Need some help with 3 year old W3J

I have a 3.5 year old W3J. One day it must have turned on in my laptop sleeve and when i took it out it was hot and the back was warped. When I turned it on, it artifacted within 5 min of windows finishing boot up,
the fan stopped spinning, but the fan itself works via external battery and wires test. The video card RAM also gets insanely hot and even with the fan forced on with an external battery, it gets too hot to touch.

I'm wondering what I should do, should I replace the video card? Is it a short somewhere in the vid card? Whats causing my fan not to spin? Is my mobo damaged too?

Thanks for any help.

 

So, when you turn on the system now, cpu temps are normal (<45C), the fan does not spin at all and the gpu starts to artifact shortly thereafter?

If the chassis was so hot that the back plastic's shape started to warp, something probably melted or broke inside. From the symptoms you describe (if I'm understanding correctly) about heat even with a forced fan that sounds like the gpu heatsink has a problem - a crack perhaps, or the thermal pad went bad.

If I remember, the W3j had a single fan and heatsink for cpu/gpu, and that the fan is controlled by the cpu temp sensor. I don't believe you can just swap a new gpu into the W3, at all.

Best option I can think of is to see where the heatsink pipe gets hot when the RAM heats up -- if it's hot at the gpu and cools somewhere along the way to the radiator, then you've got a crack and the sink needs replacing. Depending on the cost or even availability these days of a heatsink for the 3yo W3, you might start thinking about a replacement notebook. If it's pretty cool at the gpu when the RAM is burning, then you've got bad thermal conduction from the RAM to the heatsink and you should try some Arctic Silver or comparable to see if that works.

You should also be sure that your radiator is clean - at that age, the W3 is going to have a dust bunny metropolis in there if you've never blown it out.

 

I just ordered new fan and thermal system from Asus for my w3j also,,
before that it was hot also,,but after replacement, the temp is much lower.