasting the GPU!

Do you have any recommendation on what kind of brand should I get for the paste or will anything off eBay do?

Thank you so much for your time!

 

Holy moly 118C! I'm surprised it even got that high before that shut down. When playing a movie you should maybe be 60-70, top end gaming for long periods of time 90-95C max
The CPU temps also are much higher then they should be for just watching a movie. Are you feeling hot air blow out of the vent?

If you dont feel like sending it in you should repaste for sure. Get IC Diamond I think its the best. Keep in mind doing this yourself will void the warranty. If you're not comfortable doing so you can always send it in for warranty.