wykyd

I was given this laptop to replace my wife's Compaq CQ61 that is about at the end of its useful life. When I got the laptop it was stuck in a boot loop, got that problem fixed. Now I believe it is overheating and restarting itself. I've searched google and see that most people's problem with it overheating is a clogged fan, mine isn't clogged. It gets extremely hot around the exhaust. Running speed fan the GPU hovers around 69C the cores fluctuate in the 50's. It may run 5 minutes or 2 hours but it will eventually restart. I've removed the heatsinks and replaced the thermal compound, that just flaked off with my fingernail, with arctic silver 5 which made no difference. Tried sitting it on laptop cooling pad which made no difference. Removed the bottom access covers and put it back on the cooling pad and it still gets too hot. Anyone have a clue how to make this thing run?

This is almost exactly the same price I came to when I first started looking into this. Main difference is I picked i5 4690k and nvidia gtx 750. The video card is where I get lost, too many options.

I want to build a small gaming pc for my living room. I've never been a pc gamer, always consoles. I believe I'm ready to join the master race. I stuck with Xbox and was an early adopter of xbox one, I've heard the jokes and jests lets move on. Basically I want something that is going to last awhile. I want to be able to play gta, if I decide to buy it a 3rd time, watch movies and play emulators. I'm going to have to buy this over several months due to the fact that I'm broke. To wrap up, budget gaming steam box maybe $700 budget.