R3 Laptop reseting while gaming.

I recently reinstalled World of Warcraft and have been having issues with the laptop randomly resetting. It has never done this before with any other games nor when I used to play WoW. I figured it may be a video driver issue so I updated drivers to the latest R4 ATI driver but it still happens. Ive felt the air from the fans just after it restarts and it is warm but doesn't seem like its hot enough to cause it to shutdown. I use a Cooler Master Notepal U3 Laptop Cooling Pad.

I recently upgraded to 16gigs of G.SKILL 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600). That is the only major change to the laptop.

System Specs-
Alienware M17x R3
ATI 6970M
Intel i7-2630QM CPU
16g DDR3 1333
120g OCZ Solid 3 SSD

Any ideas on what could be causing this?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

so your system shuts down while trying to game? I would clean your fans out if you haven't before. I know mine get clogged up pretty quickly.

 

Sorry forgot to post that. I cleaned them earlier today and about an hour or so after, while gaming it restarted again. There's nothing that leads up to it either, just a complete reset out of no where.

 

have you tried applying newer thermal paste? Sounds like a thermal issue to me as a laptop doesn't usually just shut down.

 

No I haven't touched anything inside yet other than HDD and RAM. I remember seeing a few guides on here about how to do it. I guess I will try that here in the next few weeks and see what happens.

 

Check to ensure that the fans on your cooling pad are blowing air up towards the laptop, not pulling air down and away from it. I installed 3x 120mm fans on my U3 for better airflow, and (since they'd been installed to pull air away instead), I saw my GPU temps rise to about 110°C. I wouldn't imagine that the fans that come with it are strong enough to make much of a difference in either direction (even at their maximum), but it wouldn't hurt to check.

 

The fans are blowing the correct direction. I took the battery out to see what might happen and just running off the power cord the computer hasn't reset yet while gaming... I wonder if the battery is getting to hot.

 

Since you mentioned replacing the RAM recently, I'd want to run memtest on it overnight, just to rule out the RAM as being an issue. Should give zero errors.

 

You should test the computer with the old ram only, and see if the issue happens, run a memtest like wolfpup said and an ePSA.

 

Ok so it just reset on me again while gaming. I felt the bottom of the laptop and everything is either barely warm or cool to touch. The air out of the back fans was barely warm... I'll put the old RAM back in the weekend and run those tests. Hopefully its a RAM issue as its an easy fix.

 

Can you monitor temps with a program like hwinfo64? The machine could be overheating even if the outside case doesn't get hot due to a heatsink not having good contact or something.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy S2 running Resurrection Remix

 

Agree, if you're getting barely warm air out the back then the thermal switching is being triggered to start the fan but the heat is not being dissipated - maybe

 

Well out of curiosity I ran the ePSA with the new RAM and everything passed. I then ram memtest86+ over night. I got some errors when I woke up. Below is a picture I took with my phone. Is there anyway to test each stick individually or will I have to manually remove them then test?

20121019_081338[1] | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I downloaded hwinfo64 the other day. I will run it and keep monitoring it while gaming to see what the temps are getting up too.

 

Ok so here are some screen shots of ~45mins of gaming. There weren't any huge spikes in temp that would make me think its a temperature issue.

20mins | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
42mins | Flickr - Photo Sharing!