The story of the melted Z70va..... Honestly a must read.

So we got a customers Z70va in here and it was running very hot, to the point of freezing up. This is something I've never seen in going on 6 years with their notebooks. I'm not too familiar with the customer but I think they might be a member here... I know they dealt with my brother for the sale and the problem.... I just feel this is something everyone can learn from.

So, I got a chance to put me two sense in and when i looked at the system I was checking out the bottom and I noticed that the area under the gpu was indented... almost like someone smashed it in, but it was very smooth. So they tested the system out and were looking for issues. I suggested to look for omega drivers or something that could have overclocked the cpu and super heated the chassis... yet nothing was found. So, they took the fan out and what they found was almost a 1/2" of lint and hair and junk. This system is only maybe 6 months old at the most and this looked like years and years of neglect. It was so full that the fan couldn't blow over the fins on the heat pipe and basically acted like an blanket, covering the fins. With essentially no active cooler on the system the cpu and gpu produced heat and they went into their respective heatpipes and really didn't have a means of cooling off. The gpu got so hot that it melted the chassis a bit. Below is an animated gif that one of our guys did that I enjoyed.... The moral of the story is.... compressed air is your friend and this is what it prevents. Luckily the system turned out ok, but Asus won't cover this motherboard damage because it was caused by improper care and not a malfunctioning system.



Below is a shot that may not look all that bad, but those with Z70's or M6's can see exactly how bad it looks if they just look at the bottom of their system. The arrow in the upper right shows the flat surface of the cpu cover...... the section below that (which is right where the graphics card is hidden) SHOULD be even with that cover....... Now this is a macro shot and it's hard to tell, but it goes down a good 1/8". When the covers are only slightly more than a 1/16"... you can actually put a small screw drive under the cpu cover from the side.

 

Canned air for the win!

It's only $5-8 per can, worth every penny!

 

Whoa.

Umm.. where could you put your laptop to accumulate all that hair? Did he have it ontop of his dog while he was using it? O_O

But it is a laptop that means the hair is from...

 

Get your brain out of the gutter primetime LOL!

 

^ heheh, wow, this is some major overheating problem lol.

atleast it works after this freak accident.

How frequently does everyone blow out the vents?

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

I do it once per week

 

This is like 5-8x time the normal accumulation that we'd normally like to see. It's just like the lint trap on a dryer... but if you don't clean it out the worst thing that can happen isn't that your clothes aren't going to dry.... it's that your computer is going to overheat.

But for the record, it's from a respectable client and I must say that the rest of the system was almost OCD clean..... I'd bet they've got a pet... most likely a cat.... and my guess is nice expensive wool pants.... that'll do it.

But I hope this is a lesson to all of you to do preventative maintenance. I mean you don't even have to pull the cover cover off if you do it once a month.... just blowing air in both sides of the vents should be enough.

 

im not even sure if compressed air can blow that out lol

 

*naughty cori*

Goes back to hide in the gutter.

I didn't know that the z70v had vented covers for that area. I usually keep my w3v on my cooling pad and that's the one that gets most of the grime.

 

It would be a problem if you had an Ensemble unit, wouldn't it? I mean, if you open the chassis you void your 2 year international guarantee, right?

 

I have a Golden that SHEDS! Hopefully I don't turn into that guy.

 

No, you don't need to take the cpu out or really "open up" your chasiss...... you just need to take the cover off the area where the cpu is and at most take out the coupld screws that hold the fan in and blow it out.... it's not a warranty busting issue whatsoever.

 

My brothers got this bad one time, didn't melt the case, but I pulled more than that much hair out of it. That was a joke, though, because you had to remove everything but the motherboard, the screen, keyboard, RAM, Wireless, HDD, Top cover, speakers, all that jazz. It took me 3 hours to get apart, but ran cooler for a while, but he sucked it all back when he went back to his dorm. Not fun to clean. Nice post Justin.

 

Yeah.... at least in Asus' case, their chassis' are a lot easier to work with. I just hope everyone learns from it. I know it could be embarrassing and I'm not sure this person would want to mention it in the forum, so I figured I might as well say something.

