A8jp randomly turns itself off

I've had my A8jp for about a year now and have never had any troubles with it. I stopped playing WoW, Lotro, COD4 and etc, but i now occasionally play Gunz Online. It's a very low graphics game and take sup very little memory use.

I never turn my laptop off through shut down, i always just close it and let it stay on standby. Now i know the a8jp has a heating problem from the right hand side, but i've gotten used to hit and i've even purchased a laptop cooler (targus) for about 25$.

recently my laptop (i'm assuming it overheats) turns itself completely off (the battery's full) and i cannot turn it back on for about 10 minutes. This has only happened when i'm in the game. anyone know the solution or can at least identify the problem?

 

Dust buildup?

Check the dust cleaning guide on the ASUS Info Booth sticky.

 

It should be overheating. I experienced the symptoms as yours, except that my notebook had the CPU/GPU fan completely stopped running and it overheats. After servicing it seems to be back to normal. As E.B.E mentioned, it could be dust buildup and it'll need cleaning up.

 

thanks muchos i'll try the dust cleanup then see if it's overheating aftewards!

 

Definitely sounds like an overheating problem. The motherboard/CPU has a built in feature to shut down once temperatures reach a certain level...

Definitely clean out all of the dust from the heatsink/vents and all should be well.

 

just cleaned out the vents/heatsink and it wasn't dusty at all. only took about 10 qtips to clean it out almost completely. ran out of compressed cans. can i buy a different heatsink to install into it? is it worth it to buy another one to keep it cooler

 

Well it seems it's not dust buildup then.

Might be a hardware glitch trigerred by that particular game. Is it shutting down in other games as well?

You cannot install a different heatsink. Also removing the heatsink voids the warranty so be careful about that.

 

i think it may be overheating. i don't have any other games on the computer currently to be able to test it, i just changed the harddrive a couple days ago and haven't gotten any other games back in. didnt decide to because i didnt wanna be occupied gaming all the time lol.

will definitely check if it's the game first, but

if it's an overheat problem, how would i come about fixing it?

+rep for the help!

 

Did you take the heatsink off of the CPU? You might want to try cleaning off the gunk that's on there now and applying some fresh thermal compound on it (a.k.a Arctic Silver) to keep the temperatures down.

 

is there a guide on applying the arctic silver? i'm afraid of overapplying it

 

You can try a 3DMark. If it shuts down you are a bit more confident it's overheating.

I second AuroraS' suggestion of replacing the thermal pad; BUT be aware that will void the warranty (it involves removing the heatsink).

To keep the warranty, you should send it to ASUS and they should solve it.

But if you really suspect it's overheating, and it's not dust buildup, I can only see the thermal pads or thermal paste being at fault. Or perhaps something is disturbing the air flow.

Why are you so sure it's overheating? Does the fan go full blast before it shuts down?

 

Make sure your Power4Gear profile is not set to Quiet Office, it should be set to Super Performance or something to that effect. It seems that the fan speed doesn't ramp up until later if you set it to Quiet Office.

On my V1J, I've noticed that Super Performance means the fan ramps up at 60C. With Quiet Office, it doesn't seem to ramp up until 70C or even 80C (when NHC tells me the temperature is getting critical -_-).

 

Same problem with me... even after applying artic silver.

 

i'm pretty sure it's an overheating problem because it ONLY occurs when playing the game. i think you're right about the pad and paste because when i opened it immediately after it randomly shut off today, the fan and the area around it is EXTREMELY hot. i'm off to buy some arctic silver right now at fry's. the warranty only covers 1 year right? i'm about to reach that year right now so i dont think it would matter.

 

It depends on when you bought it. For a while now (a year or so, I think), the default warranty in the US has increased to 2 years.

 

Well I figured out what is happening here now.
Sometimes the fan does not get into full level... You seen the temperature go up and up and the fan is very lazy to understand that. When the local temp reaches 75C (when it happens... the "remote temp" meter is at 100C) the computer goes down.

When I turn it on again the fan realizes that it must start at maximum speed... then I can use normally.

I don't know if the "thing" that controls is embed in the hardware, bios, or its a software (a doubt the last one cause I'm running in vista64 with no softwares from asus). I tried Power Gear but it seens to be just an interface to change some configs of vista for notebooks.

I'm surprised how easyly is to clean and change the paste in this ASUS notebook. And the heatsink is the same for precessor and graphic card, its a nice piece and is very effective, but the cooler...

 

Update or rewrite:

ATK/ACPI drivers
BIOS

(did someone suggest this earlier? Don't have time to check now)