Overheating laptop

[The Green Bean]

I have a Sony CW i5 laptop with Nvidia 330M and I've been having problems with overheating. I've tried everything: reapplying thermal paste, resetting the BIOS. But I still get constantly rising temperatures for the GPU until they reach 100C and throttle down. This happens all within 15 minutes making it impossible to play games. I bought this about 11 months ago and it used to run fine until a firmware upgrade was released which improved the thermal management. In my case it's become worse.

I realized that since temperatures rise linearly, the problem is with the heat flow. I took off the back case, and ran furmark for 30 mins and the temperature was constant at 65C.

Dust would seem an obvious problem but the back of the casing has none. Then I realized there is NO vent for inflow. What few holes the casing has are miles away from the fan. The part covering the fan is just plastic. Sony could have made the airflow much better by adding a few holes there.

So now what? Should I make holes? How? I don't want to crack the casing or make it look aesthetically unappealing.

Suggestions?

P.S: Although the laptop is still under warranty, I bought it in the USA and I'm in Pakistan. Sony does not offer international warranty sadly.

 

[IanWorthington]

Sounds unlikely in your case but did you check the heatsink fan itself is free from dust and operating correctly?

I wouldn't worry about the inlet holes being a long way away: that's probably required to get airflow over the rest of the board, and as it *was* operating ok, clearly it worked.

And I assume you didn't apply too much thermal paste, no? Even the best of that stuff's a pretty poor conductor of heat.

 

[The Green Bean]

Sounds unlikely in your case but did you check the heatsink fan itself is free from dust and operating correctly?

I wouldn't worry about the inlet holes being a long way away: that's probably required to get airflow over the rest of the board, and as it *was* operating ok, clearly it worked.

And I assume you didn't apply too much thermal paste, no? Even the best of that stuff's a pretty poor conductor of heat.

The fan seems to operate correctly. The result before I applied thermal paste and the result afterwards are identical. I'd say that rules out bad application. Wouldn't a 35C+ difference with and without the case suggest that the airflow is the problem here. If I remember correctly, when the laptop was new temps would not go past 70. All that changed after the firmware upgrade (I did not check the temps for 6 months in between so time could have been a factor) when I started getting temps 90+. Since last week they're at 100 and throttling the GPU down. Ambient temps are also much cooler these days than ever before. I also bought a laptop cooler which doesn't seem to make much of a difference.

Edit: IanWorthington was right. I took out the heatsink and took out the fan and there was a ton of dust blocking the vent. I couldn't see it before and the fan doesn't exactly come out so it was quite hard to clean. I managed to get most of the dust out using my hand, a hairdryer and a fork in the absence of a compressed air can. I think I might need to clean in again in a couple of months. Temps are down in to the 60s

 

[IanWorthington]

HTH.

I'll give you one guess why I suspected a blocked fan.

 

[The Green Bean]

HTH.

I'll give you one guess why I suspected a blocked fan.

LOL Which one did you have?

The dusty climate is not just affecting my health, it's killing my computers

 

[IanWorthington]

Dell 700m. About 4 years old though it been running hot and slow for a while before I figured out was going on. You wouldn't believe the shit I got out of the fan.