 

I have seen the same exact thing about 2 dozen times already. Not on just the z70va but the z71v (not that bad tho) and pretty much all models that have a fan. It bothered me so much that we had to alter the warranty and frankly not pay for any shipping for rma that comes in looking like this. After many times of seeing this i finally came up with a ruling. All people that send these notebooks in looking like this use it for the better part of the day. About half of them use it 12/7 and more. Some never turn it off. Moral of the story is if you use you rnotebook 24/7 it will fry from a clogged exhaust. Personally i estimate that the radiators on these latpops will remain lint free for 3 years if used on average 3 hours a day which i think is average. The thing that really pisses me off is when we get these things back completely banged up and scratched everywhere with nasty dandruff in the keyboard cracks and the guy is complaining about stuck keys. Note to self dont pick your hair and ur face ontop of your keyboard. Someone who services your lappy will most likely call you names and curse you out behind your back when they have to touch it,

 

Are you suggesting that I should not attempt to make use of my laptop as my main computer, being on as long as I am awake (16 hours a day or more)? I'm a computer engineering student. I use my computer pretty much all day except for during class. I have software to write, reports, and assignments to do, all of which require a computer. If what you say is true, how can you market a laptop as a business solution when a person can only use it for 3/8 of their business day without "asking for an overheat"? This statement does not make sense. Perhaps you could set about educating the users about how to properly maintain their machines, such as a $5 investment in a can of air, rather than telling me that I'm not allowed to use it for more than 3 hours a day or you won't pay for shipping when it overheats. Not that I'm likely to let it overheat, because I've made the $5 investment.
To suggest that I (and many others) will only use the machine for 3 hours a day is ludicrous.

Jay

P.S. I'm just playing the devil's advocate here. I know full well how to take care of my machine and I don't think that running it the way I do is detrimental to its lifespan. I just think that your estimate of 3 hours a day is mighty low for a large number of users.

 

Canned air will not get everything cleaned. You cant get to the z70va vga card for example. It doesnt make sense? Will the fact that more then most rma we get are used and abused laptops? Most of which are used for the better part of the day. Strange? No very normal. If you use you rpart 12 hours a day vs 3 hours a day you can expect some part of it to fail heck of alot sooner then the "normal user". My estimate is not mighty low. 3 hours a day for 3 years is about the life of your radiator without cleaning. This means if you use it 1 hours a day its a good decision to clean it once every nine months or even better once every half year if you live in the city, near a constuction site or have pets. In any case i dont m,ean to sound like a pomus prick but I think its pretty rediculous for you to question what i just said given the position that i am in. I may not have an exact science but if you run your lappy 24/7 expect to clean your fans at the least once every half a year otherwise your laptop will die prematurely.

 

I didnt say you are not allowed. What I said was that if we get your laptop back after half a year of use and the radiator looks like the pic posted above by Justin dont expect us to pay for round trip shipping. It is not happening. That picture is borederline physical damage. Its not our fault you live and sleep in the same room as your can or laudry machine. We will warranty it but we will not pay for round ground.

 

I dont market anything as a business solution. How can you market butter as fat free? How can you market diet coke? Take it anyway you want it but if you use your laptop 16 hours a day it will most likely die alot sooner then most users. I am inlcuding dell gateway hp and all the rest into this. Most people use their pc's less then a few hours a day. Some leave them on while in use thinking its beneficial..... go figure

 

Geared2play might not, but Asus does: Asus M6Va

3 hours a day is definitely low for the segment that Asus is aimed the M6Va for.

The problem I see is the major warping was from the GPU and chipset where getting to the HSF to clean is probably too difficult for most user and most resellers would consider doing so as voiding the warranty.

 

OK, so wanting to do the right thing for my new Z63a, and this issue being a new concept for me as far as laptop maintenance, I have two questions, which I'll admit probably seem basic and silly:
1. The direction of blowing the air is inside -> out after taking the bottom off to expose the exhaust and pulling the HD to expose the intake?
2. For light use in the 1-2 hours/day range, I need to be thinking about taking the panels off to do this every 6-9 months or so?

thx!

