u/S3BYD

Hello,

I bought a Zephyrus m16 from 2022 with a 3070ti from 2022, and I have been struggling to get it working well. Some backstory is that I bought it second hand, and have been slowly upgrading it as I love these laptops and unfortunately never bought one when they were available new. I upgraded the ram, added another SSD and cleaned the fans, then I started using it for school and light gaming. It was awesome, however I noticed it gets a bit hot as all older laptops especially thin ones do. This and being worried about the liquid metal Asus used leaking out as I have the laptop vertically in my bag often led me to replace the paste and this is where the real issues started.

I replaced the liquid metal and the GPU paste with PTM7950 that I got from amazon, and I replaced the thermal putty with Upsirin pro also from amazon. I put it all back together and it started to perform very badly. It would get very hot when charging noticeably hotter then before the repaste. Gaming was impossible as even what should be lightweight games like league of legends caused it to thermal throttle and lag so badly that the game became unplayable. I will include a screenshot. Also a quick note I did see in G-helper after a round of league the computer was using 105watts, which seemed high or inaccurate.

I gave up for a while, and then recently read a post on Reddit that someone had the same issue, and replaced their fans which totally solved it. this lead me to try again, so I repasted the whole laptop in the same manner as before, and this time also replaced the fans. Unfortunately it is still having the same issue, except the idle charging temps went down. I was able to see that the first repaste made good contact, and the ptm had liquified and flowed between the plates making good contact. I did notice some bubbles or pock marks on the ptm which could hint to an issue, however unfortunately I don't have a picture. I also noticed that the layer of ptm seemed quite thick, and not just a thin film.

A few more details about my setup are I use windows for gaming, and I am using G-helper instead of armory crate. I was using HWINFO while the games were running to watch the temps. The laptop idles around 50c, or 60c when charging which seems reasonable, and it does basic tasks fine. However as soon as any sort of load is put on it including updating windows or other things like this the cooling system can't keep up. the laptop gets very hot and is essentially unusable.

I'm usually a Reddit lurker, however I am not sure what else to try except replacing the heatsink, and I am pretty sure this will not solve the issue as the current heatsink seems fine and is not bent. This almost seems like some sort of software or firmware issue as opposed to a hardware issue, but I am not sure what it could be. I just get the feeling I am barking up the wrong tree and there are a lot of variables. If anyone has any ideas to try please let me know I would really appreciate any direction. Could this be some sort of faulty sensor or monitoring software conflict?