Sager NP9170 with Radeon 7970m card odd behavior.

Everything had been working fine up until the past couple of days. I use Open Hardware Monitor to watch the temperatures of my CPU and GPU when the 7970m is in use. The GPU has gotten over 80 fairly frequently and even sometimes about 85 with no problems. CPU temperature never gets very high either.

All of a sudden now when the GPU temperature gets between 70 and 75 my computer starts beeping incredibly loud then shuts off in about 5 seconds. Completely off... It's almost like whatever determines the "oh no shut down now I'm overheating" temperature is all out of whack and got lowered somehow to a ridiculous level

I tried to go into the bios and see if there were any settings in there that I could check out but the bios is incredibly limited it seems...hardly anything in there is changeable. Nothing mentioning temperature, fan speed, voltage or anything like that even. It seems to be a very stripped down bios for some reason.

Also I didn't have much time to poke around in the bios since in there seems to cause the same thing to happen after about 20 seconds in the bios.

Anyone have any ideas as to what I should try? Is there a different version bios I should use that is a little more configurable where I might be able to set the temperature threshold so it doesn't shut my computer off when the GPU gets above 70?

I can still use the computer just fine as long as I don't use my 7970m or go into the bios. Obviously I didn't buy an NP9170 with the Radeon 7970m to just use it as a normal non-gaming laptop though...so I'd like to get it back to how it was before if possible.

Thanks for your time and any suggestions!

 

I have run into this in the past on another Sager and it ended up being a hardware issue and needed a component replaced. If this is the same issue or not I don't know. Definitely send it in for service hopefully still under warranty?

 

Nope Not under warranty anymore. I was also told that Sager doesn't have any AMD video cards at their parts depot, so I'm guessing that would mean the service on it would not only be quite pricey but also take a very long time to get my laptop back. Right before a big final too..ugh... bad timing to be without my computer for a long time.

I'm still surprised to see that the bios doesn't have much you can actually configure either. I guess I'm more used to seeing more than just this in the bios menu and under advanced settings. Any idea if there's another way for me to tinker with the "shut down" temperature threshold for the GPU? Here's what the bios looks like:

 

Are the the fans from cpu/gpu connected and spinning freely?
Aren't radiators filled with dust?
Is the still thermal compound between gpu/radiator AND cpu/radiator, or whether they were properly imposed?
How is the condition of thermal pads on gpu?

 

I haven't checked yet, since I wanted to make sure that by me opening things up I'm not going to make it so Sager refuses to work on it. Waiting to hear back from the company I bought it from on that question. I may just email Sager directly to make sure.

I have blown out all the dust out that I could reach though and it really wasn't very dusty.

I don't think it's overheating since the GPU doesn't get much over 75...as soon as it hits 75 though that's when the beeping begins and it shuts down a few seconds later. It should be able to go much hotter than that before setting off any alarms.

It used to hit 80+ on games that were fairly resource intensive without any alarms or issues. I have no idea why it only getting up to 75 is setting off an alarm and causing it to shut down. The CPU at the time isn't too hot either (usually 60ish). It's almost like for some reason something thinks it's overheating even when it's actually still running fairly cool.