 

1. there is only one way to seat that fan. You can not do it wrong as far as i remember
2. 1-2 hours a day means you can check it once a year but prolly will never need to clean it.

 

I swear, you, eddie, and danny should create a pinned thread with horror stories of customers and what they do to their Asus, it'd be very entertaining to read~!

 

Hm... as soon as I saw this, I opened the CPU fan compartment and removed the lint. Now how do I get to the GPU fan...

 

Actually, the worst thing that can happen with a dryer is a dryer fire. We've had a few in our condo complex, and now they've started coming around and cleaning the vents every year.

But thanks for posting the info! My W3V has been running a little warm recently, and I think I need to stop at Staples and get a can of air!

 

Do you have to open the laptop up to clean the fan since Canned Air does not clean everything.

 

The worst story i have is of a guy that rma'd his z71v. He replaced the thermal pads for the gpu with some kind of vaseline compound. Little did he know the radiator did not actually touch the die thus the thermal PAD. He fried his whole laptop. When i called him and asked if anyone had ever serviced his laptop he said no. When i asked if anyone other them him self ever used it he said no. When i told him he voided his warranty because he is a *U#*#&* he denied everything. I really wanted to send the laptop back to him and tell him to ^%^% himself but i am too nice of a guy so we fixed it anyways. That and about 100 other times when people do dumb things. Its funny but they always want to tell the thruth when you call them on the phone and say "your laptop warranty is void because you spilled cherry coke or doc peper on it". Revealing the flavor of their drink always always instills a level of clarity in them,. But once a blue moon a guiy will call and be very honest. I respect that.

 

thx for the tip PROPortable. i dont own a laptop yet. but soon will. good to have this info.

 

Well, I stopped physically touching customers laptops that have come in for repair until someone at the very least blows the thing out...... little hairs under the keyboard and dead skin cells honestly have to qualify to get Mike Rowe out here to film "Dirty Jobs"..... If I'd ever want to curse and get that word through the forum filters... it's be right now... it's disgusting... Food crumbs is one thing, but everything found under a keyboard can and will be used against you in the case of obvious neglect.

Like Ed said, honesty will get you further than covering stuff up. We've had gpu's and cpu's fried due to overclocking and the software that caused it always seems to be formatted off the drive.... We've got a tech who.. honestly I don't know how he does it, but if I did I wouldn't tell anyone..... but he's paid for himself on a hald dozen occassions where end-users want to claim manufacturers defects and on the reformatted hard drive we've found things like omega drivers and other tools to overclock the system.... Telling us they were on there from the get go would have saved them wasting their time and ours since if we had that information, we could have at least taken less time to try to help fix the issue at hand.

On that note, a customer did tell us that he spilled soda on his keyboard and he said he knew this would kill the warranty but he wanted us to try to help save it. We told him that by time it was shipped to us the wheels would already be set in motion and the damage would be done. Understanding the soda voided the warranty - it might as well turn it upside down - take all the power sources out and any components he could and just try to dry it off and blow it out. It might save it for six months to a year.. maybe two., but it's going to break down and die at some point and the more he could get off the longer he has a chance to have it work. We told him if he did nothing, we guarentee the system would die in something like 22 days.... We made up that number, but we've seen it happen and it's roughly around there. A month and a half later he calls us up and tells us that on the 22nd day - it died. He apoligized for letting it go and all of a sudden I think he'll believe any help we ever offer him..... On a system like that, you could easily say just s**** it because he dumped at least half a soda on a $2,000 piece of equiptment and didn't even do so much as to soak up anything... and also continued to try to use it. We got it in and did an exhaustive test on every component and basically narrowed it down to the motherboard and a few other things.... anytime you bring the motherboard into the equation, it's not going to be cheap.... basically it comes to a cost of around 45% to replace the bad parts and do all the work. My suggestion is take the advice from our guys and me when we say tell people who say their in a dorm in college or they're buying a computer for their kid in college...... when we say we've been there, done that... the first Asus notebook that I imported (which is still alive and running as far as I know) got beer spilled on it in a college dorm and I helped repair the damage.... soda sucks so much more than natty light, but the damage that continued to occur week after week decayed that board within the month. It was a sad day, so young and far from home... the system was maybe a month old and since it was in the original shipment from Taiwan.... spare parts weren't even in the country yet and Asus only had a single model..... took another month to repair, but it was costly.

