Alienware 18 Overheat, running 70-80 on idle :S.

Hello everyone,my name is Marco.

I'm new to this community but I have been reading/using it back when I first got my Alienware 18 back in december 2013 and was running a03 with Mr.Foxs guide, everything has been working smooth.

Specs:
780M SLI
4930MX haswell cpu.


Recently I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 and updated my ancient bios from a03 to a10.
I thought that with this update new possibitlies would arise since the bios was no longer locked, I set it to factory settings and even tried dells "overclocking levels" they were garbadge, and since then my Alienware 18 has been running very hot with absolutly no load. As we speak I'm only using firefox and spotify and it's only 66-70C at 3600-3700mhz IDLE, this is not normal, and if I try to run one of my favorite games (League of legends) my fps is cut in half and it drops down to 20-30 sometimes, it also overheats and shutsdown after a couple minutes.

I would very much appriciate if anyone here could help me out getting the best out of my computer, setting it up with the best bios settings so I can use this fine piece of machinery the way it was ment to be used.

I also tried varius settings in Intel Extreme Tuning without any luck.

My skype: Marco.arenas.1996

 

A few questions/thoughts...

Are you using HWiNFO64 for manual fan controls? If so, it may not be configured correctly, which could prevent the fans from running when they need to.

Are you hearing and feeling the fans running? If the machine is throttling from heat and shutting down the fans should be howling full blast before than happens.

Have you taken off the bottom cover, removed the fans and cleaned out all of the lint and dust bunnies? If not, December of 2013 was a long time ago and your fans and heat sink radiators may be clogged up. Take off the three screws on the bottom cover. Remove both covers. Take the screws out of the three fans. You can leave the wires connected. Lift them out of their "pockets" and flop them over to the side. This will give you direct access to the heat sink radiators. Used compressed air or a vacuum cleaner to remove all of the dust and lint. If it is caked on and crusty, use a soft bristled paint brush or an old tooth brush to dislodge the crud.

If the fans are working correctly and the system is totally clean, you will need to look at replacing the thermal paste. Liquid Ultra is the best bet. If that scares you too much, use IC Diamond or Gelid GC Extreme.

You can also look at your CPU voltage. Too much voltage will increase temperatures. Running stock clocks or up to about 4.3GHz you should be able to run somewhere between 1.160V and 1.175V. Set static voltage (not adaptive) and no offset. If you start getting 0x124 blue screens, it means the voltage is too low. Increase it in small increments until that problem goes away. You can test stability for CPU voltage using Cinebench R11.5, 3DMark 11 or Vantage Physics tests, or wPrime.

 

Thanks for replying, do you have skype Mr.Fox? I'm gonna open up the screws and clean it, and repaste it, but do you think you could help me out with my settings over teamviewer? I really feel like I'm wasting my specs. Also the fans are running at full, I can hear it, but only when I set them to max in HWiNFO64.

 

I am work during the day. We can circle back on that by private message and I am sure we can get that beast tuned up nicely. For now, let's focus on your temps because we need those fixed before any overclocking.

 

HAHAHAHA! I don't know why but after cleaning it(there wasnt that much dust but it was clogged on the cpu fans it seems, it's now running at 40-55 !

http://puu.sh/gwfMr/5a295a909d.png

This is without HW fan controls . When I just rebooted.
It's probably gonna climb to 55-60 but it's much lower than previously ^^.

I also think the HW wasn't configured properly because it only detected two fans out of three.
I didn't know the change was this big lol! I'm gonna do the repaste when my brother visits, a tad scared to do it by myself, allthrought I saw your video. I'm afraid il break anything . Now I just need to get the settings right and everything will be perfect ^^. It's running at 55-60 now while watching videos and playing music with ocational spikes to 70, but still much better than previously, I also changed the power from 1200 to 1160 and static instead of adaptive.

Also, how do you even P.M on this forum , do you need to reach a post count? Can't find it xD.

 

Yes, 5 posts and then overnight processing enables messaging.

 

Allright, til then, do you suggest I use the settings here?
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ly-have-it-run-full-stock-turbo-speed.734696/

I also think my bios settings are messed up, it currently boots in UEFI mode, with few other different things, don't really have much experience with this, I just want it to perform as good as possible while I'm enjoying games with high fps without overheating. I really want to tweak this as best as can but I just don't know how, yet.

 

Yes, those setting should work OK. They worked fine for me, but bear in mind there is a lot variance among Haswell CPUs.

Is your BIOS Boot menu set for UEFI with Legacy Option ROM? If so, not need to tinker with that. That will do fine if it is set that way.

 

So these settings will work fine for gaming purposes? Been looking on this forum for the past two hours, there is so much to tweak lol, custom gpu drivers, xtu settings, voltage, everything is new for me, I also see that you prefer legacy mode over uefi, while I don't even understand the difference yet . Could you help me optimize this system when you have freetime?

