Weird Thermal Issue on Asus K53E Laptop

[KouenHasuki]

Hello there,

 

Earlier this year I was given an Asus K53E laptop since it was no longer needed by the owner (that said could be due to it being the base Celeron B800 model) and since I was using a 1st gen i5 Laptop as my daily portable computer I jumped on it.

 

After getting it home and doing my usual shakedown, stress tests and hardware tests (the only thing being an issue was the hard drive having 3 bad sectors which was replaced) I went upon checking the service manual and checking the Asus website looking for what CPU's it could take and found that the Core i5 2450M would be ideal as the cooler and PSU was designed with that TDP (35W) and Wattage (65w) in mind, Note this isnt the first time I have upgraded a laptops CPU I have gotten used and passed along to me.

 

This is where things take a turn for the strange.

 

The CPU comes in from eBay and I Install it without issue, replacing the thermal compound with some MX-2 and after I stress test it with 20 passes of Intel Burn Test at the highest level my 8GB of ram would allow and it passed fine, Tested with AIDA 64 stress tests and the thermals topped out at around 82c with the fan hitting 4100RPM (Max being 45-4700RPM) everything was great! 

 

A month in I noticed my fan would go crazy even just booting Windows 7 and going full speed and then calming down and a lot of hot air being pushed, so I naturally checked startup items which was fine and such, I decide to then fire up AIDA64 and do a stress test and within 10 seconds my CPU was hitting 95-100c and thermal throttling at max fan speed.

 

Given this was only a month in and I cleaned the cooling system out when I changed the Celeron B800 for the i5 2450M I had no doubt that a clogged cooler would be the issue, I also checked for a BIOS update and I was on the very latest from ASUS. 

 

So I open up the laptop and pull the cooler off and it had been making good contact but I clean everything again and reapply some paste (only some more generic white paste but it was all I had to hand) checked the cooler and fan and there was nothing clogging or really any dust or anything else to reduce cooling performance.

 

I then put it back together and stress test again and im back to around 82 to 85c full load no throttling! Great I thought... Until 2 days ago and we are back again to square one. I have tried loading default values in the BIOS and such also but without luck.

 

Would anyone here happen to have any idea what could be causing this, I feel its not the CPU upgrade in principle since it is one of the ones they use on the same model and even board and the bios updates are universal to all K53E's

 

For completeness here is the system specs:

 

OS: Windows 7 x64 SP1 (fully updated)

CPU: Core i5 2450m

GPU: Intel HD3000

Ram: 8GB Samsung DDR3 1333MHz

Boot Drive: 120GB Kingston V300 SSD

Storage Drive: 1TB Seagate 5400RPM (Replaced original Optical Drive for an adapter to HDD also tested without and issue is still there)

BIOS: latest from the ASUS website

 

Cheers!

[KouenHasuki]

Since no one had the time or wanted to lend a hand with my problem, after scratching my head and talking to many others I thought id follow up this issue with my current findings and potential fix to hopefully help others.

 

After some tests and examining, I noticed there was 2 large pits in my contact point of the CPU cooler but even worse was there was a bump also rising the cooler above the level of the rest of the surface. Where I am thinking it was OK for a month then failing is the thermal paste curing period coming to an end and as it settled in it was losing contact between the cooler and the CPU itself.

 

What I ended up doing was lapping my cooler by using some high quality car auto sandpaper to remove the 2 pits and bump to the best of my ability which *SHOULD* resolve the issue since its a far more flat surface than it was before.

[zanthros]

With what you have found you more than likely found the issue. Imperfections that can de "sealed"  by new thermal compound that will "bleed out" in time will certainly do what you have experienced. You may have resolved the problem but you need to ask yourself How did this damage happen on the cooler contact plate? Was it present before? If so why did it not overheat previously?

 

Using sandpaper is fine for smoothing out the surface but you may want to get some 1600 or 2000 grit to polish it for better contact and cooling.

 

As far as no one chiming in previously all I can say is you may have stumped the chumps. LOL Really, going on the info you provided that would have been a difficult one to troubleshoot unless you were there to see the components that you removed and inspected. I hope that the answer that you have come up with resolves your issue. Good Luck!

[KouenHasuki]

Hey Zanthros, Amusingly all I had was 2000 Grit paper so you can imagine how long I was at it (2 hours) though the surface even around the dinged and bump is smoother now though as we know most of the time that doesnt give much of a difference as luke showed in a video, but I think I sorted the issue getting rid of the dings and bump

 

As for how it happened, I would hazard a guess it was just poor manufacturing from Asus, Given it was originally the lowest possible version of the K53E maybe they just chucked the junk coolers on those knowing the B800 Celery's are only 1.5GHz compared to the i5 2450m's 2.5GHz to 2.9GHz

 

Some may have said I should have just got a new notebook but to be honest my notebook does all I need and thats all I can ask for! I also wanted to follow up on my own post since I hate when people never follow up or only put "Fixed now"  better to share information than not is how I roll

[zanthros]

It is kinda funny how people will throw out a laptop because it is not "fast enough" I got an old dell 1720 that was originally an economy laptop and for about $450.00 at the time I took it to the point of blowing away an alienware laptop and other higher end units, when the laptop cost me $250 to begin with. It still is the world record holder in my sig....

I also learned over the period of a few years Dell Bios programming that came in handy. Thanks for the update as we can all learn from this one!

[KouenHasuki]

I hear ya on that one, I like to recycle hardware too or improve the hardware even if its a laptop if its at all possible and economically practical. A good example is my Asus Eee PC 1001PX which is slow as all hell for day to day usage... But since I am a Twitch streamer I actually loaded my Deepbot onto it and ran a 3.5mm to 3.5mm audio cable to my rig to allow me to leave my bot up 24/7 if someone wants to play chat games and give me the audio commands while saving power due to its tiny power footprint

[zanthros]

Re tasking is sweet and shows creativity.  We need more of that if we are to survive.

[Shingouki]

I know i'm late (i just noticed it, sorry), but in case you still didn't solve the issue, problems like these can be caused by bad contact between heatsink and CPU, or faulty CPU.

 

If you're still experiencing the problem, it can still be caused by bad contact between the CPU and the cooler, and maybe you'll need a copper sheet between the CPU and the cooler. When i change CPUs on laptops (rarely for upgrading, tough) it happens that the new one need a shim (sorry if bad translation) of copper to increase thermal dissipation.