Question ASUS ROG GL702VS (7700HQ GTX 1070) suddenly black screened ramping up the fans to full speed.

[iPongi]

I was letting my laptop render a video while afk (nothing out of the ordinary, i've done it many times and the hardware and cooling solutions are more than just adequate for the job) when I noticed it ramped up the fan speed to 100% and when I got to check on it, the screen was black and there was no way to wake it. Now when I start it, it does the same thing: black screen and fans at 100% with no way to interact with it.

I've already tried unplugging/plugging the battery, changed ram slots, cleaned the ram, checked on the cpu and gpu thermal paste (it is liquid metal cooled btw but there seems to be no issue there, temps were 70-75°C max under full load in prime 95 and idle temps were about 30-ish) so it is not overheating and the application is just right. Even now that the fans have freaked out the laptop is at normal idle temperature to the touch (obviously 1-3°C cooler). I cleaned the fans, unplugged every ribbon cable I could find and plugged it back in one by one. The only thing I can't find is the CMOS battery of which I have absolutely no clue where these madmen have hidden it.

Now please somebody help me find a solution, because after 2 hours of searching on forums the only replies I read were about cooling problems and how you should clean your laptop or it overheats, which is not the case. Now I am currently undertaking the "discharge the battery and charge it back up" route, but it will take a while for those fans to deplete the monster battery that laptop has inside it. Ultimately it doesn't seem to be a display issue either. The only worrying thing is that there is no usb output on every usb port on the laptop.

Next step if the battery thing doesn't work will be to test and see if the hdmi port displays an output on another monitor. Thanks in advance for whoever has some help and time to spare for my poor soul.

 

[iPongi]

Update 1
So the discharging/charging the battery thing didn't work. The plus side is that with that I could diagnose the state of the parts, because it took about 2hrs to deplete the battery, which tells me that the cpu and gpu are mostly fine and running at normal frequencies (this laptop has a gsync monitor that always requires the dedicated gpu to be active), and that is about the time it takes under normal conditions to deplete the battery fully even when the laptop was working well.

Next thing on the list is to check the hard drive, because I have the suspicion it was already a bit full and maybe the fact that I was rendering a huge video (around 20Gigs) and during that render I decided to download a steam game in the background, maybe somehow the pc allocated more space than available on the disk and now it has some conflicts that prevent it from starting (storage is a 240Gb M.2 SSD and a 1TB hard drive).

I still have some hope, but I've never heard of hard drive failures, especially when only storage drives fail and not boot drives of course, preventing the pc to turn on and causing these weird symptoms.

 

[iPongi]

Update 2:
Storage has apparently nothing to do with this, the pc doesn't boot either with or without one or both storage drives, apparently the keyboard can be disconnected but then there is no actual way to turn the pc back on to troubleshoot that part. Next will be to see if there is an hdmi output and if not the motherboard is probably dead. It's concerning because there doesn't seem to be any other issue.

 

[iPongi]

Update 3:
Well yes, I am now apparently writing from the same computer that decided it was time to suicide... I am not considering the issue 100% solved though for now because I still need to check on some things and run some diagnostics to find out what really happened. So, story time, I decided to finally write down a RMA request, which is absolutely the most complicated and stupid thing imaginable... And after some though I decided that since the weekend is near (Yeah yeah it's still wednesday but ok) it didn't make sense to send it away in two days and so I tried once more with booting it up. No chance, tried with F9, F2, F2+ down key, delete and all that stuff and for some reason I decided to combine ctrl+F2, WHICH WORKED, the screen was still black but the fans calmed down a bit. I tried restarting a couple times and the sought after asus boot up logo appeared, finally. Maybe this solution doesn't work for you but you may try to give it a try.
I'll keep updating this thread as time goes on with possible causes and eventually more solutions if I find some.
Cheers

 

[iPongi]

Update 4:
The laptop seems now to be working back at 100%, I redid the thermal compund on gpu, cpu and all the vrms that were being actively cooled, temps are still normal, around the top 60°C under full load in prime 95. I guess the liquid metal was doing some funny interaction with the components if that is possible. I noted some corrosion on the heatsink that is about expected with liquid metal application but nothing too worrying, I'll procede with some scotch brite scuffing to see if I can take off the metal deposits if the pc starts acting funny again. Now as my bios version is still 306 and the newest out as of this day is version 307 I'll try to update the bios too to see if it was somehow bios related.

