Asus G752 gpu possibly dying?

[Minimumwagestream]

So I bought a laptop used recently, and it was stuck in a boot loop. I tried to do a fresh install of Windows 10, and it would work, but after installing the graphics driver (for the gtx 970m), it freezes at startup with the Asus logo. 

 

I ended up taking the laptop apart and saw that someone had previously used thermal material for both the gpu and cpu. I cleaned it off and applied some ic diamond, and reinstalled windows 10. And then the laptop worked! Until the graphics driver was installed. It would work sometimes, but would other times just get stuck at the boot screen. If it did boot to the desktop, sometimes it would freeze or have a white screen. 

 

It would work sometimes with the ic diamond, and I even ran unigine heaven. 

 

I'm thinking maybe the problem is with the thermal pad/material on the rest of the gpu. It looks very unevenly applied. 

 

My question is, might this be the thermal material on the rest of the gpu that's causing the problems? 

 

 

I've already swapped hard drives, and alternated ram sticks, so I'm almost positive it's the gpu. 

 

I'm going to try to reapply thermal paste using antec formula 7 instead of ic diamond.

 

I've attached photos.