 

I think the worst is when people send the unit back for screen problems. You tell them to document it with a screen shot and still image. The unit arrives with no problems what so ever. Now you tell the guy facts and figures and after a week of burning no problems still. Now he wants to curse you becuase you dont believe him. Its a tough job and literally sometimes i cant sleep becuase of this ****. We should be featured on stressfull jobs. I think Milking the horse is a firty job. This is not so bad. I can deal with crumbs pubic hair dandruff and sometimes what seems to be a goo resembling that of things that can only come out of a human body on the screen. You would think some people would be embarassed to send in a laptop this way?

 

An interesting thread that raises several issues:

(a) Beware of computers with air inlets on the underside because they suck up the fluff

(b) Given that the old W3 series had no air inlets worth mentioning (has the W3J changed in this respect?) and therefore should not have the clogged cooling system problem, why do some of the other models need so many air inlets (compressed air has blown considerable dust out of my W3A, but no fluff)

(c) Asus should move into the vacuum cleaner business because I know of quite a few vacuum cleaners that don't do a very good job of cleaning up the fluff.

John

 

Justin,

What other stuff would you consider "overclocking utilities" aside from the Omega Drivers, ATI Tool and the like? What about NHC? It's got an ATI overclock utility on it, but otherwise I think it would be safe to say it isn't.

 

Hey guys this is a great thread to teach people how to check their vents and watch out for pet fur.

I have a Jindo (Korean Hunting Dog) that sheds like crazy, but only twice a year

While we're on the subject of overheating Z70Va's, I have a question for you guys, especially Justin and Eddie.

I sent my system in for an Audio DJ problem and creaking problem and got it back about a couple weeks ago, but when I got it back I was informed of a GPU problem that they found so they replaced my motherboard completely.

When I got it back after 2 weeks of waiting I noticed the x700 was different or it just came with a different bios, I don't know which. Default clocks are 344.25mhz core, and 330.75mhz mem. My last x700 before the motherboard swap had default clocks of 350mhz core and 300mhz mem. I could overclock my old gpu to 380/370 (core/mem) and everything was fine. Now I can't get my memory past 366 without CRAZY artifacts.

The problem is Ati Tools artifact tester reports artifacts even at default clocks when run for a while. The temperature reaches 92degrees celsius after a while of running the artifact tester. I got the temperature reading from SpeedFan's Remote2 reading, which is the GPU if I'm not mistaken.

It reaches 92 degrees while running the artifact tester, but as soon as I stop it it drops down and eventually reaches mid to high 60's. I never checked my old GPU's temps while running anything, but I remember it being high 60's as soon as I stopped a game and checked with SpeedFan.

Also upon bootup of windows, right at the logon screen I get this matrix style glitch when the logon window pops up. You usually get these kind of glitches when there is a hardware problem.

I'm wondering if you guys think I'm overheating. I hope not because I JUST got my system back after waiting for so long. I hope those guys over at Asus installed the heatsink properly.

I think I'm overheating what do you guys think?

Cheers,
Mike

Edit:: Oh yeah, I'm not undervolting or anything, I decided not to this time around, until I have everything fully burned in. Plus I'm not overclocking the GPU, I usually have it at Battery Saving mode in CCC, so clocks are really low at like 100/150 or something like that. Help Justin and Eddie~!!!

 

Also watch out if you're like me and have 2 Asian sisters. They also shed like crazy.

 

... two asian sisters.... haha... I think girls shed, period.

