Alienware 17 2013 MXM issues

Hello, I am hoping someone could help me out here. I purchased an Alienware 17 Ranger (2013) model second hand. They told me they had put a custom vbios on the 780M and it's running at 900mhz. But gets too hot for my liking. And the major issue is that card is running at 2x speed and not the full 16x speed.

If someone can help me with this it'd be greatly appreciated as I would like to make sure that my motherboards mxm slot isn't faulty.

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Very unlikely it is faulty if it is running. The cooling system may be underperforming. When you overclock the direct result is heat. Check your heatsink and see if it is a 2 pipe or a three pipe. If it is stock with a 780m then it will be a 3 pipe. Next check the thermal compound. If it is old replace it with icdiamond or thermal grizzly cryonaut or if you are a steely eyed missle man use liquid metal.

How hot is it getting? Do you hear your fans running? Lastly what do you mean by 2x? How are you checking that? If the speed you are referring to is the connection speed your mxm does not require nor need a 16x connection. Its not like a desktop pc

 

Hey Eepo,

I figured that since I am able to game but it thermal throttles like a whore. It originally came with the 780, so it has the triple pipe. I'm a big person for maintenance especially on gaming laptops. So I repasted it just a week ago when I purchased it. Gave it a detailed cleaning.

And it's idle temps are 45 and above. And gaming temps are between 80 to 90.

As for the PCIe speed at x2 is information from GPUz. Even when running the render test it does not increase to x16 for PCIe lanes. And it does affect the performance when running gaming with high res textures as it affects the memory bandwidth. And it may not be required to be at x16 but if it's designed to run at that I would rather have it fuctioning at designed specs. Considering I want to put a 1060 in this laptop soon.

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I have a 1070 in mine and its tdp is set at 135w. I see temps of 76c max under intense load. I have a 5 pipe heatsink and i am using thermal grizzly conductonaut. My cpu temps are 74c at 4.3ghz. I use a 4 pipe copper heatsink for that. Your link speed is not supposed to run at 16x. I think 8x is max. That being said there is no bandwidth limitation on your card. You can test it by running ost and playing a game. If your memory percentage stays below 100% then it is running as normal. I assume pciexpress speed is not dynamic on laptops but considering that you are not having a drop in performance just elevated heat levels i wouldnt assume your laptop mb is malfunctioning.

 

Can you post a picture of your gpuz screen?

 

I'll just have to look into it once I get back home. Currently at work.

As I mentioned in the original post, the person did flash the card with a modified vbios pushing the card from 771 MHz to 900mhz so that is most likely causing the heat level to be so high. I'm just more worried about the PCIe lanes not being fully utilized. I've owned more then a few of these laptop. From the M14x, AW 14, M15x, and M17x R2, R3 and R4. And I've owned on of these 2013 models before as well and they always ran underload at x16. But about the PCIe link speed, it is dynamic on these laptops and increases with GPU load.

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I will post a couple later tonight. Do you know where I could get the latest Dell Vbios for the 780M?

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Not off hand. Its been a while since ive used a 780m. You can just manually downclock it of course but i understanding wanting to avoid the issue. My card runs at 8x.

 

define to hot?
did you clean it and repaste it?

 

mine does run at 16x maybe there is a problem. what kind of benchmarks have you run?

 

As explained to Eepo, When I purchased it I did a very detailed cleaning and re-pasted. And I re-pasted it again and made sure the thermal pads were correctly placed just yesterday.

And by too hot I mean at idle with nothing open except GPUz my GPU sits at 45 up to 50+ and then in games it goes above 85.

 

Here are the stats from GPUz. And just to note, the temp in the first photo was taken before the second on when running the render test to show PCIe link speed. So completely idle from a cold start only launching GPUz and Chrome after a few minutes it went up to 60

 

High idle temps arent that unusual, since heatsinks really arent big. If you want the temps to be lower on idle then you should opt for Liquid metal. As far as I know the conduconaut is the best thing u can get.

 

Yeah I was looking at that. Bit expensive lol. I'm more concerned about the PCie link speed always saying at x2 and not going to the x16 because I do want to upgrade this laptop with a 1060

I'm hoping someone can help me figure this out. Maybe a bad vbios flash or something. As I mentioned it is running a flashed vbios from the previous owner.


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Most likely just a fail read. You can download 3Dmark 2011 or 3dMark firestrike to test your GPU, if the score is the same as an average GTX 780M then you know CPU-Z is failing at reading, since a 2x PCI-E would result in much less performance.

 

Okay so yeah, thanks everyone for the replies. I did run 3D mark time spy basic and the score was on the same level for an over clocked 780m. I guess I'll just have to deal with the higher temps with the overclock on the card. Does help to have it over clocked for the games I play. I've install speedfan for controlling the fan profile so the temps stay around 75 to 79 ish. Fan wasn't kicking in till 90 for some stupid reason. With the lower wattage 1060 at 75 or so watts will run much cooler.

Thanks!!

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