Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

Hey guys, I think the temperatures on my m4400 are way too high. under load the graphics (according to speedfan 4.37) can go past 86'C and the processors as well, though one is always hotter then the other. once i saw 'Core 1' at 90'C...

At the moment i'm rendering an animation in maya and its been going for half an hour so far. Task manager reports that both Cores are under 100% load and speedfan reports the temps as 75'C and 83'C respectively. the graphics chip, which isnt under load is at 58'C right now.

The configuration is pretty standard; T9400, FX770, 4GB RAM, XP Pro & the m4400 was bought in august.

Why would one core be so so much hotter than the other when both are being used just as much and are right next to each other? Do i have a serious problem?

 

Check your temps with HWmonitor...those temps may not be accurate. uninstall speedfan

 

Sounds pretty normal. The placement of the thermal diodes is why one core is hotter than the other.

 

Thank you ElPenguino, i installed HWmonitor and tested away.

I ran Orthos using the Blend Test, which stresses CPU & RAM at 100% and ran Flatout Ultimate Carnage; a game to stress the GPU.

The idea was to see how the cooling system would cope with this environment and what the temperatures would be.

I ran the game and the stress test for well over half an hour, and as you can see the results are pretty terrible:



Boiling an egg with this laptop was not one of the reasons i wanted it for. Any suggestions as to what i should do?

@ sgogeta4 i think the thermal sensors are sensibly placed in the cpu itself as shown here:
http://rethink.intel.com/Download/316663-007US.pdf
though i agree that SpeedFan was giving me incorrect readings, and that in the case of the m4400 the thermal diodes/sensors may be different.

 

Hey mrtoshko88,certainly sounds like something's not right there,the two guys that had extreme cpu's,didn't get cpu temps anywhere near that high.

Is the fan working?.....enough room underneath to get air into the notebook?

Have you pulled the fan out to see if there is fluff etc,clogging the front of the heatsink's.

I've had 91 degC on my GPU on the rare occasion,and I would have thought with those extreme cpu temps,that your GPU temp would have been even higher.......so maybe it is a cpu heatsink,thermal paste problem as with the dumb M4400 heatsink design,the GPU should always be hotter than CPU when both are stressed.

Its a five minute job to check all this,you do need some thermal paste before removing heatsink's though.

If you don't want to do this yourself,there's no option but to call dell support....and maybe you should do that anyway.


online service manual.... http://supportapj.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/M4400/en/sm/index.htm

 

What does the USB port with the lightning bolt mean above the Esata port. I thought I had read somewhere that this ment you could charge usb devices with out the laptop on however its not working. Any ideas?

 

Thats right, it lets you charge devices whilst the laptop is 'off'.

You have to enable this function in the BIOS, hit F12 several times (once at the right time is enough) when the Dell loading screen is showing when the computer is turned on. Its normally off and you can set #% of the battery to be made available to external devices. Hope that helps.

 

yep, u gotta enable it in the bios.

your temps seem quite high. are your vents being blocked? i find the m4400 is pretty sensitive to anything blocking the bottom intake

also, after 2 months of use, i was shocked at the amount of dust clogging the fan vent on the inside, the dust is not visible from the outside.

i was getting temps like yours, but after i removed the dust it went back down to decent temps.

it was practically like a carpet on the inside.

 

Does anybody have a problem where your CTRL key occasionally gets "stuck"? I'm not talking physically stuck... instead, it just seems to stay on. Rapidly pressing the CTRL key a few times fixes it.

It can be very frustrating because it results in Windows thinking you're CTRL+Clicking.

I think this is a "Dell" thing because my girlfriend has an old Latitude and it does exactly the same thing.

It's driving me nuts. Add this problem to the over heating/downclocking, and I'm really starting to regret my $2500 purchase.

 

thats weird. i've never had that problem on any of my dell's.

maybe call and get a replacement keyboard?

i dont think the heating/downclocking problem is universal. they changed the mobo on my unit and all those issues went away

perhaps u needs to ask them to replace ur unit