Issue with overheating of GPU

I recently purchased an M17X from a friend who got tired of not being able to games because his computer kept having issues. I did a complete reinstall from the two disks he had and then I ran driver detecive to work out the rest of the kinks. All seemed fine except periodically the system completely freezes when I play for awhile.

I thought it might be a graphics driver issue so I turned down the settings of the game and went to nvidia's website to download the latest driver. This sort of worked, but I still get lockups. I noticed that lockups happened more frequently the longer I left the computer on, so I got speedfan to check the temperatures.

Sure enough one of the gpu is sitting at 145f idling with no game running. I've since been trying to find some way to manually increase the fan speed. Right now the fans are close to idle and the only time the increase their speed is when I was intalling a new BIOS in hopes there would be some way of manually adusting the fans. I tried to install the R2 BIOS but it appears to be incompatible so I instead used the R1 A06 BIOS on this forum.

Unfortunately nothing I've done seems to work. I downloaded Rivatuner as well but I'm not sure how to use that program properly and I don't want to mess up some kind of setting.

Is there anything I can do to get the fans to increase their speed and actually cool the gpu?

 

Hello. Try this driver 197.16_notebook_winvista_win7_64bit_international_whql.exe and see if it can get better with it BIOS A06 is the best so far!

 

Hey first of all make sure of what system you have don't randomly flash whatever BIOSes!!
Changing the old thermal paste on the video cards GPU would grately help sometimes.
When you install video drivers make sure to properly uninstall the current version first.

Tell us your specs and we'll be able to help you more!

cheers

 

in my humble opinion the OP should first post some detail about his system

 

We need to know more about your system...R1 or R2...what GPU(s) CPU...OS...and most importantly what video driver are you using?

The VERY first thing I would suggest is going into BIOS and loading default values for all items. Fan probs and overheating/using only one video chip have in my experience been caused by having BIOS overclocks (& maybe other settings) modified.

If you don't know what your system specs are..look in BIOS page 1 or 2 depending on type for your service tag. Input this tag# in the support section of the Dell website. It will give you the original and current (with an activex download) of your system.

 

over heating of the GPU is due to Thermal paste as well as Kapton sticky tape over the GPU. purchase an Arctic silver 5 Thermal Paste not any other brand or color believe me this is the best and drop Temp 8* C on spot , make sure you lay even amount of paste , not too much at all you need very thin layer of past , putting too much will cause overheating also as this past is Thick itself .also purchase KAPTON tape 40mm , before apply Paste tape up the top of GPU ( you need to cut out the metal part touching the heat sink) with two layer of Kapton Tape , put the heat sink back , you also need to be sure your GPU ram are also sealed by Thermal Pad , hey you go your temp stay around 72 for most of the time, it might go up to 78 on ultimate use , i am talking about summer temp like here in Sydney .

 

I think I've been a bit unclear as to the issue. The problem is not gpu contact with the heatsink. The problem is that the fans never spin faster than idle speed. The only time the RPM's on the fans increase is for about 2secs when rebooting happens and the BIOS has not yet loaded.

All I want to do is allow the fans to spin faster.

As for posting the system specs, I can do that but I don't know where to locate the R1 or R2 portion. When I right click on computer/properties I get the following:

Windows 7
Intel core 2 duo cpu [email protected] 2.80 GHz
Ram 4GB
64bit OS

When I go to system information I get the following
OS Vesion 6.1.7600 Build 7600
System Model M17x
System type X64-based PC
BIOS vesion/Date Alienware A01,1/13/2011
SMBIOS Vesion 2.5


GPU's are
NVIDIA GeForce 9400
GTX 260m
GTX 260m



If there is additional information required please let me know where to find it and I'll gladly post.

 

Fan speed is ONLY controlled automatically in BIOS. No user adjustment possible. That's why the recommendation to reset BIOS to defaults. As for how to figure out if it's R1 or R2....enter BIOS by pressing F2 when the alienhead appears at boot. Look for SERVICE TAG entry. See previous post.

 

he has a m17x R1

R1: the Dual/Quad core CPUs. Video cards like ATi4870 nVidia GTX 280m/260m
R2: the i-core series i5-520...i7-940xm. Video cards like ATi4870/5870 nVidia 285m
R3: the second Gen i-core CPUs(Sandy Bridge) i7-2720 etc One video card like ATi 6870 nVidia 460m.

no need to share your service tag!

 

are you sure you have disabled the NVIDIA 9400 from the bios ? as well as hybrid ? check it out , your system is R1 , R2 system do not have onboard GPU .
what is MAX temp you measured while system is on load ?

 

How do i disable the 9400 from BIOS? I saw the hybrid part in the BIOS and I'll disable that in a minute.

Right now I've had Eve online running for the past hour or so and the temp is at 140F. I got a custom cooling pad today... took a plastic storage box and cut a hole to match the large central fan and then another hole on the opposite side of the computer exhaust to force cooler are in the front and up to the fans. Maybe that will be enough to keep it from getting too hot.

 

My friend, 140F is nothing you are not overheating at all (that's just 60 degree celsius)

i don't know about R1 and nvidia260's but with 5870's our fans stay almos silent upon reaching 78 degrees celsius, then they rev up to 3200 rpm's (wich still isn't the max rpm's, since max is 4100 or so and it never goes that high, with no game)

You are worring for no reasons

 

Any temperatures between 0 and 85-90 degrees celcius is nothing to worry about (85-90 under load, that is). I'd say Idle up to 65 degrees celcius is normal.

Where/why do you think you have overheating issues, is there maybe something you forgot to mention?
Or did you make a typo with the mentioned degrees Fahrenheit (which is indeed about 60 degrees, and perfectly fine).