Alienware m17 (ranger) and 980m burnt / died

Was playing BF1 the other day when my laptop suddenly powered down and wouldn't post.
running MSI afterburner to monitor temps, all <83 degrees celcius

Smelt a faint smell of burning plastic

unplugged the power supple immediately and felt the laptop back for temps

left most side (CPU side) was very hot

opened up the back and took a look at the GPU to find something on the upper left had burnt out!

looks like other things are dead now too, as with the GPU out, it won't post. even the light indicating that the power supply is plugged in doesn't come on.

oh well, have now bought a new desktop system, and gone back to the old m17xr4 and m290x.

just wanting to post this up in case people are having similar issues.

 

@woodzstack

Another one?

 

took everything apart and tried to see if it would post again
this time had some smoke coming up and one of the USB hubs looks damaged (left side of the mobo)

for what it's worth - GPU was from HIDevolution, never overclocked

 

A lot of people have had problems with 980M graphics.

 

No not one of mine, sorry. I've been extremely explicit with my buyers for all sorts of prevention and tricks, and explaining exactly what the causes are - always - i ask before shipping, no matter what, which laptop they have - for reasons like this.
This is why we have the TEP module, it isolated any heat coming from the nearby PCH or vregs and other components, as well as pulls a few extra degree's away from the RAM underneath the card, this usually keeps it from overheating and dying. Infact, I have a guy who leaves my old AW17 on, 24/7 much like I do, and ingame while he is afk or sleeping, and my 980M in there is going on 3 years old now. I only had 3 Alienware 17's and he has one of them, my friend, and never any issues with the 980M (it was also in my M17X-R4 too)

 

Were you running the stock vBios or someone else's?

 

I would like to know that too...

@mkerr I try and learn everything I can to help the next guy when it comes to these GPU's for the most part my buyers are not the guys having issue, ever, really, but a lot of that is prevention too...

we would all like to know if you know the vbios on the card or what was reported by gpu-z if you ever took a pic, or if you flashed the bios yourself, or which driver you were using, or if you can show us a high resolution picture of the 980M front and back please.

 

hi guys.
i was running premas V2
had J95s modded nvidia drivers, can't recall which one it was, i'll try to find out later
will upload better piccies later as well

any idea what that bit that's fried is?

 

I am really starting to see a pattern here......

 

Well J95 has my confidence that his drivers are perfectly fine, however - they are still NVidia drivers - so they're never going to be perfect.
On the otherhand, I can not recommend Prema in any instance, because I have no agreement with him, there has been little to no communication between us (not from a lack of me trying over the last 5 years.).

 

insufficient vrm cooling?

or needing more vrm? the prema one is overvolted

 

I would say it's the overvolted vBios ... Even if you didn't overclock that vBios runs stock clocks at 1.062, while this card runs at stock 0.987 - 1.037 max. @Johnksss@iBUYPOWER vBios even runs overclocked to 1202 core clock at 1.000 V.

Of course @Prema knows more than me and can shed more light on the topic, but I believe the vBios may be problematic in AWs due to the arrangement of the heatsink maybe. As this issue is exclusive to AWs and doesn't happen in CLEVOs running the same vBios.