DV7 Overheating. Heat-sink fan. [ Edited ]

[Freaksho7]

Mid December I  started having some intense overheating problems with my DV7-3180us Notebook running on Windows 7 64-bit.

The computer often black-screen crashed as a result of the heatsink fan failing and my motherboard being damaged in the process. So I sent it in to HP Diagnostic and Repair and in 2 weeks I got it back and it was working great. 

Now my problem, 2 days after my 90 day waranty expired, the system started overheating again and crashing during gaming/streaming. So I used HW Monitor to check the temperatures.

Idle: 50C average CPU amongst all cores. 60C for the GeForce GT 230M video card.

Gaming: 88C average CPU after 10 minutes. 92C video card after 10 minutes.

I quit the game as these temperatures started to scare me. It's almost as if the heatsink fan stopped working entirely. I place my hand under the exit vents on the top left side of the computer and I feel no airflow whatsoever. Now since I got this back, I have air-can cleaned out the vents every week and avoided very intense gaming, but the fan still failed. What gets me frustrated is that I am going to have to spend more money repairing a fan that isn't even half a year old. I don't know what happened to the fan...HP may have not applied thermal paste or just gave my computer a defective fan. Either way I am going end up paying a great deal. This is my last HP laptop, not just because of bad repair job, but poor designs and an overwhelming horde of unhappy customers of the DV7.

Just to give some more info:

I updated my drivers/BIOS from the HP website.

I have not recently bumped or overclocked my laptop to cause the fan to be dislodged (Infact it is just stationary since I recieved it back.

I have not opened it up, as the warrenty from the previous fix would have been void.

It is resting on a metal-mesh surface for airflow and the back is proped up half an inch.

Room temperature is 68F.

[frrw]

Hi Freaksho7:

          Have you used external fans. I use external fans Rite Aid has a real cheep fold up pocket fan for $10.00 just plug it into usb port and set your computer on it. Thats what I use with my HP DV7-6135dx . Oh by the way HP warranty is for one year not 90 days comes any computer sold in USA  new. So you know. They also sell more expensive laptop cooler pads from $20.00 to $30.00 at Staples and Office Depot. When I use my fan the laptop fans hardly ever kick on. They run but at very low speed. Ounce you get your fans fix I recomend using external fans. This will help keeping the fans from running high all the time.

[Freaksho7]

frrw,

Yes I have tried external fans. The change isn't noticeable as the GPU sitll heats to 90C+ temps in a few minutes no matter the orientation under my comp. The heatsink vents are just not giving out any pressure, so all the heat generated at the top left where the GPU and CPU are is overheating the systemboard leading to crashes. The heat produced by that single location on the computer is enough to burn my fingers numb. 

Back in early January when I sent it in to HP Diagnostic, it was sent back with a temporary warranty for 90 days, so if it breaks again in that 90 days I can send it back free of charge. That warranty had just ran out when the fan started failing.

But when I get it back from the local shop, I will definately pull out the external fan again.

Also on a side note, I want to monitor my computer functions closely from now on. I find both HW Monitor and Speedfan work great, but neither can find the sensor for my fan-speeds. Anyone know of a better program that works for HP laptops?

[spektyr]

I have the exact same notebook. It only seriously overheats when I play graphics intensive action games, e.g.. first person shooters, otherwise it runs pretty cool.  When the system starts to get really hot I notice that the cooling fan starts cycling on and off, which doesn't make any sense because that only allows the CPU/GPU to heat up to dangerous levels even faster. I have updated the BIOS to the must current version and there has been no change. I have the fan set to 'always on'. If the fan is directly controlled by the BIOS then I'd say HP needs to release a new version ASAP that corrects this condition.