Gt80 - Burning smell from right vent

Today i noticed a burning smell like a hair dryer coming from the right vent of my GT80. The last time i recall this smell was when i forgot to re-plug the fan after a dissasembly, but that was months ago, and this time there doesn't seem to be anything overheating, at least that HWMonitor, XTU, and Afterburner can see. Is it possibly the VRAM modules since i think i lost a couple of the thermal pads and replaced them with Antec 7 paste? Could the burnt GPU smell have lingered this long? Or am i by chance just mismelling "hot" as "burning"?

Edit: i opened it up and the fan smelled the most, but the gpu had this gluey looking stuff on it by that gold thing. is that supposed to be there?

 

You lost vRam thermal pads and replaced it with paste ?

This is a very bad idea because the contact with the heatsink might not be very good and the reason why thermal pads are generally used. Paste is used to fill in tiny tiny gaps. Those expensive MXM cards will most likely fail sooner than they would have. MXM GPU replacements seem rather expensive vs buying even the cheapest thermal pads.

Also can't see you image.

 

Yeah... in having remembered that that happened i've ordered thermal pads to replace them. Definitely wasn't a bright thing (at the time didnt know what they were, the stock ones were making the heatsink impossible to pull up on and they got everywhere and a couple picked up thermal paste when i did finally get it off, and the *one* GT80 teardown that existed didnt show them, and there was a lot of stuff inside the case that looked like the previous owner put there) I haven't used them much since that and have sofar had no issues aside this smell, so hopefully it's fine-ish. =S Gonna keep the laptop in intel graphics only mode until replacement pads arrive.

I can get the image fixed soon, seems Drive doesn't play nice with literally anything.

EDIT: Fixed image

EDIT2: running XTU stress test with the cards disabled i can still smell a bit of it from the right vent. Also have never had any crashes or artifacting

 

also, check that hamster)

 

Wrong thread?

 

Thermal pads help with heat transfer but glue paste cannot. It seems like the smell came from the burning of paste.

 

@Kevin@GenTechPC Glue paste.. reffering to the clear glue or the thermal paste? I've got pads on the way and for now the cards are disabled, but that clear glue by the gold thing seems odd to me.

 

The golden thing works like a spring to provide a minimum clearance when pressed down.

 

But what about that clear stuff thats around it? it's hard like dried hotglue and i've never seen such a material in a PC before.

 

Yeah, something's not right, it's best to let MSI handle it.

 

Not really an option for me, would it perhaps be possible to carefully sand down most of it? Picking at it might chip off one of the resistors its on.

 

You can try but be very careful because if a resistor or capacitor is broken you can be blamed for it.

 

Ok so turns out the glue is there to hold the gold bit on it seems? It's on both GPUs around it. I'm thinking the smell is/was dried/drying up thermal paste. I'm gonna clean up the GPUs more when a replacement heatsink arrives (GPU2 is running at 91C unless coolerboost is on...) and hopefully thatl rid of the smell.

http://imgur.com/a/1O3O9 - the heatsink and card

 

They look clean on those images.