Vostro 3300/3400/3500 - overheating?

Hi

After spending hours researching this subject, there seems to be a lot of conflicting experiences.

To name but two:

jgrunhut - no overheating
Vostro 3500 Fan Noise - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

inzuvostro - overheating
Heating Vostro 3300 (i need information!!) - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

Would users of these three notebooks (both happy and unhappy ones) please chip in? It is a real pity if an otherwise well-designed notebook is seriously handicapped by an overheating problem.

This is NOT an attempt to find out what the cause of the overheating problem is (if there is one), eg, Intel i3 or mobo design limitations. Rather, the thread hopes to ascertain how prevalent overheating occurs amongst users, ie, whether only a small proportion experiences the problem.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

 

Problems with mine atleast. Gets crazy warm and today i even smelled something burned so i am calling on monday.

Got the i5 and nvidia gpu in a 3300. Probably too much power for the ty cooling.

It is so weird they didnt make a better cooling solution for this laptop after the disaster with the M1330.

Worth noticing is probably that i am probably not a very regular user. I do alot of cpu and gpu heavy stuff. But still the cooling should prevent a cpu from reaching 100C which it was at today.

 

Hi Eik,

Could you tell us if you have managed to make some progress with Dell in regards to your overheating/loud problem? Do they accept it as a wide known issue or asking you to do endless troubleshooting for them.

Thanks

 

Hi

I got my motherboard and coolng replaced today and are doing some tests at the moment but guess i dont really know until in some days if it fully helped or not.

But temps looks better now atleast. Struggling to trying to get cpu over 80C. Before i had no problems reaching 100C and then it shut down.

Idle in ubuntu before was around 56C with fan running. Now it seems to be around 52-53 but fan is silent. So overall everything seems to be better working but i will update in some days.

 

Update again.

Had my motherboard replaced again because the new one did not work with latest bios for some reason.

This time i got a new one with this fancy nvidia optimus technology which is great if i wanted it but i dont because it got zero linux support and is the reason i choose the computer because it had nvidia and not optimus. Dell said that it should be possible to switch in bios but it is not so now a tech is coming again and i do not know how this will end.

Temperatures are still better after the motherboard and cooling replacements which is good for people that run windows on their computers. In windows it is even great at the moment as it disables the nvidia card when it is not in use.

 

Thanks for keeping us posted Eik.

If you ever find yourself in windows for 5 minutes, would you be able to do this test for me please?
http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...l-studio-15-1557-1558-mic-sound-question.html

Good luck with the new motherboard

 

Sorry i do not own any external microphones.

On the motherboard issue DELL are being real asshats for the moment and i am getting almost angry which is something that happens like once a decade.

 

i'm having overheating problems with my Vostro 3700 with the i5-430m and 330M, bought it in june.

like eik i bought it because it didnt have optimus/intel HD which is needed for a lot of non-windows operating systems, i run Mac OS X and the chameleon bootloader and it doesnt work with intel HD so im trying to avoid a warranty return...

it seems to reboot right when the cpu hits 100C, although the max temp on the intel specs for the 430m is 105.

i can get it to overheat by playing WoW for less then 30 minutes while doing something cpu-intensive in the background.

 

From all of the reviews, it's clear that the Vostro 3x00 series is a low end business system that does fine with relatively low processor loads. For heavy, sustained processor loads, you'd be better off with a Latitude E-series or a Precision workstation. In the consumer line, you wouldn't expect an Inspiron to stay as cool as an Alienware, and similarly, the small business oriented Vostro 3x00 line would probably stay reasonable cool if it was used exclusively for word-processing and spreadsheets. You can upspec a low end system, but you still have the shortcoming of a lowend system. You get what you pay for.

 

Your issue is not all that surprising. I'd advise you to go for a warranty return and upgrade to a Precision M6500.