M17xr2 Overheating?Maybe?

Hey guys, ive been a fan of the community and finally decided to make the jump. I have this m17xr2 for a couple years now, rough years mostly with you guess overheating.

Well i recently got it back and dusted it out and now its back to its old ways after more than half a year. I also have to mention that i keep a laptop cooler under it at all times. I have a desktop but when i travel or am away i like using my laptop to get some work done and some gaming on the go. For some reason though ive recently had some overheating in dead space 3 and maybe a few hiccups here and there with devil may cry 4 but ds3 seems to run around 60fps+ and ds 3 seems to drop from 110, 80, 70 to 55, and some times just chugs around 25. Ive checked the temp with gpuz and i saw my gpu hit 100(and over sometimes) and the other gpu around high 80 mid 90s. These temps are with a cooler under it. But heres the curveball it doesnt overheat with other games like counter strike or batman arkham city (atleast now now) and they used to hover around 75 to 85. So i wasnt sure if it was just bad coding with the game or that the gpus needs to be replaced or repasted. All i know is the fans sound like a vaccum cleaning and you could fry eggs on the laptop when it gets hot(it even burn my damn fingers).

I called Customer support but as usual theyre useless, Ive pretty much removed, restarted drivers, swept it clean, yadda yadda before i even called them. Now they want me to go through that useless process like they did the previous times which did nothing to fix the problem just so i can hassle them for hours and get them to send a bag over to replace it like the other 2 times. I basically told him to himself and im not sure what i should do. Whether to complain to the bbb again, go around in circles for 3 hours with Customer support, or just n open the laptop myself and try to do the cooling mod and possibly replace the crossfire 5870s to just one card 6000 or 7000 series i hear is more heat efficient?

So what do you guys think? *sorry for the lengthy post*

 

If you haven't opened it up and cleaned the internals, chances are there's years worth of dust collected in the heatsink fins, the fan and everywhere in between ^^. This can HIGHLY affect cooling, up to a point where you never had problems, and all of a sudden can't play anything anymore due to thermal shutdowns.
I generally also repaste everything every 1, max 2 years as the paste tends to become less effective after that.

If you feel comfortable doing the above yourself (I am confident that even just cleaning the heatsink fins and removing dust everywhere will likely already solve your problem).
If you have it open anyway i'd repaste the GPU at least, it's not hard to do and just a few minutes of work (if you don't feel comfortable doing this, then just cleaning would be great already).

As far as upgrading goes, there is a big amount of options for the R2, fitting pretty much every budget.
The best thing I ever did was upgrading to a 7970m, the fastest ATI card of the moment (NVidia GTX 680m is a lot more expensive but is also a great option which is even slightly faster then a 7970m).
Which yields way, way, way more power then an 5870 XF setup, in a single card, and gets great temperatures. It will cost you a bit, but it will be a top knotch notebook again, able to compete performance wise with brand new R4's in the best gfx spec.

In your case i'd first resolve my heating issue, and then decide what I want to do with the cards and how fast of a card i'd want.

 

Hey thanks, so yeah i might just do that. Seeing as i might have to ability to do so i might kill two birds with one stone and get any upgrades while my laptop is opened along with some arctic silver. What are websites where i can purchase 7970m , other gpus and usable cpus like 940xm?

 

ebay.

A good seller for GPU (7970m for example) is http://myworld.ebay.nl/upgradeyourlaptop/?_trksid=p4340.l2559 aka Eurocom. Lots of members buy from him. I also hear good things about mxm-upgrade.com, and there are quite a few people lately that have them available here on the marketplace.

940xm (or 920xm, which is just as good when you OC anyway, which you will be doing, else no use getting an XM) is best to keep an eye on the marketplace here, or also just ebay. Beware of QS/ES chips, or at least be aware of what they mean and possible problems you 'might' run into.

 

I bought a QS and it has taken some beating clocked as fast as above 4gHz at times for fun. (but not perfect for long )
Still running great after removing OC, but if u dont save money its no use, i spent about half of what OEM ones was when i bought it, but i wanted it NOW when i did.

BTW anyone knowing why they ask us to use A9 BIOS on r2's for 7970M's? (upgradeyourlaptop)

HD7970M Alienware M17x M18x VGA Upgrade Kit Dell HD7970M 2GB DDR5 CF Ready | eBay

I use the OC'able A10 and seems to run good.

 

For me the 7970m worked on A09, A10 and A10 custom bios. I think when he first sold the card a09 was the most recent bios which he was sure the card would always work with, after that he prolly just repeated the same ad over and over ^^

 

Mmmmm sounds plausible thx