Question Bought a used Multicom P17SM, having strange problems

SpartansMan

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Jun 29, 2015
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Hi, so I bought a used Multicom P17SM (Clevo PS17SM is the original I think) and I'm having quite strange problems. So at first laptop had problems with overheating, I took it apart, cleaned it and changed the thermal paste. I tested the GPU on Unigine Heaven and temperatures dropped from 90+ celsius to about 70-80 celsius. As laptop was with Windows 7, I installed Windows 10 and did more testing and some interesting problems occured.

  • The touchpad driver is causing strange lag. The usage isn't getting any higher with it, but the keyboard has this really long delay and sometimes it seems that it just stops working and some programs they fell like they froze but they aren't frozen, I don't even know how to explain. But when I end the process of the driver in the Task Manager, everything goes back to normal;
  • The GPU temperature sensor doesn't work properly, it doesn't show it's temperature until the GPU gets some workload. Same was on Windows 7;
  • The CPU fan seems to be misbehaving, SpeedFan shows that the CPU fan is at 50k+ rpm but I can't hear it at all and when I do a Prime95 test the GPU fan spins up for some reason? And I think that might be the reason why the CPU still overheats a bit, because the temperatures while doing the test go up to about 85-91 celsius;
I tried updating the BIOS and EC, but the problems didn't go away. I'm thinking it might be still the BIOS, because Multicom provides only 1.03.05 BIOS I think and as I looked Clevo has 1.03.11 BIOS version for their version of this laptop but I'm not sure if it will work on this laptop, so I didn't try updating it to that.
 
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SpartansMan

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Were it me, I would get my money back. With that much problems it is likely going to cost a 'bit' to resolve them.
It seems that I fixed the problem with touchpad driver by updating it, before I was using the one that Windows Update installed. About the CPU overheat, I think I might have applied the thermal paste wrong, because at first when I turned on the laptop with new thermal paste, even at idle CPU was at about 30-40 celsius but right now it's about 50-60 and the GPU started going up to about 85-90 celsius on load. I might try to talk to the seller if I fail to solve the problems.
 

SpartansMan

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Let us know what you do end up doing.
Well, at the moment, I tried reapplying the thermal paste and it didn't really help. But I did some reading and it seems that it's normal for those components (i7-4700MQ and GTX 780M) to hit such temperatures and I'm using one of those budget thermal pastes (CoolerMaster IC1 Value) so it doesn't help either. The GPU temperature sensor I guess doesn't bother me that much, as long as it shows up while GPU gets some workload. The CPU fan readings, maybe the SpeedFan is bugged or doesn't work well with this laptop or something? Otherwise, the laptop works fine to be honest. So, I might keep it actually and later on buy better thermal paste and some thermal pads because some of them are worn off, get an SSD and I think it will be great.
 
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