I sent it off at the end of February with the heat issues and seemingly the GPU and heatsink were replaced, bios updated and and overnight tested with Prime95 and Unigen heaven etc Well Looks like my Laptop isnt fixed after that last RMA. Will keep yas posted on what happens but im not home to send it back until after 22nd Feb Im happy PCS allowed me to investigate for myself as i like to know my gear inside and out and my warranty is still ok I have spoken to PCS Tech Support and they are fine with me sending it in for repair - what can i say, these things happen, im cool if its taken care of and my temps get down to the 70's but i have advised that either the card is sitting uneven or the Heatsink is slightly warped, most probably the heatsink though as its not uncommon with laptops Temps are now average 85C - 90C instead of 90C -96C - so 5 or 6 C drop isnt bad but could be better if the die and heatsink contacted better - This testing was done with Fans on MAX and tried with AND without cooler pad which didnt seem to make alot of difference - possibly -1C at most Rebuilt and rebooted and the Thermal/power perfcap is gone So for now i have put a little more paste on the area that wasnt contacting - yeah i know more isnt better but had to get some contact to be safe I tried repasting 3 times and reseating the heatsink using different torque settings on the screws - but no difference, still getting thermal/ power perfcap
Stripped out heatsink again and found that the heatsink is not making full contact on the GPU Die - probably about 1/2 contact from one corner then the rest of the paste was untouched Tried the power button again and it booted fine, so i ran GPUz in the sensor tab with the render test and the Perfcap was showing Thermal/power - although temps were showing low so i shut it down
then it shut down - i almost cried and thought OH NO what have i done! Put everything back together and booted up, all seemed ok so i ran Unigen Valley and the temps came to about 74C. Well - i stripped the heatsink off and found an excessive amount of Thermal Paste, so i cleaned it off and reapplied some Noctua NT-H1 and spread it thin and evenly across the die, i didnt change the pads for Fujipoly as i didn't think i had enough.