Hello all
I bought the Predator Triton 300 (
pt315-51-71sh ) last August in Australia and am now living in the UK but have
had severe fan issues for about 2 months. Initially it was fan noise, and then
became extremely loud (like you could hear it from another room in the house),
and then completely went away for a while and I noticed the fan was visibly
stationary while the laptop was running. It also smells a bit, almost
like melted plastic, so I am assuming the bearing has gone. I haven’t really
been gaming a lot on it.
I have contacted acer support to try to get it
fixed under warranty, and they request I send the laptop in the post to get fixed,
but won't give me any information about how long that will take. Given I am
studying full time I can't afford to have the laptop gone for realistically any
more than a week, so am trying to replace the cooling unit myself. I wasn't
able to get the part in Europe but located an apparently correct replacement
cooling unit in Australia that is on its way to me in the post now.
My questions are: can I take the laptop and part
to any generic computer store and ask them to do a swap and reapply the thermal
paste? I am generally hesitant about trusting pc stores, since I can't visually
check their work, but am not too keen to do the swap myself. Will this void any
warranty? Are there any other risks here? I've taken the back off a few times
to add RAM and diagnose this issue and can't see any warranty stickers. I am
worrying because I read another post where apparently the paste wasn't applied
correctly and killed the gpu?
Also, given that I am still working on the machine
while it's completly dropped 1/2 fans, it's running generally very hot by only
using google chrome and the Microsoft suite. Streaming videos can easily have
the system temp above 90C. Am I risking further damage or reducing the lifetime
of any components by still using it at these temps? I guess it should be ok
since gaming pre-fan issue had it around these same temps, but I don't know
much about this topic.
Any advice would be really appreciated. I have
just bought a cooling stand on amazon to hopefully lighten the load until the
part arrives. Sorry for the long post but it’s got me rather
worried, and any help would be appreciated
Thanks
