Friend's Acer Predator Helios 300 PH315-52 hangs when gpu reaches 65c

secretplonka

Background: Acer Predator Helios 300 PH315-52, 3 years old, heavy gaming use. Gpu fan broke 2 years ago & was replaced by family member. During the last month or so the following problems have began occurring during gameplay.

• Laptop will either hang (image freezes, all processes stop ie. discord, resumes working after a short while)
• It will turn off completely, turn back on with a black screen requiring a shut down with the power button.
• Rarely it will give an actual blue screen. Sometimes when turning back on it will say no bootable device found and require a second restart
• Rarely, it will also turn off and restart on idle (no gpu usage)

To fix this, we have tried:

• installing the latest bios
• fully updating windows, and resetting to a clean install
• removing or reinstalling predator sense and intel extreme tuning service
• checking all temps during games and stress tests
• undervolting cpu to lower temps
• checking ssd health

I have stress tested the cpu, and it does hit 95c at peak so I've slightly undervolted it and it now peaks at 80-85c. When stress testing the cpu, it never once crashed.

When stress testing the gpu, it always crashes or hangs at about 65c, sometimes 63 sometimes 67, but always in this area. When it cools down to about 50c, it will come back unless it's fully crashed.

In the event viewer after a crash there's:

• Service Control Manager "The iocbios2 service failed to start due to the following error: The system cannot find the path specified."
• volmgr "Dump file creation failed due to error during dump creation"
• Eventlog "Audit events have been dropped by the transport. 0"

For iocbios2, it seems to be an intel extreme tuning service, I have tried installing intel extreme tuning, uninstalling it, removing all files including the registry entry, and doing the same with predatorsense (which apparently includes it).

After narrowing it down to the gpu (aside from the random restarts), I am unsure of what to do next. Could the temps be a misread, and it's getting much hotter than that and that's causing the issues? Could the aftermarket cooler be failing, and when it ramps up it cuts out the gpu? Any help or ideas of how to test this would be really appreciated. I'm only doing these fixes over the internet using teamviewer at the moment but I may be able to get my hands on the laptop to open it up and clean out any dust.

Thanks!

Commodore_1995#

Have you replaced the thermal paste and thermal pads yet?