AW18 with A08 bios+HWiNFO64 still crashing

I bought this AW18 off craigslist with the 4800MQ/dual GTX 780M build and 32 gigs of ram(A07 BIOS) about two weeks ago. Due to my work life, I've not gotten around to putting anything really strenuous on the system and running it until the other day. I installed h1z1, that sort of rebranded DayZ clone game and threw it all in ultra settings with medium render distance(new game but still not so great graphics) and figured, hey, why shouldn't this machine run it flawlessly?

And it did. For an hour.

First crash with this laptop. Instantly turns off, so I turn it on, try the same thing, crash within 15 minutes. I drop settings down to high and I still crash within twenty minutes. The game is now only playable on "very low" settings. I did some googling and learned of the fun and exciting adventure of "why doesn't my half-of-a-car-value laptop work as it should?" Did lots of Mr. Fox reading (very informative) and some other misc. theories as to why it's not working.

So I put HWiNFO and Throttlestop on my laptop, reflashed to A08 BIOS, followed Mr Fox's guide to controlling seperate fans in HWiNFO and figured that'd be it, right? Now I can run my fans at custom intervals and settings and everything will be okay.. right? Not so much. With the custom paramaters that were outlined I still crashed just as fast. I set all the fans to run on max (3700cpu, 3500 and 3300 respectively for the GTX 780's) and I'm still crashing just as fast. I looked into repasting it with Mr Fox's guide(This guy is a lifesaver for people with these things) but I can't really see why it would matter seeing as the gent I purchased it from swears with pictures that he's repasted it with Liquid Ultra less than a month prior to me purchasing it.

I confronted the gent that sold me the laptop and he said he knew about the issue and that was part of the reason he sold it. He has since stopped responding. I guess shame on me for not doing my research.
The warranty on this beast runs out mid-march but from what he said is extendable. Should I even bother? Is there something I'm missing that can fix this and make it a usable machine?

please help.

 

If the machine has such issues you should really consider on extending the warranty. Anyway, this issue happened while in warranty and it will be covered by us. Did you check the machine's temperatures while playing ? How do they look ?

 

Thanks for your reply.

Around 24°C at desktop, no applications running. Jumps to 35°C when I run a game and tops around 45-50°C around 15 minutes into gaming then turns off. Another issue I'm noticing after updating the BIOS is that when I restart or turn the machine off, it lingers still on for sometimes up to a minute with the keyboard and ALIENWARE logo still illuminated and the screen off before actually restarting or turning off. Any ideas?

 

I appreciate the kind comments.

One possibility is incorrect CPU power settings. Have you tried setting BIOS defaults to see if the behavior changes? Haswell CPUs are extraordinarily picky and can be totally unstable with the wrong settings. There can be a huge variance in what settings work fantastic on one Haswell CPU versus what works well on another one just like it. This is the most inconsistent CPU Intel has ever released.

With the machine crashing and turning off, it is possible that your 330W AC adapter is going bad. Is it getting exceptionally warm or downright hot to touch? What about the green light on the brick? Does it sometimes seem dimmer or flicker, or even turn off? I ask because the AC adapter can be weak and cause instability when doing more intensive things like gaming. Given you have verified the CPU and GPU temps are fine, it is probably something simple like this.

Most people like to have a spare. If you can afford it, I would recommend grabbing a spare AC adapter and see if the machine acts right. If it does, then you can look into getting the worn out or defective unit replaced. If it is still under warranty, Alienware will likely immediately ship a replacement to you at no cost if you can demonstrate that this is the reason for the problem.

Another possibility, although not as likely, is that the previous owner did not do something correctly when repasting. If he/she repasted the video cards and left a thermal pad off or have them placed improperly, one or both of the GPUs could be overheating a component that does not show up in a sensor reading. Only the core temperature is measured, but other components without sensors can overheat and create instability or thermal shutdown.

I would try the AC adapter first, because worse case scenario is you would have a spare on hand as a convenience and still have an issue left to resolve. Best case scenario, your problem is fixed without having to open the chassis.

 

Thank you for your time!

