Quote:
Originally Posted by Zyber
All HP Pavilions have a design flaw with the heat-sink on the motherboard. It means that the GPU will often melt and fry your laptop due to the heat problem.
There was (is?) also a class-action lawsuit regarding this.
It is a good idea to remove any dust from the fan annually with compressed air. Just from the outside. It is not an easy operation to get access to the fan from the inside on these laptops because you need to remove the motherboard too.
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I found out about this the hard way: had HP Pavilion for 2 years running very good, no complains, didn't get why others hated them. Then I decided to run second monitor with it and at first I hooked it up with regular VGA cable - it run smooth, again no complains. Then I decided to hook it up with HDMI, it'd run okay for a month or two, then something happened, computer was running hotter and at some point GPU broke so that nVidia drivers would not work and therefor no additional monitor, luckily for me standard vga drivers worked so at least I could use built in display for a time being while getting new computer.
I took it all apart, figuring maybe heat-sink and fans inside got too dusty. It is a pain to get to heatsink on HP - you have to take it all apart including top display piece as well. Eventually when I got to the heatsink I learned that CPU and GPU share one heatsink, which would not be a problem IF the heatsink would be pressing firmly against GPU as it was over CPU. There was 2-3mm space between the sink and graphics chip with some filler material which I guess didn't take heat away as well as firmly attached heatsink with thermal paste in between. HDMI made GPU heat much more to a point of it burning some circuitry inside. Surprising that video card would continue work at least on standart SVGA drivers and native display, although would not play movies well any longer - it would overheat instantly and shut itself down.
Won't be buying HPs anymore after that experience.