New motherboard, smells burned when held sideways.

So got a new motherboard in for my 1564, installed it, worked perfectly, swapped another processor in and stress tested.
GPU was a little hot so I thought it was a great idea to add a tiny bit of Thermal grease between the pad and the heatsink since there seemed to be an airgap. Held laptop vertically and turns out a tiny bit of Thermal grease leaked off the die onto the GPU chip. Thing smelled seriously like burned plastic and screen went black. Reboot brought the screen back but can't find any burned things on the motherboard or anywhere else on the laptop. So can thermal grease smell like this or short anything on the GPU chip itself (temporarily ,and gets burned off possibly) ? It looked like some of the thermal grease turned into a watery no colored substance. Just worried about my new board

~Aeny

 

Aeny - I'd do the following basic function check:

-Visual inspection of the motherboard where you applied the grease; post a picture if anything looks odd.
-Run 3DMark and verify scores are in line with what's expected for your GPU/CPU combo.
-Monitor GPU temperatures while running 3DMark; HWMonitor CPUID - System & hardware benchmark, monitoring, reporting

If everything checks out - I'd chalk it up as a lesson learned.

 

Posting pictures of the chip and surrounding area. I'm pretty sure that was the location of the burning smell. Anyways, the chip seems okay to my eyes. I'm however a little worried about any residue from the thermal paste that was left behind. Will it be fine like that or do I have to clean it with alcohol of a high percentage or something else? I know nothing about electronics sadly so I've got no idea

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~Aeny

 

Could you also pls take pics from the underside? That way we can see if anything shorted. From the top view everything looks ok but it is hard to tell due to the pic quality.

 

If you do end up cleaning it, make sure to use grain alcohol if you can. Denatured alcohol (lowest amount of water in it) has been known to cause issues with the paint/sealing product used on some printed circuit boards. Hope that helps.

 

Thanks all. Tried turning it on again and same problem. board works perfectly but now with the slightest movement the screen goes crazy and burned smell. I'm attaching some pictures of the back of the board here for all of you to see. I honestly see nothing wrong with it. The board is also fine when rebooted like nothing ever happened to it.

http://imageshack.com/a/img812/2707/0r73.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img196/4196/2p1g.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img513/49/q4g4.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img839/9145/jg04.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img30/2803/ovwe.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img690/9761/jo9o.jpg
http://imageshack.com/a/img703/1008/5oed.jpg

EDIT:
Been running gpu-z built in stress test and the bench included in Throttlestop to stress the system a little. been running for 40 minutes with acceptable temperatures ~77°C and no crazy burny smelling crashes. But it does smell faintly like what is described to me by one of my helpers as "the smell when plastic gets hot for the first time (+30°C)"? Not sure if it's fine but if it runs it runs.. if it can make it through the next hour I'll try to move it sideways to see what happens. After that I think i'll stress it for an hour or 2 more and close it up if it doesn't act up again. And keep a very close eye on it and not leave it running unnatended for the coming days/weeks. Don't wanna burn down my house or school. Any more suggestions on anything?

~Aeny

 

As far as I could see everything looks all right. Is it normal to have that plastic on the motherboard? dont ever remember seeing something like that. Could that be the cause of the burnt plastic smell? Did you check the screen ribbon? could it be damaged or badly attached? maybe try connecting to a monitor to see if just the screen goes crazy or if it is working but just the screen is bad. Just some thoughts.

 

Yes, I have 3 motherboards and all 3 of them have that plastic, I've got no clue why though. And when I'm not running test on this board I'm running with one of the others so all of the other parts seem to be fine.
It still shuts down when moved around but it seems to run fine when it doesn't get touched. I will pull it back apart tomorrow to see if the condition of the chip is any different. I guess the only option I got left is to clean the chip with the alcohol stuff..

~Aeny