laptop temperature concerns

meijin

United States141 Posts

August 20 2012 20:35 GMT

i bought this laptop ~2 years ago:

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i've recently opened it up and cleaned out some dust from the fan/heatsink and re-did the thermal paste on the gpu and cpu. i run HWMonitor and my cpu/gpu temps are fine but it says my DIMM3 and DIMM1 temps are 144C. this never fluctuates. now i checked my RAM and apparently they are connected to DIMM0 and DIMM2 (or 2 and 4 can't remember. just not 1 and 3) so i figure its just taking temps from the wrong slots but if that were the case shouldn't the temp be 0 or whatever the surrounding temp is?

anyway, my main concern is that a specific part of my laptop gets very hot. here are some pictures for reference:

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the portion that gets pretty hot is ~#1 in both pictures, namely the independent GPU button and the External CRT Port. i use an extra monitor for an extended desktop and it connects via the External CRT Port (its just a VGA port). i don't know why but this gets very hot and recently, my monitor has started to go black. sometimes it even switches itself to power saving mode even while i am in the middle of playing SC2. also i'm not quite sure what the gpu button does. it says vga on it but when i click it nothing ever happens. i read somewhere online that it can control whether the laptop uses the dedicated gpu or the integrated gpu but the color of the light on it is supposed to change from orange for dedicated to green for integrated. i've never seen it turn green in 2 years.

i have tried another monitor, a different cable, but still have the same problems. the monitor does fine when i start but starts to struggle more and more the longer i play. i figure something is overheating, but i know its not the cpu/gpu because they are in a different area of the laptop and i am monitoring their temps via HWMonitor. nothing else in HWMonitor is reaching the temps i can feel w/ my hand on the laptop casing. as you can see from the pics, the vent is under the USB ports and that area is never as warm as around the vga port. any ideas?

NeonFox

2373 Posts

August 20 2012 20:40 GMT

You should be able to check via the graphic card management interface wich gpu is running (catalyst for AMD, don't know for NVidia). You can also see the name of the GPU in the device manager. Try to switch between both and see if the temp changes.

Also changing the termal paste on a laptop seems like a very risky idea for little benefit.

meijin

United States141 Posts

August 20 2012 20:54 GMT

i know its usuing my nvidia gpu. the integrated graphics wouldn't be able to run SC2 and the FPS that i get. my concern is that my monitor is malfunctioning and my theory is that its because something in the area of my vga port is getting too hot.

re: thermal paste, yea i was kinda messing around with stuff before i really did any research and took the heatsink off to try and clean it out. of course after that my cpu/gpu temps went through the roof because the old paste was useless so i had to redo it (fwiw my temps went down by like 25C on both cpu and gpu after i applied new thermal paste. yes my cpu and gpu were that hot before).

i forgot to mention that the monitor only starts to malfunction while i'm playing SC2.

NeonFox

2373 Posts

August 20 2012 21:16 GMT

On August 21 2012 05:54 meijin wrote:
i know its usuing my nvidia gpu. the integrated graphics wouldn't be able to run SC2 and the FPS that i get. my concern is that my monitor is malfunctioning and my theory is that its because something in the area of my vga port is getting too hot.

re: thermal paste, yea i was kinda messing around with stuff before i really did any research and took the heatsink off to try and clean it out. of course after that my cpu/gpu temps went through the roof because the old paste was useless so i had to redo it (fwiw my temps went down by like 25C on both cpu and gpu after i applied new thermal paste. yes my cpu and gpu were that hot before).

i forgot to mention that the monitor only starts to malfunction while i'm playing SC2.

It works with other games without problems? You could also try updating the nvidia drivers even if I doubt that would solve the problem. If a different cable and monitor have the same results, other than a faulty port I don't see what could cause the issue. Maybe you moved something in that area when cleaning the laptop or a pin is broken, it definitely looks like a hardware problem.

Your best bet at this point imo is to bring it to a repair shop.

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