So, I bought an Acer Nitro 5 with the Intel core i5 8300H and Nvidia Geforce 1050 GTX ti on Black Friday. I have not even used it everyday and I immediately bought a cooling pad with a giant fan under it, so that it stays off of the table surface and has plenty of room to breathe. Additionally, I turned cool boost on, so the internal fans would work efficiently to cool my laptop. I have been gaming on it for a few hours a night recently and its not been anything real intense. I was running Fortnite on medium settings and noticed the fans had been running loud and running a lot. And when I thought about it my internal fans were always running that loud since I bought the machine. I chocked it up to being cool-boost doing its job and the fact it was the first "gaming" laptop I have ever owned.
Well, I decided I had enough of the fan noise the other day and when I felt the air coming out of the exhaust port I became concerned because it was rather hot. I decided to check my thermals using 3 programs: Nitrosense, Speccy, and CoreTemp. All 3 programs told me that my processor was constantly hitting 200 degrees Fahrenheit with a max temp of 206 degrees (92 to 97 degrees Celsius). The processor MAX that intel sets before your computer shuts down to save itself from catastrophe is 100 Celcsus or 212 Fahrenheit. These thermal readings are through the roof and any prolonged use of a laptop running this hot will irreparably harm the processors and motherboards. My GPU was running similarly with thermals reading in the 185 degrees Fahrenheit range. This is unacceptable for a gaming machine that's not even a full 3 months old. Well I did some posting/reading on Reddit and was told to check the thermal paste. I am very handy with computers and so I took it apart carefully and removed the heat-sink/fan assembly.
I was revolted by the thermal paste job done on this laptop from the factory. It looked like a 2 year old had taken a literal mountain of old dry cracked thermal paste and poured it all over the mirror face and the silicon parts of the chip. It was everywhere and if you know anything about thermal paste, too much of it is worse than none at all. It insulates the silicon and prevents the heat from escaping to the heat-sink. That was Sunday night when I discovered this. I cleaned it all off and yesterday I went and bought Arctic Silver 5 for my laptop. I put the new thermal paste on the laptop PROPERLY and put it all back together. I am now running at 155 degrees Fahrenheit (68 Celsius) under load and thankfully I think my laptop is okay. I say that because there is no really telling how much thermal damage might have been done without a full system evaluation which I am not equipped to do.
I am thoroughly disgusted that my brand new $800 laptop had such poor quality control and I am questioning whether or not Acer does this on purpose. At that rate of thermal throttling the whole laptop would have been fried/dead within about another year (if even that long) and probably right after it was out of factory warranty. Judging from the number of people who told me their Acer had the same exact problem and that's why they would never buy one again, I would venture to say this is not an isolated incident. So ACER, what are you going to do to make this right? Was this merely some worker who was slacking off, or was this done by design so you can keep people buying your machines every year? I am so mad I had to fix my brand new laptop its not even funny. ACER are you listening? You need to do something about this problem because other machines you produce are coming out of the factory with the same problem mine had. This wrong needs to be righted! I will see what kind of response I get on this post and that will determine the nature of the "reviews" I give your product on other prominent websites.
