GL703GS 1070GTX Repaste Cooling Performance

[spiritdreams]

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.

[hexaae]

spiritdreams wrote:
I am guessing with 0.5mm then you are at risk of the pads not contacting heatsink, granted the risk is minimal.

This is the kind of white paste applied by ASUS (see from 3:00) :


As you can see, 0.5mm should be perfectly fine.
1mm instead might be too thick (compared to the original paste) not allowing good contact between heatsink and CPU, GPU.

[hexaae]

If you want to isolate electrically around the chips: https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/B07D4HVT3W/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[VladRadu]

hexaae wrote:
If you want to isolate electrically around the chips: https://www.amazon.it/gp/product/B07D4HVT3W/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Thats what i used.

[hexaae]

This heat-pipe is tighten only by the 8 screws around CPU + GPU, even though there are also a pair of case screws passing through the heat-pipe in the rear part. I start to think there was a reason why they used that white sticky thermal paste for the VRM chip.
However I'm still convinced 0.5 pads should be perfect… at worst 1mm pads only for those small chips in the rear part, but I'm afraid it could lift up the whole heat-pipe using 1mm since originally there was only a thin white paste layer…
More contact and thinner surface with the heat-pipe = better cooling.

[mp271901]

hexaae wrote:
This heat-pipe is tighten only by the 8 screws around CPU + GPU, even though there are also a pair of case screws passing through the heat-pipe in the rear part. I start to think there was a reason why they used that white sticky thermal paste for the VRM chip.
However I'm still convinced 0.5 pads should be perfect… at worst 1mm pads only for those small chips in the rear part, but I'm afraid it could lift up the whole heat-pipe using 1mm since originally there was only a thin white paste layer…
More contact and thinner surface with the heat-pipe = better cooling.

Ok thank you for your help. Have you tried to repaste your Laptop as well. Which one do you have? And what materials did you use.

Thanks in advance

[Matze2k0]

hexaae wrote:
This heat-pipe is tighten only by the 8 screws around CPU + GPU, even though there are also a pair of case screws passing through the heat-pipe in the rear part. I start to think there was a reason why they used that white sticky thermal paste for the VRM chip.
However I'm still convinced 0.5 pads should be perfect… at worst 1mm pads only for those small chips in the rear part, but I'm afraid it could lift up the whole heat-pipe using 1mm since originally there was only a thin white paste layer…
More contact and thinner surface with the heat-pipe = better cooling.

I've done the same with my GL702 and the temps went up. Then someone mentioned this paste https://www.amazon.com/s?k=K5+PRO+viscous&ref=nb_sb_noss which is similiar to the one used by asus . My temps went down again and even got bit better.

[mp271901]

Matze2k0 wrote:
I've done the same with my GL702 and the temps went up. Then someone mentioned this paste https://www.amazon.com/s?k=K5+PRO+viscous&ref=nb_sb_noss which is similiar to the one used by asus . My temps went down again and even got bit better.

Yeah i am tempted to use the paste instead of the pads. How much did you use for the VRMs

Regards

[hexaae]

Matze2k0 wrote:
I've done the same with my GL702 and the temps went up. Then someone mentioned this paste https://www.amazon.com/s?k=K5+PRO+viscous&ref=nb_sb_noss which is similiar to the one used by asus . My temps went down again and even got bit better.

So you had worse performance with 0.5 (+1.0mm in case)?

[Sayid_Jarah]

Hi sorry about the late reply to you all.

I've now had a few weeks to try and cool this bad boy down with limited success. Here is my timeline of what has been happening with my experimentation.

1.Re-pasted cpu and gpu with noctua NT-H1whilst leaving the original Asus Paste on VRM's etc. Temps rose 10c thermal throlttling in all games. Needed to set 99%CPU
CPU/GPU temps 95+c in every game. 😞

2.Wasnt happy so cleared all paste away from cpu/gpu/vrms replaced Vrm with 1mm Thermal pads and Cpu/GPU with Termal Grizzly Kryonought. Same again Temps 98c+
Scratching my head at this point.

3.Third attempt, removed thermal pads as thought it was causing contacting issues with cpu/gpu and replaced with 0.5mm, re-applied Thermal frizzly. Guess What SAME RESULTS??

Starting to think here that its gotta be a bad heatsink, SO i eventually order 1mm copper shims, Paste regular noctua on both sides, swap out thermal pads for K5-PRO (smothered on like the videos says) my GPU temps drop to 65C! but cpu still high in the 90's

Now operating a cpu undervolt of -125mv while disabling turbo during games.

Have ordered a new heatsink online gonna fit it next week and let you all know how i get on

cheers.

[hexaae]

Sayid_Jarah wrote:
Hi sorry about the late reply to you all.

I've now had a few weeks to try and cool this bad boy down with limited success. Here is my timeline of what has been happening with my experimentation.

1.Re-pasted cpu and gpu with noctua NT-H1whilst leaving the original Asus Paste on VRM's etc. Temps rose 10c thermal throlttling in all games. Needed to set 99%CPU
CPU/GPU temps 95+c in every game. 😞

2.Wasnt happy so cleared all paste away from cpu/gpu/vrms replaced Vrm with 1mm Thermal pads and Cpu/GPU with Termal Grizzly Kryonought. Same again Temps 98c+
Scratching my head at this point.

3.Third attempt, removed thermal pads as thought it was causing contacting issues with cpu/gpu and replaced with 0.5mm, re-applied Thermal frizzly. Guess What SAME RESULTS??

Starting to think here that its gotta be a bad heatsink, SO i eventually order 1mm copper shims, Paste regular noctua on both sides, swap out thermal pads for K5-PRO (smothered on like the videos says) my GPU temps drop to 65C! but cpu still high in the 90's

Now operating a cpu undervolt of -125mv while disabling turbo during games.

Have ordered a new heatsink online gonna fit it next week and let you all know how i get on

cheers.

How did it go?