 

[iPongi]

Update 5:
So the pc crashed again because of a couple of other weird reasons. Once on its own under light use and another time when I tried to plug in a usb drive to update the bios, this happened only while plugging the usb drive into a specific usb port though (I might check if the port is faulty).

After doing the bios update the issue didn't resolve, the pc kept booting with problems even with the new bios update.

As I read in some forums the pc seemed to be on a "battery" even while using AC power, meaning that it woud crash only after some time:
after thinking of having resolved the issue it lasted about a couple hours under light use and then crashed, after trying to boot it up again it lasted about a minute and the crashed, with the longer I waited the longer the pc would stay stable).

This issue could be caused by a nearly depleted cmos battery. So I proceeded to check the cmos battery to find that it was one of those weird soldered to cables and then with a weird connector one, instead of a normal cmos swappable cr2032 or similar (why do you do this ASUS?!?), cost of which is about 10$ instead of the 50 cent to 1$ for a normal one because you have to swap the entire unit instead of just the battery...

I tried unplugging it and then plugging it back in to see if it would change anything and now when I press the button to turn the pc on it just lights up the power light and nothing else happens: no fans, no hard drive, nothing, which suggests me this should be somehow cmos related.

I'll order a new battery and post an update after I finished testing it. If not, back to RMA it goes.

 

[iPongi]

Update 6:
Well seems like this laptop now has a mind of its own because after trying to turn it on again it booted for a couple seconds, crashed, then tried to boot again on its own just after crashing and now it works... Most frustrating laptop of my life. Next time i'll build another tower instead of buying a laptop... Still ordering that battery just in case. It's only a couple bucks after all and this is, or better was, a 2000$ laptop and it's not even a year old.

 

[iPongi]

Update 7:
Now the pc starts without the CMOS battery but the screen still turns dark after just about 2-3 minutes, depending on how much time has passed before. The laptop doesn't turn off while plugged to an external monitor. In a couple days I will receive the new cmos battery to see if it is cmos related. I tried to do a fresh windows install keeping the personal data but it hasn't helped.

 

[iPongi]

Update 8:
After some working around in device manager and disabling the gpu, reinstalling drivers, all that trying only to use the iGPU, the issue seems once again to be resolved, I noticed some corrupted xeon pci drivers and done a complete reinstall of the chipset drivers.

Now the issue has gone for the longest time after starting up the laptop. I'm still doing a complete factory reset of the system after that to be sure and then I'll reinstall all the latest drivers for every component in the laptop.

I thought for a moment that the motherboard was broken or something, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
I reverted back to a standard thermal paste as well because of the corrosion on the heatsink plate (i sanded that down with some scotch brite and now the temps are better than ever). The performance of CPU and GPU hasn't changed a bit from when the laptop was new, which is to be expected. The only question is why did those drivers get corrupt all of a sudden.

I will still post an update in a couple days if everything goes right.
Signing off.

 

[iPongi]

Update 9:
After having reinstalled the corrupted chipset drivers all is now working back as normal even after 5 days, the performance is unchanged.

 

[iPongi]

Update 10:
It happened again, now even after a complete strip and reassembly the computer does the fan spin up noise and just stays there, it froze once, started up fine after 2 tries and then crashed during light use after around 10 minutes, even after changing the cmos battery it doesn't change the start up problem, I will ship it back to asus during the week for a fix but I'm sure the response will be something around the lines of "your motherboard is dead, now give us your money for a new laptop" even though it clearly isn't the case. Sadly I need it really badly for university and I don't have time to fix the problem again, if it turns out to be a software or driver bug I will be really pissed since the problem was solved two weeks ago and now the computer is broken again.

Is it really possible that no one ever experienced something similar to this??? I searched the internet for weeks for a solution but every post is always full of the same turn it off and on again after a static discharge garbage...