M50Sv woes

Hello All,

So I have a M50Sv and it was running hot with everything stock and even a cooling pad. So I went and re thermal pasted the cpu the northbridge(I think) and also the GPU.

This is where it gets intersting. My computer was running fine for about a week the my girlfriend played sims 3 on my computer for an extended period of time and the screen started flickering red. This i knew was bad so i shut off my laptop and now when it starts it has artafacting within the bios as well as any OS i try to boot xp will just crash and restart and Linux give me a movable mouse pointer and a jumble of the asus logo and the intel logo (from the post screen).

So my question is did I fry my GPU? I took off all of my hard work today and it seems that all the graphics ram did not make any contact with the heat sink because the gap was too much for the thermal paste to bridge.

Now if it is bad my next question I have found an ebay seller of 9500m gs for asus laptops as well as a 9700m GT which he says will work with a M50 laptop. Do you trust him? I have emailed him to get recomendations.

Any suggestion to my dilemma?

Sorry for the long post.

 

What components used thermal paste and what used thermal pads? Looking to do the same on my M50sa, (radeon instead of Nvidia), but want to know what was on each component.. not good if you didn't make contact with all components, the Heatsink should contact GPU, gpu memory, CPU, and northbride if im not mistaken, but I was under the impression some components used thermal paste and others thermal pads, hence people making copper shims to fill the thermal pad gaps. some risk that something else is fried in the Motherboard.. so wouldn't spend too much, obviously you got some video probs, and defiantly memory is easy to kill so maybe your lucky and thats all eh? Kinna new to this site but just wondering what thermal paste you used..

Also, since you voided the warrenty, pop out your GPU and look at the connector to the motherboard- have this ebay fellow send you some pics of the card you want to buy, if the connector is the same you may have a chance.. Swapped a GPU chip on a dell for a better chip off ebay years ago..so its possible..

 

Also keep in mind Asus uses its own proprietary GPU slot, a reverse MXM of sorts. So you can only replace the card with another Asus one.