R7000 Dead, thermal paste liquefied

10 posts / 0 new
Last post
Antioch
Antioch's picture
R7000 Dead, thermal paste liquefied

I've owned my R7000 for roughly three years. Over the last few days the router has been rebooting randomly. It got increasingly bad over the last few days. Today when I got home from work I had no WAN access and the router was rebooting every 5 minutes. I swapped in a replacement router I had in the house, and I decided to tear apart my nighthawk to see if I could find anything wrong. I was kind of shocked to see that the thermal paste appears to have liquefied and shorted the board. I can also see damage to the metal bracket that the routers board is mounted too. I'm not looking for help and advice, I already have a replacement router on the way, I wanted to see if anyone else has ever seen anything like this. I have never heard of thermal paste liquefying, let alone in something  like a router. 

 

I have photos here if anyone is interested

microchip
microchip's picture
wow, that's really bad! I've

wow, that's really bad! I've never seen that happen to a router, not even heard such a thing. was the router operating in a very high temperature?

bigtime
bigtime's picture
whoa thats gnarly

whoa thats gnarly

 

where u running Openvpn server? maybe openvpn client?

 

had to have had it maxxed out yeah? I ask because I run my R7000 with openvpn and I feel like im maxing it out sometimes.

 

also which way did you have your router sitting? Was it mounted any particular way like sideways or upside-down?

mine is upside down and I think performance has been less since mounting it that way. Maybe not I just feel like it worked better when it was sitting rightside up on my desk

bigtime
bigtime's picture
**Were

**Were

 

1 more question in the last 3 years how often did you spray it out with one of those electronic duster thingies? U think it might have had some dust inside?  any dirt when u opened it up etc

 

thanks

Peter Redmer
Peter Redmer's picture
That's crazy, never heard of

That's crazy, never heard of anything like that happening to any router I've ever used, or any router I've ever encountered in fact!

To the mentions of OpenVPN, I ran the R7000 for over a year, 24x7 with OpenVPN and never had an issue, same with basically all the routers I've worked with.

This seems truly like a strange occurrence!

sonny_d
sonny_d's picture
I notoced they run hotter

I notoced they run hotter than I would like 130-140' 

Have an zyxel that ran that hot so added a 20mm fan and now just 100'

May do that with 7000 

sonny_d
sonny_d's picture
Added the fan on one side and

Added the fan on one side and the temp went from 140 to 111 degrees. Other proocessors are a lot lower as well. The design inside is planned failure and three years is about right there. This should add a little more life. Without a fan they need proper convection cooling. Cisco has some nice versions on that.

microchip
microchip's picture
the design inside is not

the design inside is not "planned failure" - have you even seen the big heatsink?. In fact, the R7000 runs (much) cooler than any other comparable ASUS router and the latter keeps working for years to come

You have to understand that the SoC is made to endure high temps. My R7000 has always worked between 65 and 75°C and over the almost two years I've had it, it's still working just fine. ASUS routers on the other hand, go up to 80-85 °C and they appear to do fine as well. You also have to understand that routers, from a technological point-of-view, are simple designs and there's no power management AT ALL in them. This coupled with GHz CPUs running at full speed all the time, and in case of the R7000, a SoC that is manufactured on a 28 nm process, is what is causing them to operate in the 60-70 °C and slightly up temperatures

spacex
spacex's picture
If the goop is indeed the

If the goop is indeed the thermal paste, then your uPC released its smoke - it is shorted and simply sits there burning up.  I've never seen thermal paste liquify like that - is it possible that you are looking at a spill of some sort?

rotorbudd
rotorbudd's picture
It looks like the thermal pad

It looks like the thermal pad wasn't square against theCPU and the corner that melted was trying to transfer all the heat.

If that's what happened I'm surprised it lasted 3 years!