M17X-R1&R2 safety mods!

1. Touch panel.
Most of us occasionally need to open the system and do some maintenance (replacements, cleaning, etc) and this part is the most difficult to remove, or the easiest to break . So, to make things easy I just gently sanded the rough edges on the inner plastic clips of the panel as can be seen from the attached picture, till I was able to remove it with very minimal effort (without any plastic or metal tools).



Make sure you don't exaggerate! Use a light touch!
Sand a little, try to fit it in and remove, and so on until you're happy with the result. I used a 100grit sand paper, BTW and it took me about 5min.


2. CrossFireX Cable!
As you might have noticed, a part of the CPU/NB heatpipes is exposed directly beneath the CF cable. Why on Earth AW picked that spot - remains unclear to me, but here is the problem:


The CF cable has some glue on it and when removed often (ex. to clean the GPU's and their fans from dust) a bit of the glue might get underneath that cable section and whoa - pressing on it when putting it back or even applying some pressure on the keyboard later on will glue it to the pipes! It happened to me on R1 and the cable was practically fried.
So here is an advice:
a) Always make sure you have no glue underneath that section of the cable.
b) Always make sure that section is not bent and there's enough space in between the pipe and the cable.

On a side note, you can attempt a few simple tips, like putting a thin plastic (with a decent thermal resistance) under the cable, etc.

Hope this helps someone!
Enjoy your beasts!

 

Nice one! Going to do the cf cable mod for sure!! Didn't notice it myself. The touch panel came out quite easy for me so I am not going to bother with it.

 

Yeah, my R1 had a panel that was very easy to remove, but this one was painful enough to start thinking about it

 

Thanx for the tips Aikimox. +1 from me.
As far as it concerns the crossfire cable, the only logical explanation I can give is that they were concerned about the heat and a possible distortion of that data so they preferred to slightly curve the cable so it won't touch anywhere. As you mentioned though it is vulnerable to a potential hard press on the keyboard and makes me wonder how hard would it be for Dell to apply a heat-resistant plastic on that spot for this purpose...

 

Dell could easily fix the issue by making that opening narrower and thus preventing the CF cable from dropping in. Heat would still circulate since there's no 100% contact between the surfaces.

 

Why not just put a piece of aluminum under the cable where the pipes are? Even foil from the grocery store will insulate it very well. It's what I did with my last r2 and it worked perfectly.

 

I guess it's up to you what to put under, though I'd not recommend using aluminum foil. If you happen to jam it in by pressing too hard and make it touch the pipes, it may fry the cable as well due to the outstandingly radiant heat conductivity of aluminum.
But if it works fine - don't worry.

 

Which part did u sand, 1 or 2?



For the cable: I use a piece of sticky tape (like that tape alienware use on the cable) to cover where the heatsink exposed. Then i lay the cable on it gently and stick another tape on. Isn't that more effectively?

 

2 is the part you would want to sand.

the problem is that the CPU copper heatpipes are right there, so when the processor is under full load, that cable is sitting < 1/4" from 74C metal.

 

Uh, mine is not like that- Look. The wire doesn't contact the sink and it's all covered. R1 as in sig.

But I guess it could contact that small portion- This pic

 

the opening right below and slightly to the left of the question mark is where the cpu heat pipes are, the CF and SLI cable go right over that opening.

 

Thank you! That's what i thought

 

Yeah, second pic. Just could use something to bridge it and that would help. How could they(Dell) miss that? Amazing!!!!!! And, I was just pointing out that mine (R1) looked nothing like the OPs.