Repaste GPU on G73 or send it to Asus?

I am stuck with the hard decision of shipping off my G73 too asus for them to diagnose/repair my GPU due to the laptop going into hibernation as it reaches +109C while running intensive 3D application, games, furmark, etc.

I have many years of experience repairing laptops at work and for personal. And I have never taken apart a laptop and ever had a problem with damaging components while performing assembly or disassembly. I also have extensive experience applying thermal compounds on desktop computer cpu coolers.

My options are

1. Ship the laptop to Asus, Shipping time + repair time (quoted 14 days for repair time only), and be out of my laptop for at least a week.

2. Disassemble the laptop, removing the factory thermal paste and applying Artic Silver to the GPU. Potentially voiding the remainder of my 2 year warranty.

What would you do?

 

Noxian,
I am in a similar boat as you. I am an test engineer for a different (NOT ASUS) notebook manufacturer, and I've done CPU/GPU replacements on those notebooks with no problem.

My solution is to wait until they have fixed the issues being discussed regarding the BIOS,vBIOS, and ATI drivers before I decide. When there is finally something "stable" to work with, then, for me, I can feel comfortable that the repaste is necessary.

My 2 pennies worth..

In Peace and Agape,
Trav...

 

109C to me is not something that will be fixed by a vBios update.

You have seen the pictures. Some of the G73s have horrible thermal paste jobs. They used way too much of it so the heatsink doesn't sit properly and practically all air pockets.

I don't think the paste itself is the issue. But on SOME it was applied horribly. Now I say SOME because there are many G73's that have the same temps as those who have redone their thermal stock.

Evan for example who doesn't post here often has the best idle and load temps I've seen and his are completely stock.

 

Send an email to asus and get an email back from them saying it wont void your warranty then you have something to stand on...

 

Hi Ziddy,

I hear ya... (read ya)
I have yet to break the 95c mark in my gaming usage, I play a older game (Joint Operations) - I'll be honest with you, I am still in the "baby" stage and a bit aprehensive to full throttle my "baby".. So I haven't ran through the "Furmark" testing to see just how hot she'll run. Maybe I am scared to find out that I've got a bad paste job on my "baby" too. What's the saying? "Ignorance is bliss"? Laugh - I do fully intend to throttle her up, but right now, I am just gonna baby her and wait for some stability on the GPU driver side. (excuses maybe). Besides, I don't have the time to tear her down right now, and I am thinking I'll take the other advise given and get a "won't void warranty" email from the ASUS Service people before I decide to take the plunge...

In Peace and Agape,
Trav...

 

It appears the only time I am able to get my GPU up to +109C is when I run furmark, I tested running BC2 and couldn't get it to get past 95C.

 

For stressing your G73. Stick to playing games. See how stable your temps and performance is, making sure the HD5870M isn't downclocking at high temps etc.

I am in complete agreement with Gary, Furmark is useless. Just because you can run Furmark stable now does not mean your GPU didn't suffer damage in the long term. Furmark stresses GPU's beyond what they were designed for. It tells us nothing from a practical or actual usage view.

This is a great post from Gary and I agree 100%
http://forum.notebookreview.com/6578625-post24.html

 

All it does is stress the GPU 100% to see the peak temperatures youre going to reach so you can see if youre within safe temperatures and not overheating. So were not supposed to do that? SC2 can bring the GPU to similar temperatures so i guess were not supposed to run that either.
If you have any more insight why Furmark is so bad please go ahead and offer some reasonable arguments.
All you keep saying is "Furmark is useless, dangerous and unrealistic". Tell my WHY. It certainly doesnt work any different than any high end game. The only difference is this software keeps the load at 100% at all times so you can see the peak temperatures faster instead of having to game for hours.

These furmark "arguments" really remind me of the movie Idiocracy;
[cabinet has been debating putting water on the plants instead of Brawndo]
Pvt. Joe Bowers: What *are* these electrolytes? Do you even know?
Secretary of State: They're... what they use to make Brawndo!
Pvt. Joe Bowers: But *why* do they use them to make Brawndo?
Secretary of Defense: [raises hand after a pause] Because Brawndo's got electrolytes.

Sounds similar?

BTW. the movie is worth watching if you havent watched it yet.

