MSI cant thermal paste.

[BlargKing]

My brother's laptop died inexplicably, so I took it apart to see if I could find any obvious signs of failure, or a way to fix it (I couldn't, its just dead). And holy crap, MSI apparently loves to just slop on thermal paste. Look at this shit.

 

CPU left, GPU right. 

 

 

 

My cat could do a cleaner job. I'm amazed my brother even got 3 years out of this thing. 

[Techicolors]

what model laptop was it? a gaming laptop? 

[AresKrieger]

With thermal paste more is always better than less, and since it's not conductive in most cases they just slapped in a lot of the stuff to make sure they got enough on there.

[BlargKing]

Just now, Technicolors said:

what model laptop was it? a gaming laptop? 

It a MSI GT70. 

[BlargKing]

1 minute ago, AresKrieger said:

With thermal paste more is always better than less, and since it's not conductive in most cases they just slapped in a lot of the stuff to make sure they got enough on there.

Yeah but too much hurts heat transfer. Its a fine line to walk. And really for such a large company it comes off as being cheap, lazy, and sloppy.

[AresKrieger]

Just now, BlargKing said:

Yeah but too much hurts heat transfer. Its a fine line to walk. And really for such a large company it comes off as being cheap, lazy, and sloppy.

No to much does not hurt transfer it merely squirts out the side as it did in your laptop, so long as the paste isn't conductive and you mount the cooler properly more is always better until it gets into something important since you put a gallon on it (aka more is better until someone does something stupid with it)

[tiberiusmoon5]

2 minutes ago, BlargKing said:

Yeah but too much hurts heat transfer. Its a fine line to walk. And really for such a large company it comes off as being cheap, lazy, and sloppy.

 

How would you assume this? the heatsink transfers the heat away from the die, if too much was to increase temps then it would be a insulator and not a very good compound

[paddy-stone]

Doesn't look great, but 99% of people would never see this, and probably works out cheap for someone/machine to squirt enough TIM out, than to have to measure too accurately and take more time doing it.

[BlargKing]

1 hour ago, TiberiusMoon said:

 

How would you assume this? the heatsink transfers the heat away from the die, if too much was to increase temps then it would be a insulator and not a very good compound

Thermal paste isn't great at heat transfer. It works best as a thin layer as thermal paste is designed to fill imperfections in the contact surfaces.