MSI 1762 Fangbook from CyberpowerPC

Good lord, the problems I've had with this thing. I should have gotten a 4 year warranty and I'm not sure why I didn't.

Early on, I had to open the system to add an SSD. In doing so, I very carefully began removing the case when I found out the 1762's plastic tabs are the most brittle material currently known to man. There also wasn't a caddy in the socket, although the whitebook manual says there should be one there.

I shrugged and dealt with it. That wasn't a big deal, I thought. It probably should have been a warning sign for me to check more closely.

Recently, I moved to a house that was quite a few degrees warmer than my old place. I then noticed the system was an efficient space heater and was unusable for gaming in the room any time it was over 72f in there. I had to stop playing almost anything intensive, and on future inspection, I noticed my CPU was idling at 60c and going up to 70c under any sort of load. My GPU was hanging around 50c and jumping to 65 or so whenever it was even checked on using HWMonitor. Under full load, the CPU was quickly hitting 100c and throttling, and the CPU was hitting 90c fast and doing the same. Both of them were dancing around their throttle points and being incredibly unstable. If maximum fan was enabled by pushing the glowing button, it dropped things about 5c for a bit before temps got back up and fired gouts of hot air.

I checked Coretemp and MSI Afterburner on temperatures, and they agreed.

So I pop the thing all the way open finally.

Jesus christ.

The fan is held in by one screw. The other two that are supposed to be there are not. There were other missing screws in places, but I failed to document them. I was a bit furious. The hard drive is held in with a rubber stopper.

The vents and fan were at a layer of dustiness that would put a vacuum bag to shame, so I painstakingly cleaned them to wonderful sparkling perfection. That'll fix it, I thought! So I booted back up and... get about the same temperatures. So I get some thermal paste from a friend and popped it open.

Thermal paste is supposed to be extremely thin. On one corner of the GPU, the thermal paste was half a centimeter thick and was too thin on the other side. The CPU was slightly better, as it wasn't so thick it was squashed out to the sides of the die.

After a repaste, I'm getting 90c on my GPU in games still and 99-103 on the CPU. It's still dancing around the high temperatures, but not as drastically. I'm going to go buy some Arctic Silver 5 tonight and try yet another repaste to see what I can do. I'm still having to play games like Xcom on Low to get smooth framerates. I've had to drop to 720p/low in a lot of games nVidia suggests that I max out. It's not an Optimus issue in these cases, either. I've checked with the nVidia inspector toolkit.

Other issues:
- The hotkeys do strange things in games. I have to be careful not to turn my keyboard light on/off while playing Dota 2, or it actively messes up my team by stealing an important item. This is probably just MSI's keyboard, but I figured I'd mention it. (It's the Courier hotkey being hit)
- The Killer 1202 sometimes decide to hoover up 15gb of system memory. I had to use registry tweaks to get around it. It's bizarre to play a game made for a P2 and have windows pop up a "Warning! System memory error! I am afraid!" sort of error and demand that I close it.
- The USB ports on the right side are giving some bizarre problems. My gamepad, for example, turns off if you tilt the joystick down and left at the same time. A friend's 360 controller is powered up, but gets no signals over the data bus. The ports on the left side are completely unaffected.
- The battery that came with the system rather startlingly started shutting off my system suddenly, without warning. I had to swap to the spare and it's fortunately not having the same issue yet.

I emailed them and detailed what all was going on. Their response to things like screws missing?

"Thank you for contacting CyberpowerPC Tech support. Because the system is out of warranty it would be best to take the system to a local repair shop."

Well, okay, CyberpowerPC. That is an excellent response to me warning you about issues in manufacturing.

 

Update: On repasting, the CPU is now idling slightly lower and still throttling under load.

The GPU is now idling just over room temperature and takes multiple minutes to reach 90c, where it took about 20 seconds on Furmark to do so before.

Any suggestions on what to do for the former? Is the latter normal?

 

I've also just noticed, after attempting to polish the copper sink over the CPU to a mirror shine using isopropyl on my fourth repaste attempt, that the sink has several scratches. :|

People of the world. When you buy a laptop: Open it up and investigate, and buy super long warranties so you can call people out on stuff like this.

 

As a reseller I can't comment on Gigabyte or Cyberpower directly, but I can make the following observations (!):

- the fan is held in by 4 screws. One of these is directly holdingthe fan in, which you have mentioned. The other three screws hold the lower panel to the chassia and thus also hold the fan in place. So although once you remove the lower panel it may look like there are screws missing, you have in fact already unscrewed them!
- chassis like this (a single fan to cool both a discrete GPU and CPU) are known for heat issues and performance throttling, though it sounds like in your case the heatsinks may not be sitting flat
- I would recommend asking a moderator to move this post to either the Cuberpower or MSI section of Notebookreview. Though some resellers on here will have sold this specific chassis, you will likely get more help if you ask the other forum sections

 

Oh, neat! The fan ones are neat to hear about. That's a good design.

I've repasted four times at this point, three with silicon based paste and one with arctic silver. I think it might be the cooling methods themselves that are causing issues.

I'll PM a moderator.

Yeesh, I see why other Cyberpower posts are in here. The cyberpower forum is like... dead.