G20AJ GTX 960 Throttling Issue (Resolved)

[C4RN1]

Hey guys, I'm back.... I haven't been here in a long time.

I've bought over 50 rog laptops to own/refurbish/repair over the years. Since I started working in the corporate IT world I stopped buying these things, I barely get enough time as it is when I'm not working.

Anyway I bought a G20AJ off ebay (1TB HDD ,i7-4790, 16GB Ram, GTX 960 GPU), supposedly excellent condition. Came with a reload of windows 10 v1903, generic windows drivers.

I loaded Asus utilities on it, lastest GTX 960 driver from Nvidia as well as prime95 and furmark to see where temps were at. Temps were acceptable so I loaded a test game and started playing it... and that's when I got the issue.

GPU renders everything perfectly but the video is stuttering. I thought it could be the external brick dropping voltage or a bad driver, I tried to adjust settings and monitor power. Changing settings didn't do anything, power stayed in spec.

Seeing as this is a computer from 2014 and still has an intact warranty sticker I decided to open it up to clean it out.

Some slight dust on the main fans, nothing too crazy, a couple dust bunnies between the fans and cpu heatsink. GPU was absolutely caked with dust, I blew it out for a good couple minutes. The rest of the case wasn't bad at all. I am thinking the previous owner tried to blow out the case before they sold it to me, but there was no way to get to the gpu direclty without taking it apart.

I removed about 30 screws, removed the heatsink and replaced the thermal compound with IC Diamond. Cleaned the rest of the case and threw it all back together. Ran Prime 95 for an hour to help set the IC Diamond and then ran my test game.

Everything is perfect now, I downloaded the latest windows 10 release (version 2004) and did a clean install. As a bonus while doing a clean install of windows 10 I found several partitions just taking up space (yeah I don't think I'm going to need Windows 8 Recovery anytime soon). It was sold to me as a 1tb drive, though it looks to be a 2tb drive after I deleted all the partitons.

Got the G20 for about $450 shipped, not a bad deal all in all. Will probably keep it around for a few months then sell it.

[cl-Albert@ROG]

Welcome back C4RN1!
Thanks for sharing as well as providing the pictures which can hopefully help others running into similar issues.

fyi.
Probably not spending much time on but if you didn't already know and have any interest, the G20AJ is supposed to support 'breath lighting' that is common on many newer gaming systems and my notes mention you want to disable standby as well as hibernate and allow the system to idle around 10 minutes for it to kick in when you have the feature enabled in the ASUS command software although not sure if it still works in the latest Win10 versions if you're running that.

[Welsh Whoopee]

its amazing that asus won't allow customers to open them up to clean them, but force them to send them back to them so their can clean them their self and charge a small fortune. I tell people to just open it up and learn how it goes together, it will make it easier in the future to upgrade then if you ever sell, sell it to me in the UK lol ]