I've built many PCs before so have no problems applying thermal paste etc, but I'll probably check out a tutorial or two before doing it all just to be sure I'm doing everything right. I have seen some people saying that it is worthwhile changing the thermal pads. Not sure if it's worth it or not.
I'll give it a try anyways.
Makes you wonder why Dell doesn't stick a dollar onto their laptop prices and just use decent thermal paste. I guess I can understanding cheaping out in the lower end Dell G3 range etc, but not in their Alienware range. It seems short-sighted as they would undoubtedly get less support queries and less returns if everything worked better out of the box.
I know firsthand about Dell's crappy screws as I had to return a precision 7540 recently because the screws for the keyboard wouldn't move at all. Which meant I couldn't change the memory.
The screws on the back of the M15 seem ok, but the M2 SSD screws are really bad. I bought a box of M2 screws that have bigger screw heads on them so I replaced them with decent ones.
I'll just have to be really careful when I have to deal with the smaller M2 2.0 screws as the ones Dell use are absolute garbage.
I saw this one on Amazon UK selling for £24.99.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/MQUPIN-Wireless-AX201NGW-802-11ax-Bluetooth/dp/B07STTGLM7/
But the same one seems to be selling from China for only £11.91.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2-4Gbps-...774539?hash=item48ce2e1f8b:g:fL0AAOSw-ftdKFJI
Are there many fakes going around? I reckon there is a black market for things like this, but they do appear to be identical.
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I am reluctant to send my laptop back for repair as I will be using it most days. So if anything was wrong, I'd rather they just sent me the part so I could replace it myself. -
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Are there any tell-tale signs that I have a dodgy heatsink?
My temperatures aren't too bad now that I've undervolted so I'm hoping that it will be really good after a repaste. -
CptXabaras Overclocked, Overvolted, Liquid Cooled
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Last edited: Nov 22, 2019 -
When playing a game, a little noise isn't too bad as the noise from the game will drown some of it all.
But before undervolting, the fans were so crazy for me that I couldn't browse the web or watch a video etc. When doing light tasks, I do want it to be silent.
Of course, I don't want overheating either. So what I will do is try the repaste first and then see if I can drop things further with a laptop cooler or something. I can always revert the bios later if necessary -
CptXabaras Overclocked, Overvolted, Liquid Cooled
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before I call tech support - wanted to know if this was normal or not
My M15, I love it - except the trackpad. It appears to be "loose" - in that the bottom edge has a bit of wobble to it - in that I can press down lightly and it will depress a bit, but it isn't clicking in. I can then press a little harder to actually engage the click as normal. My M15 R2 was rock solid on the trackpad (and had a significantly better surface). I know many folks don't even use their touchpad, but I have to to support my use cases for this thing. Looking at the repair manual, replacing the trackpad is about as trivial as you can get, so I was thinking of requesting a part repair as opposed to sending this entire unit back in. Since I've got thermals and performance dialed in, and my OLED display is outstanding, I didn't want to mess with a full return/replace and gamble a unit that doesn't undervolt as well, have a worse OLED panel, etc. -
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Uneven quality of heatsink and use of thinner and softer thermal paste as Kryonaut etc instead for the printed thermal stamps would in fact increase tech costs within the obligatory warranty period. As well Dell's new policy regarding temp problems.... Increase temp limits for newer models will easly stop most of the customers from claiming new thermal paste. See... Up to 100C is within specs. Be you sure. Dell know what will lead to less costs.
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I'm not an expert on thermal paste, but with regards to the lifespan of thermal paste, does a long-lasting paste mean it won't be as effective? Surely a good thermal paste will improve temperatures and last well beyond the warranty period.etern4l likes this. -
CptXabaras Overclocked, Overvolted, Liquid Cooled
Let's take for example Conductonaut Liquid Metal, if you have a look in the internet the user experience will vary a lot in terms of how often a reapplication is needed. People in this forum had them lasting a pretty long time, while others had them loosing their performance in terms of few weeks. For Liquid metal is really important to manage the right amount and to create a barrier that has the double function of preventing accidental spilling (is extremely electrically conductive!) and to isolate it from air to prevent it to dry out. In my case, i'm running my machine on the same LM application since over 4 months now and temperatures are consistent as they were on day 1.System0 likes this. -
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CptXabaras likes this.
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Update: tightening those screws helped a smidge, but still somewhat loose floppy bottom edge so I'll just have them bring a new part out and replace it overall.
As another question, anyone try this:
https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Style-A...s=240+watt+dell+adapter&qid=1574621582&sr=8-3
see if it works with the M15, and if it's really any smaller than the existing 240W.Last edited: Nov 24, 2019 -
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Has anyone experienced an issue with Diagnostics starting up during wake up from hibernate and reporting a problem with GPU fan? As a result the CPU fan starts running at 100%. Shutting the machine down and restarting resolves the issue. This happened to me before and support suggested I clean the fans, but the fans are clean. It sounds like some software issue, given that a restart resolves it.
