Hi Guys
I recently purchased a GL703GS mostly for VR, like many of you, I've found the laptop to be running a bit more hotter than I'd like under load so I have decided to repaste it. Here are my experience for those of you who are interested, as well as the results. I hope someone find it useful.
My room is currently at a constant 18 degrees C under controlled heating as it is winter here in the UK. I have not undervolted anything.
I have purchased
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 1g tube
Artic thermal pad 1mm thickness
Disassembly:
- There are no warranty stickers in the back cover, however there is a warranty sticker on one of the screws on the CPU heatsink, so Asus will know if you have repasted your laptop.
- There are 4 screws holding the HDD which also holds the back cover, so you need to remove the HDD before you can attempt to remove the back cover.
- There are no hidden screws under the rubber feet etc, just unscrew the ones you see and use guitar pick to go around to wedge the case open.
- There are lots of small thin clips all around the case holding the back cover, they seem to snap very easily during opening, however screws alone seems to hold the case well enough.
- You do not need to unscrew the fan to remove the heatsink, just 8 screws on GPU and CPU, the heatsink is then only held down by the thermal paste.
Interesting observations:
- ASUS existing thermal paste on CPU and GPU appears to be of a low quality and is chalky and dry, even though my Laptop is brand new, these clean off very easily.
- Instead of thermal pads, ASUS uses a kind of sticky residue for VRM and memory. I have replaced these with thermal pads (1mm).
- 1G thermal compound is barely enough for both CPU and GPU, you do not have much room for error.
- Immediately after repaste, the cooling performance was terrible, hitting high 80-90'C on idle any load for 5-10 minutes, I was considering opening up the case to find out what is wrong, but decided to keep testing.
Result:
On overdrive fan profile, stock thermal paste was hitting 96C peak 45-47C Idle, and maintain 87C both CPU and GPU during intensive gaming and benchmarks (Heaven) minor throttling is observed. Sitting on secondary cooling surface (17' Laptop cooler), with extra cooling fans on, I was able to maintain around 76-78C without throttling.
After repaste, I was getting at 39-43 idle, and can maintain around 71-72C both CPU and GPU during intensive gaming and benchmarks. Secondary cooling (Laptop cooler) would drop this to an impressive 58-66C during heavy loads, no throttling what so ever was observed.
In both cases (before and after re paste) the CPU could hit 90-92C before the fan kicks in.
I will probably do an update in couple of months time to see if the performance drops, but so far I am very impressed with the effects. I think ASUS should really consider using better cooling paste as it made such a big difference.