Recently I had a customer come in with a ASUS G60V Gaming Laptop. He was telling me that the laptop is getting unnecessarily hot constantly. So I checked in the overheating laptop and got to work. Looking over the computer this is what I found:

ASUS G60V Fake Vent Before

At first glance I thought, “Oh nice, this laptop actually has a great cooling system – a fan must be stuck.” But, after closer inspection, I noticed that it was just an illusion. What you see in the above picture is a silver plastic ring encircling nothing but a sticker which looks like a vent. Not a real vent, but something that is supposed to look like one. Why Asus didn’t put a real vent there instead of taking the time to factor a fake vent into their blueprints, I don’t know, especially with the overheating.

I started out by disassembling the laptop and removing all the dust and debris. Then I removed all the heatsinks, cleaned them, and reapplied new thermal compound to the CPU and GPU. After I put everything back together and performed a stress test, I found that the processor was running at a stable, normal temperature but the graphics card was cooking away at 100° C. That’s hot enough to boil water. This was pretty surprising, seeing how cold it is here in Bellevue.  I took a minute to assess the problem and asked myself what I was going to do about this. Can’t very well just give it back to the customer with the laptop still running at that temperature. So I go over some options with the customer. He could either get one of those laptop coolers – but those are usually a hassle and bulky – or we could remove that fake vent and install a new (real) one. After talking it over with the customer, he gave me the green light to do some modifications.

Some drilling, cutting, sanding, and mounting later, this is the end result of the custom modification:

ASUS G60V Vent After

Basically, a hole was cut where the fake sticker used to be. From there, a new silver color metal vent was secured to the plastic, and the laptop was reassembled.  Now the laptop runs an average of 10-20°C cooler than before. The best part is the customer doesn’t have to carry around extra weight using a cooling pad just to use his laptop normally. Our shop isn’t just about repairing your computers, it’s about doing whatever it takes to make your experience with said computers all that much better.