ASUS G51 Cooling mod

Great post! Very informative and interesting to read. I am intrigued by this problem. I wonder if this is the reason for all the failure that was seem on Nvidia 8xxx series cards. I owned a 8600gts that may have died in this way.

I assume the video card manufactures try and reflow the returned cards and ship them out again once fixed.

I bought my G51 refurbished from TigerDriect, who was selling off these laptops for $600. They sold them off for a couple years so I assume they had a lot of refurbished stock.

I wonder if mine already had this problem and had been repaired once. Do you know if it is likely to happen a 2nd time? or would reflowing the chips actually fix better than is was originally?

Did you learn how to do this in school or take a course about it? It's a very interesting subject. You got a great deal on your laptop, considering you fixed it yourself too. Great work

 

Simply put, i own a computer repair shop.

I actually went to ITT Tech in in 2002 and got my bachelors in multimedia. Then when i was looking for a job but nobody would hire me because i already had a job (working at a mall). I had 4 interviews with this one company and they picked the guy that didn't have a job. Anyway i ended up reading and studying and got my compTIA A+/MSC. Then i was head tech for a local computer repair shop for a few months and he had to close because he didn't know how to manage money. So i figured i could do it, opened up my own shop and i've been in business about 2 years.

As far as the reflowing and smt or bga soldering i kind of picked it up as a hobby. If you look on afterdawn forums you'll find hundreds of posts just like the ones above. That's really where i learned and researched everything. It all started with xbox 360 repair and it's evolved into fixing anything and everything.

It's almost second nature being able to fix everything i see. I've had a few ROG laptops so far, the next one will be a g53 with a broken dc jack if i can find one cheap enough (i keep getting outbid on ebay). I just bought an rog am3 crosshair iv formula board for cheap and plan to use a bulldozer 8 core in it with 16gb because it's so ridiculously cheap.

Anyway like i said before, reflows only fix the cracked solder balls under the chip in the bga. The end all solution would be to reball with lead solder but that's expensive and time consuming. It takes specialized equipment to do it and the knowledge to use the machine. At that point you're almost better off buying a new video card or laptop.

 

I finally got around to mounting my fan switch, i had to modify the switch to fit the opening but it fits perfect. I might end up shortening up the switch a bit but we'll see if it gets in the way.

Here's a few pics, if you have any questions feel free to pm me.

 

those are really amazing temp drop. I tried playing without the bottom panel but all i could get is 3-4 C lower. I know that you did this with laptop on your lap. Even though I was running test on my table i think i still should have more temp drop then that.


how does cooling mod serve everyone else around here?

 

I feel bad about posting in such an old thread but it seemed like the only place to ask. In the above posts C4RN1 said he installed a switch, was that a switch between the blue wire? My understanding is that putting a switch in would allow the wire to act normally, but also be able to disconnect it to make it run at full power when needed. My apologies if I missed something or this is an extremely obvious question, modding computers is a new adventure for me.

 

So on my G50vt (G51 fan assembly) there are four wires. The blue one is PWM, which I'm 80% sure makes the fan go full speed when cut.

So if you spliced a switch in series with the blue PWM wire, you could have it run at full speed (switch is open) or at whatever normal speed (switch is closed).

Refer to this thread here where I had a similar discussion with another fellow NBR member

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asus-gaming-notebook-forum/560381-g50vt-fan-cable.html

Good luck! Let us know how it goes! Maybe it is a bad thing but it might be more relevant to resurrect that thread instead of posting more to this one.

 

The blue wire is the signal wire and if you have it connected it will work normally. Flip the switch and it will disconnect the wire and the fans will run 100%. It works great for playing games, though in furmark you probably won't see a difference in max temp (though you might get a better score due to it throttling in the beginning where it ramps up the fan). I've done this mod on several g50-51 computers so far (a couple from this forum), and it's more than worth the time to do this mod.

 

Hi C4RN1, I saw your mods for the G51 and they look great. I'm trying to do something like that as well.

I have a question for you, is it okay to use 1.5MM thermal pads instead of 1MM on the GPU heatsink? That's the only thing I have and I'm worried that when I put back on the heatsink, it will be too tight.

 

I would not worry, the core can take quite a bit of pressure and too little will lead to heat problems.

Now installing a high pressure heatsink in the athlon XP era was scary.

 

Thanks a lot for the reply. I understand what I need to do now... I need to rescrap all of the thermal pads and put new ones because the current ones are just falling apart.