MSI GT70 GPU Upgrade questions (RX 480)

As the title suggests, I've recently come into possession of a GT70-0ND with an RX 480 MXM card in it (from previous owner, bought off eBay), and I've been wondering about a couple of things to get it working better.

Things I have working:
Hardware Acceleration (drivers modded w/ atipixelpatcher)
Games run fine as far as I can tell, which isn't super far because my AC adaptor is way underpowered (120W asus unit, I'll find a better one but for now this is all I have)

Things that don't work:
Games with good anticheats (since modded drivers)
Fan control (stuck at 100%)
Heatsink isn't quite right, I have a lead on a GX70 heatsink which should be easier to fit properly

But I'm wondering if there's any way at all to fix the fan issue (don't really care about any specific methods, hell i'd be willing to wire in some sort of potentiometer if needed, although that could be tricky because its PWM?)

 

100% fans is probably a software issue if your temps aren't too high. You alluded to the heatsink being an issue which could cause temps to keep the fans at 100%. My laptop when playing around with different thermal pastes / control center (fans/lights/etc.). A good indicator of paste stability outside of monitoring the temps was the fans kicking up and duration.

The simpler fan solution could be the prior owner swapped a 3-pin in place of a PWM whether from being cheap or just not knowing better.

A good place to start would be hwinfo64 and see what the probes pick up for temps and HW.

If you run Linux you can use the "sensors" command and see the fan speeds

 

I don't think temps would be an issue since the core makes good contact, its just the VRMs, & it does it in the bios with no load too, so I think it's related to the gpu upgrade honestly, I'll try hwinfo later though and report back with that says

 

If it's spinning @ 100% in bios then it's probably the wrong kind of fan being used or modded bios forcing it to max spin.

There's the off chance there's a chip issue somewhere not reading the correct info causing it to not spin down.

Does it spin at 100% when it's not plugged in? It should decrease or be more of a passive cooling when not plugged in depending on the power profile selected.

 

dont have a battery yet so cant check that, bios is factory, I've been looking for an unlocked one actually but don't have a techinferno account that can download

 

Try to install MSI Dragon Center. You can set fan profile for your laptop. Dont know if it will work with RX 480 but you can try.

 

I'll try that later, I didn't think dragon center supported machines this old but can't hurt to try

 

Use Dragon Center 1.2.1910.3101

 

Hi mate, nothing will work unfortunately.
Full fan behavior happens when EC triggers the dgpu instead of the igpu, as it does not read the temperature probe and goes to panic mode, which hopefully on MSI GT series is 100% fan. On clevo for instance, EC panic mode is a loud beep every second for about 30s then full shutdown...
There's no software solution to your problem. The only solution would be to buy a low spec cooling fan (like a chinese replica you can find on aliexpress or ebay for less than 10$) and mod a second 5V fan (get 5V on usb) triggered by thermal probe directly beneath the GPU heatsink. That would be a second fan blowing directly on the GPU heatsink, increasing the cooling capacity and keeping a "relative" low sound level

 

yeah thats more akin to what i was expecting, although one questionable idea i had was that i bought a potentiometer for another project a while back, and was thinking that would theoretically be possible to wire in line and i could just monitor temps w/an overlay, or would that cause more issues than it solves what with pwm and etc?

 

Non that would work. But IDK if msi GT has an automatic shutdown procedure if it does not detect the fan. There's no pwm on the msi gt60/70, it's a 3 pin fan (red, black, yellow = tachometer) so I think your mod would work. But you can get thermal probes that can get the job done, without any bad looking knob popping out of the chassis