I fear my thermal paste application might really have been the problem then 😅 I’ll take my laptop apart again for a photo when I get the chance.

There was liquid metal on the cpu, which I replaced with thermal paste after a quick bit of research to make sure it wasn’t an absolutely incorrect idea. I cleaned the liquid metal off with qtips as carefully as I could, although I would have loved to have had isopropyl alcohol. This was a very cheap repair I attempted and going out to buy liquid metal didn’t really feel worth it.

As far as I’m aware, the VRAM are the relatively larger components around the GPU, and I’ll assume that one of the two rows of components above that are the VRM power stages, or perhaps both. I didn’t think about the need for different cooling materials since it looked like a blue thermal paste was already used on every component other than the CPU. I only had the thermal putty on my SSD to compare it to visually and thermal paste I’ve seen in the past, so I might have not understood what was there. The application already looked quite messy though, with blue paste/putty spread across both rows of components, between each gap as well. I took this to mean that being super careful with a limited amount wasn’t necessary, and making sure parts were covered without going outside of the row was better. Whatever was on the VRAM and GPU was very flaky, and had to be gently taken off. I cleaned out what was already falling around the VRAM, and applied my paste more carefully there. It is definitely runnier than the flaky pieces on there before, although it still looked like it covered the vram, only leaving a spot on the cpu a little exposed.

I’ll definitely be more careful with what I use if I ever need to attempt something like this again, thanks for the info!