I'm reviving this old thread because I've decided to repaste my laptop. I've never done this before so I need some advice from you guys.
I'm planning on using Arctic MX-4 for thermal paste, since it's non-conductive so it won't cause any shorts if I mess up. I've seen some tutorials on youtube. The main doubt I have is whether I can use the same thermal paste for the vram and chipsets around the gpu and cpu, or should I buy separate thermal pads for them. If so, what thickness should I use? I won't overclock since the processor is locked, but I would like to turn turboboost back on. Can I just not repaste the chips and keep the factory paste there itself?
Can anyone who has repasted their GL502VS give me advice, and tell what other stuff I should look out for? Thanks in advance.
ORIGINAL POST:
Hey guys I'm a new member. I joined the forum to post about the problem I am having with my Rog strix gl502vs-ws71 (7th gen intel i7) laptop. I'll write all I know about the issue so you guys can figure out what it is, but if you don't want to read the whole thing then just skip to the bottom. 😛
I bought it around sept 2017 from a microcenter store in NY. It worked smoothly in the initial two months with most games running in max settings without any throttling. After a while i started noticing screen tearing, initially with GTA V and then with others. I tweaked around with the g-sync v-sync settings but couldn't resolve it. After a while it progressed to full on lagging. The frame rates were abysmal, I was getting 15-20 fps. Even turning the graphics to minimum didn't seem to help. I was playing Batman arkham knight at the time and i noticed that the lag wasn't always present, sometimes it ran normally smoothly and at other times the framerate was absolutely horrible. I did a unigine valley benchmark and got an average 21 fps with min 7 😞 . There was also an issue where the laptop automatically went to sleep mode after 20-30 minutes of gaming (i believe this is probably a safety mechanism to prevent overheating and getting the cpu fried). I initially thought it might be a driver issue (my card is gtx 1070 8gb) with the official nvidia drivers installed by geforce experience, so i uninstalled it and then downloaded and installed the OEM VGA driver from the asus site, but it did not help. I even reset the laptop a couple of times and that didn't help either. I then installed intel xtu so i could monitor the temps. I found that the individual cpu cores ( i have 4 physical cores - i7 7th gen) were getting heated up during the benchmarks in the app and while gaming, and thermal throttling was turning on. The gpu was stable at around 70C. I then disabled turbo boost ( actually the disable button was greyed off so i decreased the boost voltage and duration) and undervolted the cpu by around 10 mV i think. Now i am playing forza horizon 3 and ghost recon wildlands. I can play them in high setting without any issues. When playing forza in the highest settings after 15 to 20 minutes the framerate suddenly drops below 20 fps due to throttling ( I've set max fps to 30 in the game settings). GTA V doesn't lag now but screen tearing is still there, I don't know why. My OS is windows 10 v1709 and i have ESET smart security premium antivirus installed. I also set the fan boost to max (4500 rpm) in the rog gaming centre.
So that's most of what I know. Sorry for the long post 😛 . If you read all that then thanks. So basically what I think the problem is that the cpu isn't getting enough cooling, causing heating and then thermal throttling which causes the framerate drop. There doesn't seem to be any problems with the gpu. All i have done now is put a band-aid on the problem so i can continue gaming. I haven't figured out the cause of the heating and this problem wasn't present in the beginning. I read in other threads in the forum about others facing heating issues too. Is this something all Gl502vs laptops have or is my piece faulty? Do you have any idea what is the cause of this problem and how to fix it? Will it get worse over time? Should i send in my laptop to the service center to fix it or get it replaced?
Thanks. 😉