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CptXabaras Overclocked, Overvolted, Liquid Cooled
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I've ordered some canned air and paste etc. When I'm doing a repaste I'll check my fans too. In your case, I reckon dust could cause a minor issue, but not 100%.
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I also have a 130W adapter coming in today - plan to see how much power it allocates to GPU for mobile gaming. It worked pretty well on the 13r3 a couple years ago for me - was about 80-90% performance that running off 180W was surprisingly. I can’t remember if there was any battery drain when doing so though; or if it just puts less power to the GPU. -
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I sent an email to Dell asking about the 2.5" caddy. Their initial response told me to call and when I called I got transferred around for over 20 minutes and then sent to an external company that said they don't have the part.
I emailed again and pointed out that even when idle, the laptop sounds like a plane taking off (I've since dropped temperatures a little via undervolting).
Their response is interesting to say the least, stating that 100 degrees is normal. The guy has requested I jump through a ton of hoops. Conveniently, he failed to address the noisy fans in his reply.
Dear Kevin Muldoon
Thank you for contacting Dell hardware support.
I am sorry that you are experiencing problems with your system. I will do my best to solve it as soon as possible.
In order to find out the cause of the problem, I would kindly like to ask you to perform the following steps:
Please accept my apology i dint understand why they didn't transferred you to us as they normally do so with any alienware related issues.
Furthermore the 2.5 inch. HDD/SSD housing and the interposer cable to connect it are optional parts in case you chose a pure M.2 SSD configuration.
During the online order creation you can use the selectable option to pack them to the whole order however they need to be payed extra. If you wish to purchase these parts please let me know the country you currently located in and i will provide you with price calculation.
Regarding the temperatures please perform a system stress test to check the system behavior under load and send me the results to check the CPU behavior since your CPU is expected to reach around 100°C on cores(CPU die temperature) and short peak spikes on package temperature to 103-105°C with without any issues.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...-8750h-processor-9m-cache-up-to-4-10-ghz.html
CPU:
Please download and install program HWiNFO64bit:
https://www.hwinfo.com/download.php
Please be informed that the initial readings might be off due to the initialization/calibration phase due to this we are interested in the readings during the test alone not nominal values from the main screen of HWiNFO64bit that can contain also readings from calibration. These can be obtained by enabling the logging to file as following Open it and select SENSORS ONLY, click on the button which creates .csv files (small paper sheet with green + at the bottom right) and play the game Once you finished the stress testing or gameplay go back to HW info app and click again on the same sheet but now you should see red X there. So it ends the logging. The log should be made also in case your system will restart during the stress test and it will be visible in the log
After that, please send me the created .csv file. as attachment to email reply
Please download the Intel XTU and perform the stress test set it to run at least 15 minutes and send me the screenshotted results please.
In the graph please click on the wrench in the top right corner of the graph and check the Thermal throttling and Power throttling as well as all of the cores temperature and all of the cores frequency to be displayed.
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/24075/Intel-Extreme-Tuning-Utility-Intel-XTU
GPU:
Please also download GPUz and Unigine Superposition benchmark to stress up the GPU In GPUz under sensors tab please check the Log to file box and insure the Nvidia graphic card is selected in the bottom window this will create a TXT log of the GPU behavior please send me this log as well
Superposition benchmark:
https://benchmark.unigine.com/superposition
Gpuz :
https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/
Instead of synthetic benchmarks feel free to perform some gaming and send us the results from a longer gaming session
To avoid repeated service calls please check your system for any other hardware failures which you didn’t mention in your E-Mail. Thank you.
Please send me by return all results of these essential steps/diagnostics to be able to move forward in this case.
Please use the same E-Mail address and don’t delete the previous conversation as well as the E-Mail subject to prevent the delay in our communication. In the case that we don’t get a reply within next 2 days, we will contact you from [email protected] to ensure that you have obtained this E-Mail.
I wish you a nice day.
Yours sincerely,
Michal Doblej
Senior Technician, Consumer Support Services
Dell EMC | Support & Deploy Services
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A lot of it is being lost in translation and they don't appear to actually want to provide a solution.
It did surprise me that they think that 100+ degrees is normal and acceptable.
Guess we have to accept the limitations of this laptop and work around them as Dell aren't going to help.
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See it this way. The fits between IHS and Die is damn good... Intel would never swap their thicker paste intended for longeivity for soft thermal paste similar Kryonaut. RMA is expencive. More costly than use of so called softer and better thermal paste.
