Razer Blade 15 Advanced (2018) crashing during games | Razer Insider

Razer Blade 15 Advanced (2018) crashing during games

  • 27 August 2020
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Hello,

Apologies for the novel but I wanted to be thorough with my situation.

For the past several months I have been having an issue with my laptop (Razer Blade 15 Advanced 1070 max-q (2018)) where after some amount of time playing games my laptop will randomly get a severe frame drop, and the audio becomes crackly and distorted. About 10 seconds later the whole laptop powers off. Back in March it would usually take a while before it happened (maybe 2 hrs), but now it happens within one game of Overwatch making the laptop essentially useless for gaming, and I'm out of ideas as to what it could be. It has never happened during anything other than games.

I got the laptop back in about August of 2018. I am an architecture student so this thing has gotten constant use between CAD models, renderings, photography editing, photoshop, random school things, and heavy gaming usage (several hours at a time). I don't know if it has anything to do with it but all this means is it gets plugged in for long periods of time. I haven't been playing games as much lately (over the summer) but this problem is now unbearable.

My first most obvious idea was that it was a thermal thing because it happened after long gaming sessions. So first I blasted dust out of the laptop which seemed to bring the temps down a little and make it a little better (this was back in March) but a week later the horrendous crackling and shut downs were back. I should note that then, shut downs did not always happen if I left the game immediately, again seemingly thermal related.

At around the same time, my laptop power brick died and so I thought maybe that was part of the problem. The new one worked well for a while but alas, the problem came back. Then I noticed the bulge in the battery so I removed it and for a while just used the laptop plugged in with no battery out of shear laziness of ordering a new one. Anyway, the shut downs continued, still somewhat infrequent but still a problem. Eventually I did get a new battery mid summer.

Towards the end of the summer the problem had become more frequent, so I decided to open it up and repaste the cpu and gpu. The stock paste was quite crusty and it seemed overdue. It brought the temps down a few degrees but the problem persisted. Now I'm at school and it is horrendous, like I said crashing within 10 minutes. I got an active cooling pad with three fans that helped the temps too, didn't fix it. And just today I tried undervolting the cpu which didn't fix it either.

It is hard to know what the temps are because the temperature of my room changes frequently with no A/C, but before the thermal paste, cooling pad, and undervolting it would hit 88-90 during gameplay, now it sits at about 83-85 during Overwatch and a lot cooler during menu sequence (Side note the temps are just from looking at the GPU temp display in Overwatch). I should also mention that changing the graphics settings does seemingly nothing for frame rate, temperatures, or the crashing.

I'm stuck. I don't know what it could be. As far as I know there has been no water damage to the computer or hard drops, I treat it very gently. But in summary I have:

- Blasted any dust left in the computer (GENTLY used an air compressor because standard cans of air weren't enough)
- Replaced the power adapter
- Replaced the battery
- Replaced the thermal paste
- Bought a cooling pad
- Undervolted the cpu

Lastly, I can't send the laptop anywhere right now because I need it for school especially in these times, so RMA is out of the option. It has passed warranty anyway. If anyone has any idea of something I could try or what it could likely be I would appreciate it. My best guess is that it is a GPU problem because my vector based CAD software/rendering uses CPU and has never caused a shut down.

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