W860CU HD5870 Overheating Problem

There should be 4 tiny screws in the metal cover over each fan, remove them and take that facing off and ensure that the actual fins of the heatsink are dust free. You should not need to remove the heatsinks or reapply thermal paste to do tis (though with those temperatures you might want to do that anyway...)

 

You could re-aply some better thermal paste and you could set the vcore to 1.05 volt. That would make a pretty big diffrence but if your temps are at idle your chip might be a candidate for RMA... (or check the screws)

 

Good news everyone! I fixed it.

Here are my new temps:

Idle


Load


For reference it was 88C idle and could get up to 120C under load.

It is MUCH better now, but is this what I should expect or still a little high?

For those wondering what I did, I cleaned the heatsinks and chips with 91% isopropyl, and applied some Tuniq TX-3 thermal paste.

I also made some shims by cutting a small copper sheet I got at a hardware store:


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I think one of the main problems was, when the thermal paste is applied there's way too much, and it spills off the die, meaning some heat is conducted back into the chip. I didn't take any pics of this with the GPU, but here are some of the CPU. After reapplication it idles much lower (42C atm), and I can't get it over 65C under load. Prior I could easily get the CPU to 80C under a serious sustained load.

Can someone confirm that this is right? I know it's true in desktops, but the chip's die is much bigger on them. Do you still want to avoid paste falling off the die in laptops?





Oh, and one last question. You may notice my GPU clocks are a tiny tiny bit below stock. When I use MSI afterburner it won't let me set it to stock, and even with unofficial overclocking enabled, that's as high as the GPU goes.

 

Your temps look fine now, but your clocks are strange.. maybe you should try amd gpu clock tool.

On a side note my clocks are 830mhz gpu and 1050mhz mem and my temps are idle the same as yours and that with 20% higher gpu clocks hehe

 

Be careful of those shims, a few have killed their 5870 GPU's after using them.

 

Eeep! Thanks for the warning- do you have a link to any of the cases?

 

Using those shims isn't the best idea, someone else tried that and fried their motherboard. The best thing you can do is to cut a piece (or buy on ebay for $1) of copper and put it between the GPU die and the Heatsink. I went from 50C-60C idle to 40C-45C.

I'll try and find the copper shim post.

Edit: Follow this: http://forum.notebookreview.com/6274519-post55.html

Did some more research, and I found this. He used paper clips but it's practically the same thing.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/484935-gpu-possibly-fried.html

 

Thanks for the warning, guys! I took the shims out and the temperature is still holding steady at about the same as before. Maybe the added initial pressure combined with the new thermal paste makes for a much better connection?

 

i'm planing on buying the w860cu with the ATI 5870 will it have the overheating issue?

 

The GPU doesn't overheat, but it runs a lot hotter then it should, which is why people think the W860CU is too loud. For some reason the 5870M doesn't have enough contact with the heatsink. There are some ways to keep the laptop cool and the 5870M from being "hot":

- Buying a copper shim(see my above post)
- Using AMD Clock Tool and manually setting the clocks, and setting hot keys. The Clevo 5870M doesn't use Powerplay. It runs at constant stock clocks.

 

I want to also add that part of the problem is the way they initially apply way too much thermal paste. After a paste reapplication and 1 day with the shims in (took em out after), my laptop is running great. I don't even need a shim. YMMV.