Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

Laptop heating even at idle state

Mar 11, 2016 4:17AM PST

Laptop running pretty hot even in idle state,it is about 2 years old Asus N56J with core i7 4700hq,Nvidia 2gb 760M.Running Windows 8 ultimate x64.Any ideas what might be causing this?on higher loads it starts throttling,thanks for the help!http://s14.postimg.org/be9elbe01/Untitled.png

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Answer
Dust, clean it out
Mar 11, 2016 4:22AM PST

Get a can of air, use it.

- Collapse -
Did
Mar 11, 2016 6:37AM PST

Already did,not much dust was in the fan..

- Collapse -
Answer
At years old
Mar 11, 2016 8:10AM PST

It's now possible the heatsink compound has dried and cracked. It's also possible the parts are failing but the 5 bucks of compound is cheap compared to the alternatives. There are YouTubes about this work but have it done if you don't DIY.

- Collapse -
It doesn't have to be very old
Mar 12, 2016 1:47PM PST

Just a couple of years ago a grandson made the mistake of buying a Cyberpower desktop. It took less than a year before it would start to randomly shut down. He finally gave up on it, but then recently took it out again. Now it was shutting down about every 5 min. so I was asked to check it out. It wasn't too dusty, but I eventually cleaned the heatsink and applied new paste. No more problems. I called it shoddy work by the mfg.

- Collapse -
Answer
Fan Wearing?
Mar 12, 2016 6:49AM PST

When the machine heats up, is there a noticeable increase in fan speed and the volume of hot air expelled from the vents? If not, it could be the fan bearings wearing and preventing it from spinning up fast enough. Might need a new fan unit to fix.

Since the machine has been running hot, Bob's suggestion of dried out thermal paste is very possible.

Looking at some of the videos, it looks to have some substantial heat pipes from both the CPU and GPU to the radiator. I've never seen them fail but I suppose it's just possible something is blocking them.

Also looking at the videos, there is some significant careful leverage necessary to get the base cover off and obviously a chance of breaking it. And getting the motherboard out has a significant possibility of doing some serious damage internally. Although I do some hardware maintenance on my own kit, I think I would be inclined to take this one to a service agent, even to replace the thermal paste and or fan assembly.