Out with the Heat, In with the New Cool(ing fan)

Recently, Pugyuu's been experiencing some overheating problems when I play some games, like League of Legends, Minecraft, and other spec-heavy games I have on Steam. I had gotten a brand new laptop cooling fan for Pugyuu because of it, but the problem persisted, mostly because the air flow was still lacking from the air's out vent.

I had done my usual maintenance for Pugyuu, like cleaning the air vent, fan, and heat sink with canned air and the likes. Dust did not accumulate in the vent like the last time Pugyuu had an overheating problem when I was playing Left 4 Dead 2. Instead, the internal cooling fan was making a little more noise than it should, and showed signs of it wobbling slightly off its axis. It turns out that the fan has aged a bit too much from high usage and is worn to the point where it isn't blowing air out very efficiently. So a replacement had to be ordered online.



Heck, just from having the computer on at my new job, it somehow overheated Pugyuu to the point where the cooling fan itself had melted a bit, keeping it from spinning. This happened when the computer was fairly idle in fact, so there's definitely a need for attention on the fan. Now I feel the need to open the bottom panel to expose the CPU, GPU, heatsinks, and more with the external fan pictured above to cool Pugyuu to play games. It works well enough to keep from encountering frame rate drops from overheating at least.

So having to be cautious with PC gaming, and the PS3 not reading discs, it looks like I'm going to have to work on some Wii games instead, until Project X Zone gets released in a week and a half. It's too bad I forgot No More Heroes in the Wii in Florida. Although, I may not be able to play as much as I had hoped, since my work hours are pretty long, and I'm currently sitting in the store on a Saturday as well. We'll see what happens.

Edit: The internal fan came in the mail today (June 18th), and installed it.

First of all, all the websites that gives the same generic instructions for how to replace the fan for Pugyuu (Asus M50-vm B1 laptop), which the place I bought the fan from had copied and pasted, is wrong. There is no need to remove the CD Drive, hard drive, nor the keyboard to access the fan. Just open the main, bottom panel, unscrew the heat sinks that are connected to the processors, and pull the whole heat sink and fan out to access the fan. Save yourself the hassle if you're trying to replace the cooling fan on your Asus M50 series laptops.

Second of all, the fan works well (although wasn't the exact same fan model), and has solved the overheating problem it seems, while also being much quieter. I'm glad, since the sounds that the fan was making was driving me crazy, knowing how inefficiently the fan was spinning.

Well, PC gaming is back in. Next, gotta fix the PS3 issue.