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System0 likes this.
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Of course, I suspect most people commenting on this thread have a more hands-on approach, whereas most general laptop users will just keep things as they are. -
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Bizarre thing here for me
Battery life on my M15 is pretty bad, maybe 3 hours total for this 90 wHr machine. Even with OLED, I expected it closer to 5 hours. This may be some sort of ThrottleStop thing, but I've turned off turbo-boost with a specific profile, and I've disabled a ton of dell background services, etc. On top of this, over night it likes to drain the battery a ton. I did a sleep study analysis in POWERCFG and saw some bizarre stuff. For example, it seemed to wake itself regularly on a very specific interval, then it essentially sits on for 15 minutes until it goes back to sleep. It repeated this several times over night and in the morning. I have a 93% battery and when I woke it was under 50%. Anyone have any idea what would cause this? It's stating an "unknown app" is burning through a ton of battery life. I'm adding that my lid was closed the entire time - so I'm not sure what is waking this machine up.
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Basically anything that triggers the dGPU will finish the battery off pretty quickly. Afterburner is one such culprit, bad drivers could be another. -
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I'd be curious to whether you can get to the bottom of this. I generally keep mines plugged in, but I will use the battery from time to time so I want to make sure no rogue apps are draining it. Battery drain when asleep is obviously a pain.
Track it over a few nights to see if the same thing happens. Perhaps a few updates were installed (Windows seems to do this, even when you don't want it to). -
For battery drain issues I normally went through the power saver battery plan and set it to default settings. I also disabled "hibernate after x amount of time" as it kept waking my laptop from sleep. Also recommend you install the original drivers as sometimes the updates do more harm than good and test each version one by one.
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Mr. Fox likes this.
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Hey everyone! Glad I found this thread. I have been struggling with settings and reading, and watching videos. I need some help with my settings, I have a M15 R1 with I7 9750, 2060 RTX, 32GB ram. Here’s my Throttlestop settings. I came to this point after reading an article and YouTube videos. Temps are staying 84c and below, but man does the keyboard still get warm. Infared thermometer shows spots getting to 112-116f. Maybe it’s normal, but I feel my settings are not where they need to be after reading pg 315 on this thread. Thanks!
Last edited: Nov 30, 2019 -
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CptXabaras and Marty Collins like this.
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Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalketern4l likes this. -
Just wondering what his turbo boost wattage was set, guessing 55-60? If he used speed shift, BFprochot, or any set multiplier. Thanks again!
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Adjusted everything except it will not let me undervolt the GPU to -.0605mv?
Also the ICC max adjustment, does that apply only to the GPU, or the Cache and CPU?
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CptXabaras Overclocked, Overvolted, Liquid Cooled
Hi Marty,
When you talk about undervolting your GPU, you mean your iGPU right? (as of the intel integrated gpu)
in order for the undervolt of the igpu to work properly, you need to undervolt of the same ammount also the igpu unslice. This being said, the igpu undervolt is the least of the settings that will help you tame the heat of the R1. You need to work out on the CPU undervolt so that your TDP will max out at =/< than 60w.
As per @kahuna0k findings, that some of us have followed up and tested succesfully (always kudos to him!) the best undervolt is with a fixed core voltage rather than with the adaptive one.
this down below are my fixed undervolt (profile 2 on my machine) as an example (ymmv!)
with this settings my CPU stays at 3.9 Ghz on the 6 cores under full load stress test, maxing out 54.5w
My normal profile (start up) has an adaptative off-set as follow:
It is not as effective as the fixed voltage undervolt, but perfect for light loads
Keep in mind that i've repasted with liquid metal, and that you may or may not achieve stability with the exact same settings.
Have you repasted/repadded your machine?etern4l likes this. -
I set up all 4 profiles. I’m just confused where he has the Intel GPU @ -.0605mv?
Also setting the ICC maxes, do you set them for the CPU and GPU.
Also the static setting for profile 2, do you still undervolt the core as well or leave it at 0?
The -1.582 undervolt seems too much for my cache. I have blue screened a few times
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CptXabaras Overclocked, Overvolted, Liquid Cooled
If you start to set everything at once yoy wont be able to pinpoint the source of eventual instabilities.
Start to get your CPU voltage down and stable, testing it for extended period of time with something like prime95.
I reckon that your -1.582 is a mistype and you meant -0.158 V or -158.2 mV, right? If that's the case, and you are not stable at those settings, dial it up a notch, until you find the sweet spot. Not all cpu are the same. What work for me may not work for you.
Question, and don't take it wrong, is this the first time your are dealing with undervolting a laptop/pc?
*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 Owner's Lounge
Discussion in '2015+ Alienware 13 / 15 / 17' started by ssj92, Oct 25, 2018.