 

Noxian,

That's partly why I am still a little unsure about the whole repaste thing. Granted, those who do the repaste have been successful in getting lower temps when running Furmark, but that app was built to "push" the GPU beyond that which is normal use, and as such, I am not terribly concerned with my current daily use is going to "damage" the GPU and cause a meltdown. I don't get the ?SOD screens because I remain at stock level and the one game I am into, plays just fine, except for the "Creative" audio problem. No biggie, the Realtek HD Audio has pretty much the same capabilities, just called something different.

As I stated before, I am in a "holding pattern" with the repaste issue - And I will be sending an official request over to the ASUS support people regarding the warranty and opening/repasting the GPU heatsink.

In Peace and Agape,
Trav...

 

I agree with HellCry. We're paying for a chip that should be able to perform at full load for a few hours without overheating. FurMark just saturates the GPU with work, that's all. If we were overclocking it 25% and stressing it for a few hours then I would say that Gary has a point, but we're not. Your argument that we're pushing the 5870m harder than it was meant to be is to imply the chip is not designed to operate at full load, which is false.

To Noxian. If you're fairly comfortable working with computer hardware, disassembling the g73 isn't a huge stretch. This was my first laptop disassembly, and it went without a hitch. It sounds like you wouldn't have a problem managing without having to RMA.

 

Well I guess I will keep a close eye on it, if Gary say the max temp is 114C for the 5870 and I never reach that while playing games then I guess the card is running within spec... It may not be optimal but oh well.

I can sorta understand how they can say stress test arent real world test and the point of the stress test is to generate as much load on the part as possible rather than optimizing for performance. I know I had a AMD 4800+ X2 that would max out on temps if I ran linepack on the factory cooler. If I put in a Tuniq tower 120 it would run it all day long without a problem...

Heck I cant even run linkpack with the Asus powerboost on wiht my G73 without it shutting down because of heat, when I run it without the powerboost it completes fine.

 

There is a lot of disagreement on the validity of what Furmark does beyond being really good at getting as much of the GPU pumping as possible. It doesn't represent how games use the GPU. I've never seen any game get the temps up where Furmark will.

I have gotten my G73 to shutdown when running Furmark. Games are fine and tend to run 20-30C cooler.

There's no doubt that the G73's GPU cooler could be beefier, but that comes with cost. If it works adequately for things other than Furmark, I think it does its job. Furmark isn't very entertaining, after all.

 

Furmark would be more interesting if that dragon started eating the hairy donut.

 

I can speak from experience because my G73 recently started to overheat worse and worse everyday to the point where the only game i could play without it overheating to the point of it shutting itself down was world of warcraft and even that was putting the GPU to 84-90C. Other games would have the GPU hitting 90-100C within 5 minutes of play. So today i decided to take action into my own hands. I had some extra arctic silver "ceramique" thermal paste left over from a couple of xbox 360's i repasted so i decided to repaste the GPU and CPU of the G73 and it made a WORLD of difference. Stripping the laptop down was a little bit of work but there is a very good disassembly video on youtube for the G73 that walks you through all the steps of stripping it down to the underside of the motherboard to access the GPU. Anyways, after replacing the ty thermal paste that ASUS put on there (was way too much and was already dried up and flakey) my temperatures are now 10-30C cooler. My Temperatures before and after are as follows

Stock Paste
Idle 700x1000 clocks - 69C
Idle 250x500 Clocks - 59C
100% load while gaming 700x1000 - 100-110C (with the exception of WoW which ran at 84-87C)

Repaste with Arctic Silver "Ceramique"
Idle 700x1000 - 54C
Idle 250x500 - 48C
100% load while gaming 700x1000 - 70C Average (Highest i saw was 77C after an hour of playing Mafia 2, everything else seems to stay at around 70C)

So as you can clearly see ASUS did a ty job with the thermal pasting of the chips in this laptop (at least mine anyways). Now my temps stay so low that i never even hear the fans anymore because they no longer need to spin up to ridiculous speeds due to heat. Also since the GPU and CPU are running cooler now it almost seems like my games are running smoother now too, could be just my imagination but it looks that way.

If anyone else is wondering whether to open theirs or send it off to ASUS for GSOD or overheating problems i say just do it yourself and save yourself 3-4 weeks without a laptop. The only two problems i had with my G73 was GSOD and overheating, so just reflash the vBIOS and repaste the chips and ur good to go.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I'm just like Noxian: lots of experience with desktops, none with laptops. I've seen the video and been reading all the "repaste experience" by everone.

I know I'll repaste some day. I'm just waiting for the free time to have the peace of mind to take the time it takes and not rush. For now temps in games reach 100 without going over...they hover around 97°C.

