Mid 2010 Unibody 15 inch A1286 Overheating

[AC_HAC]

What's up everyone,
I have upgraded my mid 2010 2.66 GHZ MBP to 8gb ram and replaced the original HD with a 1TB WD SSD. It has been running great but I just started monitoring the GPU/CPU temps and it has been running over 70 degrees celsius while playing 1080P youtube videos. I plan on changing the thermal paste with MX-2 as soon as it arrives, but I was wondering if any of y'all had info on how to reduce the high temp on a unibody any other way. I am trying to keep my 2010 running as long as possible. It is currently running high sierra.

 

[CooperBox]

A repaste could well help reduce the temps on your MBPro, it did with mine, a MBPro 17" mid 2010 (a beautifully stable MBP) which I use daily.
Did your fans look clean with the lower case removed? Even with an even film of dust on the blades of both fans, experience has shown me that one can still have a unpleasant build-up and partial blockage of debris on the fan exit matrix. Whilst inside the Mac I suggest removal of both fans (a very easy task) to perform a thorough clean.
Even afterwards if 70deg celsius is observed during 1080P video playback using QuickTime, that should not be a significant problem. If hotter maybe try another media player such as VLC or MPlayerX.
Pls give feed-back on your findings as that could assist others too.

 

[AC_HAC]

I finally had a moment to replace the thermal paste and do a thorough cleaning of the heat sink and fans. There was very little paste left on the components and I thought it was surely the issue. After applying some new thermal paste I tested it by streaming HD video and it would eventually reach 70 degrees. While doing normal tasks like web browsing and downloading it stays at an even 50 or so. Overall, it helped to reduce the temp during normal usage but when I tried to test its efficiency it performed the same at heavy loads.
Do you guys think it is just the unibody design that limits the cooling capabilities?

 

[ptfuzi]

That looks like too much paste, but that wouldn't influence the temperatures

 

[CooperBox]

That looks like too much paste, but that wouldn't influence the temperatures

It certainly looks as if too much paste was originally used, and I agree that generally that wouldn't influence thermal performance - unless it's a low quality paste.
However the use of too much paste should be avoided because of the danger of shorting components - especially with a conductive paste.