Alienware M17x R4 overheating beyond usability!

I purchased and M17x R4 (With the nVidia 675m) as my first proper PC (all the other one have been internet browsing ones), so naturally I was excited that I could finally play the games pc elitists were bragging about. It was great, It had converted me from a long time console game to now a mainly pc gamer. At first my laptop almost never overheated but after the first time it just got worse and worse and now basically I come to you in need of advice. Basically I cannot play 35 minutes of minecraft on a cooling pad on my lap (It is worse on a flat surface) with this awesome laptop that I payed 3k for.
I got a screen grab from CPUID Hardware moniter.
This is my laptop on my lap with a cooling pad.
Any help would be appreciated.
*Edit*
Temp Screen Grab words may have been to small. Heres a closer one.

*Edit 2*
The closer screen grab was a different one after playing some minecraft on a flat surface. Here's the proper one.

 

The first screen capture would have me worried but the subsequent 2 after that don't seem all that bad. The first one is 40 degrees more then mine pulls while gaming but the next 2 are right on par with mine and my M17X is running just fine with a 7970 at those temps. If you are afraid of overheating then i would probably start by first making sure it is good and clean. Pick up some compressed air and give it a good cleaning just to be sure. You could also pull it open and check the thermal paste on the CPU and make sure that it was applied properly and that there is not to much or to little. Make sure all your GPU drivers are up to date although that should not have a huge impact on the temps, at least not enough to the point of overheating I wouldn't think. If you are still finding that your overheating then possibly some warranty work may be required unfortunately. With a fairly new system you shouldn't really be getting overheating unless your blocking intakes but if your getting it even with a cooling pad then I would guess it is probably hardware related.

Good luck , let us know what you find.

 

Thanks for the quick response. The first screen grab was while it was just sitting idle, But surely my laptop shouldn't be reeaching 90C while playing minecraft. Also what part do i spar with the compressed air, just the fans or do I have to open it up?

 

90C for your CPU cores? Holy Crap that's hot! Definitely clean out your heatsinks with compressed air. Unfortunately, to get the best results you do need to open up your machine and remove each heatsink, then blast the fins straight thru with the air nozzle to push the dirt and dust out. That gets em real clean. You can take off the fans and hit those two if they are looking pretty dirty. Just be careful with unplugging each fan's power cable. They can be fragile.

PS: that's a lot of icons & stuff on your desktop...how can people keep their desktops like that?

 

that's a load of icons. as radji said you should definitely blow out the fins on the heatsink and remove any dustbunnies. if your feeling confident then you may even want to repaste them both which should give you even cooler temps than you had when it was new

 

200+ ºF? You reached the boiling point at some point there. I wonder how the laptop even survived that temp.
I think you really need to open you laptop, clean the fans, heat sink and do a repaste.

 

The thing is unless you have been using this quite heavily in a dust bowl then it shouldn't be that bad. Try blowing with compressed air first up through the fans and then back through the exhaust and see if anything at all comes out. Chances are if nothing comes out it is either pretty clean or so clogged that nothing can move but most of the time you will get something if it is that bad. Being that your on a cooling mat , that usually keeps them pretty clean because the cooling mat is grabbing a lot of the dust before it pushes it into the laptop, I still try to blow my laptops out every couple months but usually don't see anything come out of them due to the cooling pads picking up 90% of it.

 

Definitely way too high for the CPU cores, it could be that the thermal pads are misplaced and therefore they're not dissipating as much heat as they should. If you have experience and feel comfortable taking apart your laptop for a re-paste, by all means go for it.

If you need help with that, send us an email at [email protected], include your service tag, phone number and a link to this thread. I'll look up your case and set up a callback to help you sort this out.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I sent and e-mail to the AWsocialmedia email and will see what happens from there!
Much appreciated.