Maybe next month... but it's good to read about everyone's experience, it'll make it easy when the day comes.

 

I'm running off stock paste with new BIOS / drivers. My temps never go past 76 on ANY game for ANY amount of playtime. Furmark brings my temps up to 94 within 30 minutes, at which point I realized how ridiculous it was to purposely bash your video card's head against a fluffy donut. My laptop runs everything perfectly fine and never gets hot. Even if I did run Furmark for 8 hours and GSODed, it wouldn't make me want to go repaste. I'm perfectly happy with my mid-70s while playing the latest games.

 

Let's see if it holds up after 2-3 months.

To those on the fence about repasting: C'mon guys! Just do it!! Even I did it, and it was my first laptop disassembly, and I'm a girl! And use ICD7.

 

LOL at - "and I'm a girl"

 

I am going to try and find some ICD7 retail today, my comp shuts down when gaming.

 

I agree about the 2-3 months part cuz thats about how old my laptop is and thats all it took for the thermal paste to dry up and be useless. Also i have heard that Tuniq TX-4 is the best thermal paste out there. Seen a review on it with temp differences and i gotta say i was impressed....if i had that on my gpu instead of AS Ceramique i think my temps would even be another 5-10C cooler. It's impressive stuff (TX-4 that is)

 

gee... after this fun conversation I monitored my temps in a game I've played and monitored before... they went up... now I'm going up to 101 even though my ambient is perhaps lower than it was last time I checked... it looks like my repaste is going to happen before Xmas... I better start figuring out a way to get kids and wife out of my way "did you need those little screws?"... "YEEESS! put them down!!!" NOW!

 

I'm yet to see a solid, scientific review of TX-4, or a proper repaste posting using it. On the other hand, IC Diamond 7 has been beaten to death here.

 

While I don't expect this to change your mind Hellcry, I figure others might find it interesting these quotes at Anandtech.com.
Anandtech is a pretty reputable site so I think what they is worth consideration.

The following is from Anandtech about the Clevo X7200 Nvidia 480m SLI review that should still be at the top page of the site where they said the following about Furmark:

We fired up Furmark to see what would happen, and the results were a bit scary. Upon initialization, Furmark caused the X7200 to use around 325W with the GPUs starting at just 41/50C; but then power draw, temperatures, and noise levels kept going up...and up...and up!. The X7200 finally reached a maximum power draw of 410W before some sort of protection kicked in and the power brick shut down—and rendering performance drops from 40FPS to around 5FPS in Furmark. Unplugging the power brick from the wall and then plugging it back in restored normal performance, but then the cycle would repeat. Note that for this to occur, we had to use the Windows "High Performance" profile as well as setting the Clevo power utility (called "Power Conservation Mode" and accessible via a system tray icon) to "Performance" or "Balanced", the latter being the key. If we set the Clevo utility (in the system tray) to "Energy Star", power draw never exceeded 350W, though it does appear to limit system performance if power draw gets too high. Some have called Furmark a "power virus", and we would agree that the load it places on GPUs is unrealistic compared to anything else we've encountered. Running games, we spiked at a maximum power draw of "just" 310W, which is far more reasonable.

And...

Here's a look at the system temperatures—after running Furmark for 30 minutes with the "Energy Star" mode activated. GPU temperatures top out at a toasty 102C for the primary GPU and only 77C for the secondary, while CPU temperatures max out at 69-74C. Note that we also ran Cinebench to stress the CPU, as Furmark doesn't hit the CPU that much. The HDD topped out at 41C, which is perfectly acceptable. When we skip Furmark and use games and other applications, the maximum GPU temperature on GPU1 drops to 92C, again illustrating how much more demanding Furmark is compared to normal games.

In other words - Furmark is a Hustle!

 

This:

And this

Shows us this X7200 beast is flawed in more than one way. The power brick is to small. It cuts out even when the CPU is not fully loaded. And the cooling of GPU 1 sucks. Either by design or by a poor TIM job.
This is what Furmark is about. To stress a system so that flaws will show up. No other way around it.
So IMO it is back to the drawing boards CLEVO.

 

Lol... Notebookcheck runs both Furmark and Prime95 together as a standard protocol for testing notebooks, and many of them can handle it just fine. Who is husling who here?

