The laptop is a 4 years old Asus N56VZ, ambient temperature is around 25°C.
I've already unmounted the laptop, cleared the (not much) dust and changed the original thermal paste with Arctic MX-4, but the temperatures won't drop. I'm on Windows 10, I've also checked the temperatures with a clean installation of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and they're pretty much the same. The situation seems to be pretty critical given that if I start a system scan in Bitdefender the computer will turn off automatically after ~20 minutes because of the activation of the thermal protection.
I specify that the CPU used to have normal temperatures, around 40-45°C in idle and 80°C in heavy load, before that this problem started. If it is not the OS/loads, the dust or the thermal paste causing these temperatures, what can it be?
Best Answer
Just a thought: If you changed the thermal paste and removed the heat sink yourself, make sure you screwed it back in the correct order.
Each screw is numbered to have the heat sink aligned properly with your cpu/gpu. I have made this mistake in the past and it really hit the temperature quite a bit.