Let's talk about overclocking and undervolting and what not...... anything that can be directly or indirectly linked to the use of tools to change the gpu or cpu can get you into trouble if you don't know what you're doing. Now, undervolting a cpu hasn't caused many issues that I know of other than people who have done it and then complain they have no performance and their system locks up (no kidding)......and it's dumb to overclock a centrino system anyway... so lets leave the cpu out of it even though you can screw that up to.

In regards to the gpu - omega drivers can get you in trouble. I use them on some systems.... and I usually use them as stock, but even at stock they're overclocking the gpu from the factory which Asus usually underclocks so that they can get a certain amount of battery life out of a system (can't wait to see how underclocked the w3j comes in), but the omega drivers will clock the gpu up to what ATI considers normal. From there you can also overclock very, very, very easily. You shouldn't use the drivers unless you know what everything they can do really does. The system is designed a certain way and Asus sets certain things a certain way based on battery life and the amount of cooling they can give the unit..... so even putting the omega drivers on in stock form could be too much for the unit and you have to be able to test temps and things to see whats going on with the system..... Burnt out gpu's and cpu's simply don't happen in stock form on an Asus centrino system..... so if it happens to you, expect to be found out and expect to be paying for your mistake. I'm not worried about the experts in here... i'm worried about the wannabe experts who know about a way to do things and wants to think they're an expert (the kind of person whose parents brag to the world that they're a "computer genius" just because they can format a hard drive)... those people are dangerous and they know just enough to know where to get the program and how to install it and how to move things up and down.... but they're not smart enough to know how to fix things and when things just stop all of a sudden they think - "it must be the computer's fault because i'm a freakin' genius".

92 degrees is high, but not really too high during a stress test..... that's just as hot as it's going to get... it was was reading 80 while idle.. that would be a problem. You could be overheating..... but most likely I bet it's from some sort of clogged vent.

Oh and just so you guys and gals know... it's not just a bottom vent that could suck this up.... rear and side vents are also to blame..... and you could keep your system on a desk that's 3 feet off the ground and you're still going to get it in the system.

 

Very interesting Justin. Yeah I think my temperature is slightly higher than the previous board, but I'm positive it's not a blocked vent because I just got it back and the vents look clear to me. I will open it up to take a look see, but I think they didn't install the heatsink properly or something happened with them not cleaning the cpu properly when transferring it over to the new board.

Probably the thermal pads are not making a good contact between the heatsink and components. Even my CPU is running hotter than before as well.

I will investigate more.

 

Shampoo
The answer to that is most likely nothing you can find. Remember what i said i am sure you seen it. Heatsinks and heatpipes are manufactured with some type of compressed gas inside. Oner will not be 100% identical to the next one especially if they are manufactured some time appart. These heatpipes can actually develop microfractures and become completely inefective. One way to tell is an overheating cpu while the radiator is just cool. I have seen this maybee a dozen times now. Its very rare but it does happen. A few degrees variation from one unit to the next is very normal. Sometimes the broken heatpipes are user error. Take the z71v for example. It has a screw that sits right on top of the heatpipe. The screw is marked with an "a". When users take them appart they see the small screw and mix it in with the rest not realizing that a standard screw when inserted into the "a" hole will jam up against the heatpipe and actually bend it somewhat. Not sure if this can cause a broken heatpipe but there is a reason why they dont use a normal size screw. I personally think its another design flaw but a small one that nobody noticed.

 

After reading this post, I'm concerned about my notebook, sorry if this is off topic but what is 'canned air' ? is it basically compressed air in a can and you spray it into your notebook to remove dust? That's what I've assumed from reading the posts.

Does anyone know where to buy this in Australia? Preferabally not online?

 

Bwen yup that's it, hehe, your canned air or compressed air comes with that long stick in which the air flows through and you can use that to clean the vents of your laptop.

Lint build up is bad, this also occurs in your dryer and could cause fires.

Thanks,

MysticGolem

 

Bwen, you can purchase compressed air at your local computer shop or even at your local hardware shop, so no need to shop online.

Thanks for the advice Eddie. I think my baby is okay, and since she still has 6months warranty, I'll see how things go down the road.

Cheers,
Mike