Hi all,
Been having a right nightmare with my laptop lately!
My graphics card was playing up about half a year ago and I started to get green screen crashes and multi-coloured lines etc.
Eventually it died and reading up on it I realised it needed a re-flow. Apparently it's a well known issue with these particular cards.
I don't like to do things in half measures, so I purchased a heat gun to do it properly rather than just baking the whole card in the oven.
These aren't the kind of chips you want to be baking after all.
This worked like a charm the first time, although only lasted about another month. The second time it lasted about 3-4 months which I was pleased with.
The last time I was a bit overenthusiastic with the heat and probably melted the chip!
So I had to find another card. I searched around to try and find a decent price and stupidly decided to order one on eBay.
Big mistake, I ended up with a card that was only compatible with Dell Alienware laptops and not my Clevo.
So I did what I should have done the first time around and ordered one from PCSpecialist.
The guys were awesome as usual, the card came with new heat-sinks and they also threw in a free x-bracket since I sheared one of the screws off of mine.
The install went smoothly and it was a breath of fresh air when my laptop booted and I saw my desktop for the first time in about a month.
I installed a temperature monitor straight away to keep an eye on the temps (GPUTemp) and was getting pretty high temperatures for no load of about 75-80 degrees.
Of course, as soon as I tried to boot a game the temperature shot up and hit the thermal shutdown temperature.
Now I installed the card with the stock thermal pad over the heat-sink because I didn't want to mess with it too much.
So I decided to take the card back out and apply some proper arctic silver thermal paste.
This seemed to do the trick and I was then getting a stable temperature of 45-50 degrees under no load.
Played a bit of a game for a couple of hours and everything seemed fine.
So I was happy and thought I was safe to order a few games off Steam.
Now after a few minutes of playing one of these games my laptop shut itself down again... Very frustrating.
I booted it back up and fired up GPUTemp again, went back in game keeping an eye on the temperature by alt-tabbing out of the game.
It was getting pretty high, up to about 100 degrees and would have eventually gone over this and hit the thermal shutdown temperature again.
So, question is, what do you think my issue is now?
As far as I'm aware all the thermal pads are applied correctly and the arctic paste should have also been fine.
I was really hoping this would have sorted it once and for all as it is my main machine and it's pretty much a waste of money unless I can play games on it.
The fans are all working correctly, Fn+1 keeps the temps down a bit longer in game but it still would hit the thermal shutdown temp.
I was trying my hardest not to have to send the laptop back to PCS to look at for me because I don't really want to be without it for any longer.
Will give them a call tomorrow and see what they think but was wondering if anyone had any ideas tonight?
Really appreciate any feedback on this.
Cheers,
David
Been having a right nightmare with my laptop lately!
My graphics card was playing up about half a year ago and I started to get green screen crashes and multi-coloured lines etc.
Eventually it died and reading up on it I realised it needed a re-flow. Apparently it's a well known issue with these particular cards.
I don't like to do things in half measures, so I purchased a heat gun to do it properly rather than just baking the whole card in the oven.
These aren't the kind of chips you want to be baking after all.
This worked like a charm the first time, although only lasted about another month. The second time it lasted about 3-4 months which I was pleased with.
The last time I was a bit overenthusiastic with the heat and probably melted the chip!
So I had to find another card. I searched around to try and find a decent price and stupidly decided to order one on eBay.
Big mistake, I ended up with a card that was only compatible with Dell Alienware laptops and not my Clevo.
So I did what I should have done the first time around and ordered one from PCSpecialist.
The guys were awesome as usual, the card came with new heat-sinks and they also threw in a free x-bracket since I sheared one of the screws off of mine.
The install went smoothly and it was a breath of fresh air when my laptop booted and I saw my desktop for the first time in about a month.
I installed a temperature monitor straight away to keep an eye on the temps (GPUTemp) and was getting pretty high temperatures for no load of about 75-80 degrees.
Of course, as soon as I tried to boot a game the temperature shot up and hit the thermal shutdown temperature.
Now I installed the card with the stock thermal pad over the heat-sink because I didn't want to mess with it too much.
So I decided to take the card back out and apply some proper arctic silver thermal paste.
This seemed to do the trick and I was then getting a stable temperature of 45-50 degrees under no load.
Played a bit of a game for a couple of hours and everything seemed fine.
So I was happy and thought I was safe to order a few games off Steam.
Now after a few minutes of playing one of these games my laptop shut itself down again... Very frustrating.
I booted it back up and fired up GPUTemp again, went back in game keeping an eye on the temperature by alt-tabbing out of the game.
It was getting pretty high, up to about 100 degrees and would have eventually gone over this and hit the thermal shutdown temperature again.
So, question is, what do you think my issue is now?
As far as I'm aware all the thermal pads are applied correctly and the arctic paste should have also been fine.
I was really hoping this would have sorted it once and for all as it is my main machine and it's pretty much a waste of money unless I can play games on it.
The fans are all working correctly, Fn+1 keeps the temps down a bit longer in game but it still would hit the thermal shutdown temp.
I was trying my hardest not to have to send the laptop back to PCS to look at for me because I don't really want to be without it for any longer.
Will give them a call tomorrow and see what they think but was wondering if anyone had any ideas tonight?
Really appreciate any feedback on this.
Cheers,
David
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