I actually don't know how to mess with the BIOS settings. Full disclosure, I didn't even know how to reflash my BIOS until this happened, the only other gaming laptop I've owned was an 18x R2 and I never had issues with it. I saw on one of your posts about overclocking the AW18 that to overclock it, users would need to unlimit their wattage- is it possible that with just the factory overclock(and a usb under laptop fan and usb headset) I could be sucking too much power out of this thing?

I've never really paid attention to it under any load but I've just spent a good half hour watching it with varying degrees of load on my computer and it's not flickered or dimmed at all. At the same time I've nothing to compare the brightness to. It's warm to the touch but not hot or uncomfortable. EDIT: I forgot to mention, after one of the crashes, when I turned my laptop on it greeted me with a black screen after the windows splash screen telling me that my battery was temporarily disabled due to being too hot and that I should check the bios screen for more information. I went to the screen as directed and was told it was too hot and to let my computer cool off and restart the system. I let the machine sit for about 10 minutes, restarted it and no more battery warning.

He made a point of telling me he worked for a computer store and "knew how to take care of his toys." I'll send him another message though, fingers crossed for a response.

 

Sometimes the factory default settings are not the best and if the person you bought it from was doing some settings tweaking they may not be quite right. Yes, it could be drawing too much power if the settings are jacked up. The laptop turning off after it crashing suggests a power or thermal problem but it is difficult to diagnose that in a forum conversation without gathering more detail to try and isolate the cause. Under load like gaming, if the AC adapter is dropping out or temporarily turning off and on, this can lead to instability or the system turning off. The battery cannot handle that. Gaming must be done on AC power.

Press F2 during POST and enter the BIOS and then go to the boot menu. There you will find an option to set factory defaults. If you are not used to poking around in the BIOS this can be tricky... not dangerous as in causing damage or anything like that, but if the previous owner set things up differently than factory the result could be interesting. The main thing to take note of before setting factory defaults is how the SATA operation is configured. Look to see if the BIOS is set to RAID (the default) or AHCI. After resetting BIOS defaults, you may need to press F2, go to that menu and change it to what it was set to before. If the OS was installed set for RAID (the default) everything will be fine. If the previous owner installed Windows with it set to AHCI, you may need to manually change it back to AHCI before Windows will boot without a BSOD. Not a serious matter, just an FYI to be aware of it.

 

I'll check it out right now. I know the prior owner returned computer to factory settings shortly before I bought it(because the day I bought it he still had to put some drivers on it that were missing) but hopefully this works! Will update in a bit. Thanks!

EDIT:

F9 was my "Setup Defaults" though it appears nothing changed unless I wasn't paying as good attention as I had thought. Something that struck me as interesting though was under Advance tab, "Overclocking feature" was disabled and "CPU Turbo Mode" was enabled.. I was under the impression that the "Turbo Mode" was Intel's name for their built-in overclocking so this is confusing to me.

Anyway, I restarted after that, loaded the same game I've been trying to play and about 15 minutes in crashed at 56°C. Upon turning it back on, my computer lingered with the screen off and only the left most key set lit up, the 5 macro select keys. It stayed this way until I restarted again and was automatically put into Safe Mode with the keys still unlit. I had to manually reset the lights. The battery seemed fine through all of this(it's still not even that warm.)

This is starting to get a bit frustrating, ahaha..

 

Disabled turbo mode and it's still doing the same. I'm at a loose end, roughly two weeks left on the warranty.. should I sell it now or try to salvage and pay for the warranty?

Anyone have insight on this?

 

Extend the warranty and keep it unless you have a line on a maxed out configuration on M18xR2 that you can buy with the money from selling your Alienware 18. The only other machines you can get that are better than what you already have is a maxed out M18xR2 with Extreme CPU and 780M SLI or a Clevo P570WM with 4930K/4960X and 780M SLI or 980M SLI. Everything else money can buy is an inferior product. You just need to get your problems sorted and gain a little more experience at tuning and things should turn out fine. If you actually have a hardware problem, the warranty should take care of it. No machine is going to deliver impressive performance running with factory defaults out of the box, so learning to performance tune is a must.

If that is too stressful, (and for some folks it is too stressful,) then maybe sell the beast and get an ASUS or MSI gamer-boy notebook. They actually play games perfectly fine, but they're nothing to get excited about in terms of performance.