Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
Had my m11xR2 for about half a year.
Lately when I began gaming more heavily I noticed in-game stuttering, which occurred only once game had been running for quite long time. Stuttering was random, but temporal, dropped FPS to around 14-19 (playable but not bearable), and in few minutes everything got back to normal FPS... only to annoy me with this stuff later on again.
My first suspect was temperature. I'm using ThrottleStop, no GPU overclock. Under heavy load peak temperature reached 77-81, which I found reasonable and far below safety limits. Hell, that was actually almost idle temperature of my asus w7s(g). Don't have cooler pad, but my laptop stands quite high, air intake\exhaust not blocked so it couldn't be an issue. So no thermal throttling happened. Well, at least I thought so.
My second suspect were GPU drivers, as I was using modded drivers all the time. Moving back and forth, from official drivers to not-so-official there was no real change in behavior. Gave more attention to powermizer, used third party tools to disable it \ to disable scenario of downclocking in case of overheating. No luck here as well.
My third suspect was system. Although I couldn't be bothered to reinstall it (alienware doesn't pack much garbage anyways), I checked msconfig, removed unneeded services, disabled stuff here and there. And guess what - no luck again.
It got quite annoying. So I turned to one last measure that I could think of.
Although my laptop was never used in dusty environment i decided to use vacuum cleaner to clean internals. Construction of this laptop is quite good in terms of airflow and has a free access to fan at the bottom, which prevented me from tearing my old buddy apart (having re-read that - that sounds bit scary >_< ). So I simply took vacuum cleaner, and, having covered area with cloth that wasn't covered by hose (to increase airflow force) vacuum cleaned it. It's just important to take your time - no rush, do it throughly, make sure no dust is attached to grille. If fan starts spinning and screaming - it's all right, means that air intake force is fine. Then you may do the same thing to the air exhaust at the back of your laptop. As a bonus - quick run through keys (no real temperature effect here, but it's always nice to use a neat notebook). At first I was a bit scared that suction could rip a key, but construction is sturdy and no harm was made (though it depends on your vacuum cleaner).
After that I gave my m11x a fry by playing few hours of DoW2, CoD-BOps and BFBC2. And, hell yeah, no more random stuttering, hooray to stable high fps. Temperature never got higher than 70, which made me extremely happy (but still quite confused of such low temperatures when throttling kicks in).
The whole point of this wall of text is to remind people that sometimes most obvious and stupid solutions (although they are obvious and stupid) are the most effective solutions. Hope that helps someone who experiences similar problems.
Random game stuttering fix =)
Discussion in 'Alienware M11x' started by Greywind, Jan 6, 2011.
