G73JH About to Lose Warranty

My laptop has less than a week left on my 3 year warranty and would like to do a stress test of some sort on it to find any problems while they are still covered. What are some problems that I should look for? I already had to send it in to get one of the back fans replaced and they disconnected my bluetooth adapter in the process. Thanks for any help.

 

1. FurMark: VGA Stress Test, Graphics Card and GPU Stability Test, Burn-in Test, OpenGL Benchmark and GPU Temperature | oZone3D.Net = great way to stess test GPU (I would not run it for extented time periods though ~ 15 minutes)
2. Depending on what hard drive you have (most came with seagates) D/L the version of Seatools that run outside windows to test hard drive
3. Memtest PassMark MemTest86 - Memory Diagnostic Tool for RAM testing
4. Look closely through device manager and eventviewer for any issues, if in doubt let us know.

 

Thank you for your response. I checked the HDD and the memory and both of them gave no errors. However when I put a load on the GPU the temp was maxed at 108ºC. I am assuming that this is too high. Is there something in particular that I should look for in the eventviewer? There are errors but none of them seem to be of any importance.

 

I presume you have never repasted? 108C is way too high, with a good thermal repaste of the GPU Furmark usually max's out at about 78-80C!

Although cleaning fan out with air may lower it a bit, if I was you I would carefully disassemble it, clean the fans, and repaste the GPU with a decent compound. As long as you are careful, read the guides, and watch the videos, should be no problem. Also as the laptop was opened when it was serviced (inexpertly if they disconnected the bluetooth!) it should be a bit easier, as the keyboard is hopefully not stuck as fast as stock.

As long as you don't break anything it is worth doing this during warranty, then if inexplicably something doesn't work after the repaste you can always send it off. Have a look at all the guides in the "read this first" section and you will hopefully find it doesn't look too hard.

If you repaste it also makes it easier to overclock the card a bit through the catalyst control centre overdrive. With a small overclock there I am quite happy with my G73JH's performance on new games, so can happily wait a bit before upgrading.

If the laptop is working fine in windows and games, not crashing/resetting/blue screening or locking up at all, then I wouldn't expect anything relevant in event viewer.

 

I might have phrased that wrong. I meant that I knew that that was too high. I had already gotten a RMA from ASUS. The problem with me doing it is that I will not have the time to do it till after it is no longer covered as I have to study for one of my EE classes. I have also never taken apart a laptop before. I have done a repasting on a CPU in a desktop. So while the chances of me doing it wrong is low I still would rather have someone else do it while I can and if they mess it up then I will do it myself. The only downside that I can see is that I will lose my laptop for 2-3 weeks since I have to ship it across the country. But I have my surface pro that I can use in the meantime. Thank you for your suggestions, I will most likely open it up once the warranty is gone and give it a good cleaning as I am sure ASUS will not do.

 

I also just did a stress test for my CPU with Prime95 and found that it was getting up to 100ºC under heavy load. It did not finish the test as I started to worry about physical damage to the CPU. Could there also be a problem with the paste on the CPU as well? Or could this be caused by the hot GPU? When I was doing the Prime95 test the GPU was at 78ºC.

 

The CPU will just throttle it's speed down when it reaches 100C, so unlikely it will fry itself. If it gets much over 100 it will just shutdown. That is beside the point though as it shouldn't get anywhere near that temperature even under a CPU stress test. Same story as your GPU, paste has degraded. You would get a massive drop if you put some ICD7 or similar paste on it. Perfect time to do it is after warranty runs out, as breaking the CPU seal invalidates the warranty.

The CPU has a separate cooling fan and heat-sink, so it isn't linked to the GPU. You can have one running cold, the other super hot. My CPU is a 920xm, which runs a bit hotter as higher clocked, and gets to a max of 80C with Prime95. With ambient temperature of 25C you'd expect an idle of under 40C.

Bottom line is as a CPU stress test puts a huge load on the CPU, way more than any game does, it isn't really an issue unless the noise of the fan bothers you. Unless you are doing CPU intensive work with the laptop (converting video files, rendering CAD stuff etc) I would be surprised if it got very high under normal/gaming use. Check it out with HWinfo.

Personally I like the laptop to run nice and quiet, and also with less heat over time the components are likely to have a longer life (but will most likely be obsolete by the time they die anyway)!

You could send it to ASUS as you mentioned in the last post, but as it is working fine bar needing a re-paste I would be wary. Might come back in a worse state, with temps no better. Plenty of horror stories on here. You could wait a few weeks till you have the time, then do a great job on it yourself

 

I have been thinking of getting a new Haswell chip and replacing my current 720Q. Do you know if the newest generation is compatible with the mb? I see that they have different sockets. Also how difficult is it to replace it?

 

Not a snowballs chance unfortunately.

 

Thanks for all of the replies. I decided to send it off as I was going to visit my parents for a week and would not need it anyways. They payed for express shipping which I was surprised at and when they got it it was fixed the same day. I got it back and on the repair summary it says:

FAN Error

Replace G73JH TH GPU MODULE ASSY

BIOS Error

Replace G73JH MAIN_BD._0M/AS (WO/TV)

I googled the part names and it seems that they replaced my mobo and the entire GPU heatsink and fan. Is this right? It seems more likely since when I popped in my drive that I saved and booted up windows it told me that it was no longer activated and I had to call microsoft to reactivate it. I ran the stress test again and the max the CPU got to was the high 50s and the GPU got to the 60s. The only problem now is that the GPU fan always turns on when I turn on the computer and is much louder than what it was before. I checked the BIOS and it was the current 213. Is there a way that I can edit the fan settings?

 

Have you tried setting BIOS defaults? Full fan speed could indicate a bad temp sensor. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest for ASUS to give you bad hardware and not test it. Apparently nobody told you about how iffy their RMA services are.

Your improved temps may be a result of the fan spinning at max speed, perhaps faster than it will normally run.