 

The SLI 480m (which are just a stupid choice to do SLI with their insane power draw and heat emisions) + desktop i7 were just too much for a notebook, you cant chalk that up to furmark if the machine is still flawed (cant provide enough power lol). Thats one poor argument you have there in my oppinion, but youre free to believe whoever you want.
Laptops with SLI/Crossfire are a fail just by definition in my oppinion... I had the Crossfire 3870 AW M17 and the microstuttering was just horrible, not to mention the heat and fan noise of that machine. That one was a real bad choice.
For comparison i had a D900F with a GTX 280m and an i7-950 and it ran furmark maxed out for as long as i wanted at incredibly low temperatures without a single hiccup.
Same goes for every other desktop and laptop i ever owned. Some of us like furmark becouse it shows any problems faster than any other software, some people avoid it like the plauge. Its always been like that and its pointless to keep bickering about it...

 

Just finished Repasting with some Arctic Silver. Absolutely HUGE temperature drops.

 

Define "huge"

 

Me. :laugh:

 

I am still waiting my ICD to come, I have ordered it yesterday.

 

About 30-35°C drop off the top end, (used to overheat and shut down @ 110°C

About 20°C drop off the idle temps, idles around 60-70 C° now

Totally did the whole pasting job without wrecking anything! good as new!

I used Arctic Silver, because I had some left over from a previous computer build. I also used canned air to blast the heatsinks, that has probably helped temps too.

 

idles between 60-70C? that isn't a great idle temp

 

I got similar temps at load, with ICD (and I know it's been done properly .

Just fyi.

 

dont forget to blow out the vents if you never did that, it could lower another 20

 

Wow!! I hope ASUS can learn from this and try to do a better job with thermal paste.

 

It probably could have been repasted better, but at least my machine never overheats any more I'm happy with my results

Just running some temps again to confirm my primary findings, idles at about 60°C, and its strangely steamy in here at the moment... like no shirt and still pretty hot >_>
I think this isn't too bad
I'm loving my laptop now.
I also flashed the Vbios the other day to solve some strange problems. Worked perfectly and my G73 is now without fault.

 

Hi people.

Got my G73JH-A2 currently running at 66/76/70 for GPU/Memory/VRM in idle. At full load, temps reach almost 100 easily. So i though of doing repaste. However, i would like to suggest me good TIM and thermal pads.

I am familiar with MX-2 and Arctic Silver, but there are more powerful solutions on market today. From this review the best one is Indigo extreme. But i doubt it can be applied on notebook CPU or GPU.
Second by performance is Prolimatech PK-1. Has any one used it?

Next is thermal pads. Are stock ones poor enough to be replaced?
Possible solution here is Phobya T-pads but i have to know what pad thickness to pick. Any one has any ideas here? And how about adding paste to both side of pads before applying? I have read it actually helps.

Thanks in advance.
SpuTnicK

 

MX is fine if you have some if not buy IC7 because its proven to be a good TIM.

You can either resuse the stock thermal pads which is what most do or you can pick up some new ones, I have tried and tested 0.5mm pads and found the heatsink to seat better for me and give couple of oC drop in temps over the memory.

See my signature for my results with IC7 and also a post of my first repaste which I used AS5. IC7 gave far better results.

 

Thanks for the tips, Dallers

 

Is there a security seal on the GPU and CPU?

 

Only on the CPU, nothing on the GPU.

 

Can you, please, explain what is a security seal?

 

Generally speaking, a security seal is something that has to be cut or broken to gain access. An example of the concept would be the plastic shrink wrap that you have to tear through to open a bottle of aspirin.

I haven't seen the seal on the G73 CPU, so someone else would have to tell us what materials are used and how it is configured.

 

It's a sticker that you cannot remove, only break to access certain parts. If it is broken, your warranty is considered voided. There's one on one of the CPU heatsink screws.

EDIT: ninja'ed by Me109K6.

The seal on the CPU is a yellow sticker on one of the HS screws.

 

Thanks, tijo.

 

It's a good thing for me that I joined TeamROG... and now am Authorized to remove that sticker.

 

I can't believe that up until now I thought both GPU and CPU had seals - I even posted a thread looking for someone authorized by Asus to do the GPU repaste.

Anyone near DC that's done this a few times want to do mine? I'll pay for time and IC7...

Not to get off topic, but what's the word on G73 CPU repastes - necessary or not?

Thanks!

 

The CPU isn't necessary, just the GPU. As for the repaste, if you're will to come up to NY...

 

Thanks, Chastity!

If I don't get it done beforehand, I'll let you know the next time I visit my in-laws in southern Connecticut. It would give me a perfect excuse to 'disappear' for several hours!

 

That works... I have a sister in Connecticut too.