Cooked Comp

[Gryphus_1]

So I had to recover my boot sector last night. While trying to figure out what the problem was I unbuttoned the bottom panel and found that the entire steel frame had bad heat discoloration and some scorching. Yet all the plastics were unmarred.

I've known I had overheating issues, but not this bad. Has anyone seen this before?

As reference, the frame was the same color as the fan surrounds just matte.

http://www.net-jam.com/profile/134159/pics/album/album_id/358277

G1

[TIGR]

Sorry to see it Gryphus. I'm not able to tell what is discolored; is it safe to say it got hottest around the heat pipes and CPU? Is it definitely steel? I don't understand what in a computer could do that. Steel shouldn't discolor until around 300°C if I'm not mistaken, and the hottest part of the hottest computer component shouldn't touch 100°C.

[milSpec]

The chassis is most likely aluminum. Perhaps the heat caused whatever paint was used to oxidize to the point of corrosion. When I worked for the school IT department, lots of the student issue laptops would come in for motherboard replacement due to intermittent failure of usb ports, wireless adapters, lcd's etc. over 70% of them would have dry crusted almost burnt looking thermal compound under the heatsink acting as an insulator. It became standard practice to replace the heatsink fans and reapply thermal paste after any hardware repair other than hard drives.

A re-application of a high quality thermal compound might help out, but laptops in general have bad cooling capability due to tight confines and restricted airflow. In an extreme case you could lap the contact surface of the heatsink to the die of the cpu to ensure optimal thermal conductivity.

I recommend and swear by AS5. Arctic Silver 5 [EMOJI:https://resources.enjin.com/1489581540/themes/core/images/emojione/svg/1f44d.svg?0]

[Gryphus_1]

It could very well be aluminum, given the sheer weight and width of the thing I would assume steel. I know that my HDDs have been running at 44-47°C and that's a completely isolated compartment. Since I've not had any temp software on my GPUs or CPU I literally have no Idea what it could be getting up to, but given the back panel (2 new pics) has only those little vents covered in dust clogged felt as the only form of intake...

The heatsinks did look kind of dry. It would be great if new paste is the answer. Right now I'm looking at keeping the back panel off and creating ducting for a large fan to force air into it. At this point my goal is just to keep it running.

G1

[Ruthless_One]

Just pour water into it to cool it down! should help!