High Temperatures on G50V after graphics card repair

Hey everyone,
I recently had issues with my G50V-A2's graphics card (little sparkly red dots would show up every now and then), so I sent it to ASUS INDY for repair. After getting it back (apparently they changed the graphics card), I've been noticing higher temperatures across the board than I was used to before. Since I had the red dots issue, I've been using CPUID Hardware Monitor and on average, I see my graphics card idling around 57-60C whereas before it was in the lower fifties. Further, my CPU cores also seem to be running hotter (idling around 52C). Worse, during games, my GPU goes up to 102-105C whereas previously it never went above 95C. CPU cores also shoot up to 80C.

Should I be concerned? Is there a possibility that the repair wasn't done entirely right (i.e., bad thermal paste or something)? The other day, my Windows 7 switched from Aero Glass to Aero Basic randomly, and I saw some weird temperature and fan speed fluctuations for about 2 minutes. It went back to normal after that, but made me really concerned.

Thanks in advance!

 

Sounds like a repaste is in order. Either they didnt do it at all or they did it very badly. Other possibilities could be there as well but Its a crap shoot until we check something.

Sounds like they removed the heatsink, changed the card and put the heatsink back on, MAYBE even have gone as far to redo the card paste and not the cpu.

I wouldnt check it until you have paste and cleaner on hand, but this is the first step I would do.

 

I was thinking about doing that as the first step, but I wanted to know if there could be other reasons for the higher temperature. I've never dealt with thermal paste personally, but does it have to burn-in for a while before you improvements? It's been about 3 weeks since I got back my laptop so I would guess if there was burning-in to be done, it should have happened by now.

What cleaner and thermal paste would you recommend?

 

I use Artic silver 5, but thats up to you. Articlean is a great cleaning system and I recommend it no matter what paste you choose. While a tiny tube of as5 will do many processors and even trys the articlean will be enough to clean every computer in your neighborhood.

The key to the whole thing is the paste shouldnt be any thicker than it needs to ensure 100% contact between the two surfaces. The second time i did it I used a razer blade to spread and thin the paste and got better results then the method using a credit card to spread it. Thin enough to where its not transparent with AS5 but damn near it seems to be the recommendation. You will have to take the heatsink's imperfections and alignment with the surfaces into account however. Contact is contact and if its not made, it wont cool properly. An out of alignment will cause a need for thicker paste one side of a chip and more imperfections overall thicker.

Thicker it is the less efficient the heat transfer is, but as i said contact is contact. I would do it as thin as possible and try it out or check it and redo it just to be safe, remember after applying paste if te heat sink is removed it has to be redone again.

As far as other causes, the hotter the card runs the hotter the cpu will get versus a cooler card. Could be a very hot chip, not all are created equal. This i doubt very much and the paste is suspect to me.