I don't even know if the drivers I use now currently are crippling my system, reinstalled the drivers from dells offical site because I could not find the disk that came with the system.

 

If everything works well with your system, other than video drivers, don't mess with drivers. There is no need to update your BIOS or drivers for stuff like WiFi, chipset, USB, Bluetooth or anything else unless there is a problem that needs to be fixed and you know the driver fixes it. The best approach is "if ain't broke, don't break fix it" LOL... NVIDIA and AMD display drivers are the only real except to this.

If your BIOS Boot menu is set to use UEFI with Legacy Option ROM, there is no compelling reason to change that. If it is set to pure UEFI (no Legacy Option ROM) you will have to reinstall Windows to correct that because Windows uses a different method of booting. If you are using the UEFI Windows Boot Manager and switch to Legacy it is unlikely your machine will boot Windows. You will need to look and see how it is set up.

If you are primarily going to be gaming, a stable 4.3GHz overclock is phenomenal and you can just stop there because going higher than that is a waste for gaming and you will already be rocking higher clock speeds that the vast majority of gamers (laptop or desktop). You could even run 4.0 or 4.1GHz for gaming and that would be more than enough. Most of the current games are GPU bound and have very lenient minimum system requirements that accommodate comparatively weak and aging CPU and GPU components. I say all of this because there is not a lot that needs to be optimized for an amazing gaming experience. Having display drivers with current game profiles and choosing the ideal settings in NVIDIA Control Panel are your most important considerations for gaming.

What you can get a nice lift from in terms of system responsiveness is eliminating worthless software and services that are running in the background and serve no significant purpose other than self-edification for the software vendors. Simple run of thumb for software and non-core Windows Services is, if you are not actively using it, a 99.9% chance exists that there is no good reason for it to be running. Killing all of the crap frees up resources for things that you are running on purpose.

 

As you were writing this wonderful message I overclocked it to 4.3ghz with your settings and enabled legacy option rom, to see if it would be any difference, but apparently haswell didn't like that so now I have to open up the entire thing, take out the battery, cmos, and memory modules just to reset the bios, what a pain, I started laughing when I read "if it ain't broken don't break it" I just did ahahaha xD! Il do the dirty work tomorrow, for now it's just a black screen, lights, and a fan noise. I was thinking I could reinstall windows after changing it to legacy option, but apparently I can't even enter my own bios. The bios is really interesting, first time ever to "brick" a pc or any other device for that matter. I don't think theres a easy way to reset it either :S, should I have dell fix it for me or attempt your fix or taking the bios on a usb, (I don't know if 18 boots usbs pre boot) I was surprised to find out there was no other ways of resetting it, I don't know what broke it in the first place.

 

OMG... Yeah, these new Haswell machines are a real pain in the butt, and their locked-down BIOSes are just pure crap. We have been waiting patiently and asking nicely for them to make things right with the Ranger and Viking BIOS since mid-2013, but it's looks like we're all just fresh out of luck on that ever happening. Some dumb-dumb thought it would be cute to store settings in NVRAM so they can't be flushed and then write protect it to help the corruption remain persistent, LOL.

Here's how to get it working again...

I find it inexcusable that they engineered these machines in such a way that yanking the CMOS battery does not reset everything to POST-safe defaults and then write-protected it so we could not tweak the firmware... absolutely unacceptable.

 

Yeah I found this after some research, I didn't want to open it up until my Liquid Ultra came, but now it leaves me no choice. LOL.. how stupidly designed, they coudn't add a reset hotkey? I sure would if I designed a bios. Even a tiny reset button would do lol.

 

An unmarked pcb short point could have done the trick too.

 

@Meaker - the motherboard actually has two of them (so does the AW17)... one for CLR BIOS and one for CLR EC... unfortunately, they do not work. Bridging them does nothing to flush the settings because of the sad draconian measures taken by Alienware to prevent tinkering. Only the "get a bigger hammer" trick posted above has worked for me. The contact points on the AW17 were also strategically placed in an area concealed by the chassis that is nearly to impossible to access without removing the motherboard. It just adds insult to injury to discover that bridging the contacts does not clear the settings after going to the trouble of pulling the motherboard, LOL.

 

Really odd, a better solution would have been a room chip.

 

Or a tried and true BIOS design without any write-protected, signature-enforcing "security" cancer and volatile memory so that removing the CMOS battery would dump all the custom settings like a real computer.

 

The damned battery sits too tight, cmos and the memory on the upperside is out, waiting for my big brother to drop by to help me out with the rest, damned bios lol.

 

Hey guys, I bought GC-extreme il repaste while I'm back there, but I can't seem to get the keyboard loose, are there more than 4 screws? Afraid of breaking it, they didn't have liquid ultra here and the seller told me liquid ultra is impossible to remove and gets hard and unefficient after a few months, went safe with this.