[Advanced] Repasting Question - Nitro 5 2019 (AN517-51-56YW)

Hello All -

I took it upon myself to repaste my laptop a few hours ago, I had only ever done a paste application on a desktop CPU before so I understood the application process but as far as what the layout inside was going to look like, I only had a video of the 2018 Nitro 5 being repasted which I found on YouTube to go off of. I understood the risks and figured that at worst I was giving myself an excuse to buy a higher-end gaming laptop. Anyhow, when I pulled off the heatsink, I was expecting to find just the CPU and GPU core's paste applications under the heatsink. I did of course find those, but I was surprised to also find four chips, each with a very thick glob of some sort of peach-colored compound, probably about 2mm tall between the chips and the heatsink plate. They were positioned around the GPU core chip so my assumption was that these were the four 1GB DDR5 chips for the GTX 1650 4GB GPU. I didn't want to clean and re-paste them with the stuff I had on hand, because I wasn't 100% certain that they were what I thought they were, and the compound used was much thicker than the thermal paste which I had on hand. The compound was still rather pliable and did not appear to have dried out the way the paste on the CPU and GPU had. I smeared them into pyramid shapes using the imprint left on each glob by the chips as a guide, hoping to create a decent smush effect when replacing the heatsink, but also dropped a small amount of my thermal paste towards the center of each hoping to avoid air bubbles as much as possible. I replaced the heatsink and got the laptop up and running and everything seems smooth after gaming for a couple hours. Temps dropped a substantial amount, and I am able to run my usual game on higher graphics settings now with fans running significantly quieter and maintaining CPU/GPU temps at or under 80c/70c respectively during heavy, sustained load.

Does anyone know why these chips are pasted the way they are? My assumption as of now is that heat management from the GPU memory was of minimal enough concern that it wasn't worth producing a different heatsink plate for the models with the 1650, but since there is no airflow to that part of the laptop, they wanted to allow for at least some transfer of heat off of the chips. The factory setup doesn't appear efficient enough for any other explanation that I can come up with. As I said before, it seems the repasting efforts were successful and worthwhile, but I can't help but wonder if I should figure out how to repaste those chips.

Thanks for any information you guys might have!

Accepted answers

andylb

You are correct they are the VRAM chips. They don't produce the level of heat needing anything other than this crude gob of paste. The Helios and Predator models are the same and most people leave them alone

All comments

andylb

You are correct they are the VRAM chips. They don't produce the level of heat needing anything other than this crude gob of paste. The Helios and Predator models are the same and most people leave them alone

ohfoxy

andylb said:

You are correct they are the VRAM chips. They don't produce the level of heat needing anything other than this crude gob of paste. The Helios and Predator models are the same and most people leave them alone

Wonderful, thank you! Marking as solved. If anyone needs help repasting, feel free to message me for an idea of the procedure. However I will hold zero liability for any accidental damage or damage otherwise that you may cause to your system during or resulting from the process.

ohfoxy

Edit: Booted up today and started a new gaming session and CPU/GPU are both mostly in the 60's under heavy load now that the paste has had some cure time, which the paste I used tends to need. Amazing!!