G73JH 5870 Overheating? Heres what my problem was.....

Well after taking apart my G73JH several times and trying to reseat/reapply thermal pads/grease my results just werent getting any better. So heres what I did, I removed all grease and thermal pads from the HS and 5870 and seated the heatsink on the 5870 and then tightened it down. Took my flashlight and examined all the gaps from the card to the heatsink and noticed that it appeared something was warped. So I removed the heatsink and looked at the card alone, it looked flat, no warps. Then I looked at the heatsink alone, was flat as well no warps, so it must be the installation causing the warp something wasn't lining up properly and causing the gaps. And there it was, theres 2 pieces of aluminum coming out of the main piece of the heatsink, one of which (right side) is actually making contact with chips on the board, too much contact, so much so that it was raising the rest of the heatsink off the entire top row of ram and most of the right row and maybe even part of the GPU core. Unfortunately when trying to bend it back some it came clean off the rest of the heatsink, wont be hard to reattach, but before I did so I remounted the heatsink to the video card and low and behold its flush against the ram and gpu all the way around. results and pictures soon to come....

 

So your a master of taking apart the G73 now eh? How hard do you think it was to get it down to the cpu level and then back together?

I still think about putting a QX9200 in here one day but read the stories about those guys that broke there G73 taking it apart (and they were not computer noobs)

 

well its quite easy after you follow the disassembly video on youtube the first time, i think I could do the full disassembly/reassembly in about 15mins lol. You shouldnt break anything, you remove all the ribbons and screws everything pops apart without any issues at all.

 

nice, awaiting pics and results
I am having an overheating issue as well. on the same boat as you.

 

Heres a link to the photos: 5870M - a set on Flickr
I have my finger on the piece that is causing the problem in both of the pictures, if you look closely in the second pic you can see how the piece is no where near matching up to the rest of the heatsink when its flush on the board, it was causing the board to warp from the pressure. Also take note that I was able to bend it slightly before it came off, so If i was to bend it back it would be even more offset. I cant say I would recommend doing this so much as the aluminum snaps very easily when trying to bend it

 

I don't see anything :\

 

And the difference in temps are great. Before I could run furmark for 1 minute and my system would shut down after it hit 110C now after 5mins its topping out around 105C, no more shut downs exactly what I was going for. Also I noticed it actually took 3mins of furmark before the GPU core hit 82 and the fans went into high speed where before it took about 30secs. As well as the mem temps used to shoot from 70ish idle to 90 in about 5 seconds where now they shoot to about 80 but slowly rise from there over a couple minutes.

 

Nice job. My congrats! You have solved your problem! It seems to me, that more and more people can solve their overheating problem themselves. Credit to BTOTech for video.

 

Thanks, and thanks to BTOTech for the video, I had to fix this myself, I am in kuwait til December for the military and I didnt want to go a month or more without my laptop waiting on a "possible" fix from Asus.

 

I re-pasted my G73 tonight and what I found was that yes the heatsink is anything but ideal. The contact area for the GPU core is poor and half of it is getting poor contact (you can see this in how the paste is distributed. For me an ultra thin layer did not work because not all of the core made contact with the paste. However I don't think it is affected by the VRM "arm" because I bent it slightly to test if it was the cause and this didn't improve GPU contact.

It's a combination of a less than great heatsink and maybe not enough screw pressure. There's little that can be done to correct this that I can see.

 

How thick and resistant are the thermal pads for the RAM?

Could they resist getting a good contact with the core?

If the cooler isn't properly flat it could indicate why TSS1 is so hot compared to the other 2 sensors. I noticed that people that changed their paste had TSS1 a lot closer to the other 2 sensors.

 

You can ask Madrake. I know he did change the thermal pads when he redid the paste.

But he also lapped the heatsink also. He did the whole shebang.

 

Lol this is the second time you mentioned putting a Core2Quad in your i7 machine ..


If you take your time you wont have any issues though... Just make sure your properly rested hint hint...

I ripped mine apart hours after i got it and this was before there was a video(wasnt much fun being the first to have the G73 at that point) and didnt have any problems other then yanking off the keyboard which was basically epoxied to the chassis...

 

What will they use next? - coffin nails?

 

Doh lol

Its been a long week.

Yeah I still dream about 4ghz bliss for video encoding. 1.8ghz just is not up to my standards. Id be quite happy with 3.5-3.6ghz stable.

 

well that damn tape isnt that bad if you take an ear bud soaked in isopropyl alcohol(spirit) and use it to slowly dissolve the solvent and pull at the same time.. it takes a lot of time,patience and spirit but i managed to get it done w/o too much difficulty when i had opened mine up to change the thermal compound...
removed the tape afterwards, though i think a little more flex in the KB now..

 

I think that the pads could be causing some trouble with the core making good contact. I'm sure that part of it is also that the heatsink isn't very flat overall though.

The screws don't allow a lot of pressure. But more pressure from them might cause a board to flex excessively. I think they should have added another screw or two for the pad areas.

 

OK. It looks like have to redo my paste and do something about how the cooler fits the core. It looks like TSS1 doesn't have to be so hot. It looks like it is an indication that the cooler isn't seated correctly.