Upgrading Alien laptop Vid Card making or brakeing?

Upgrading Alien laptop Vid Card making or breaking?*

Hey hey all I am new to the forums here and have a quick question for all you uber pros

I have an Alienware Area-51 m5500r-r3 with an ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 256mb version video card. It is a duel core Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU T5500 @ 1.66GHz with 4 gig of ram running on Windows Vista Ultimate. I play WoW and have been having some probs with the framerate for awhile now where I probably should not have, as well as if I do not run a cooling pad AND a small desktop fan directed at the cooling pad the comp will shut down after about 15-20 min of game play. without the desktop fan about 30min to an hr before auto shutdown.

My question is... I have been told that it is my video card by a few people. I have cleaned it out and it is free of dust. It runs at about 104-115 degrees out of WoW or even with WoW minimized. But the second I maximize WoW it jumps to about 125-135 degrees. I dont know what it gets to to make it shut down but I would guess rather hot lol.

Is what is going on normal for this card? What could I or should I be doing to make this not happen if not? (and yes i have the latest drivers) And, will getting an upgrade like the GeForce GO 7800 GTX fix this, let it run the with the same heat probs or make it worse?

Thank you for taking the time to read and reply to my wall-o-text!

/bow

 

That is MUCH too high. Does the fan run at all?

You can upgrade, check this, but I suggest you first get your temps in order. Either your fan is not running or you don't have a heatpad on your GPU.

 

something burning?
wow your temp are very high
but as Ice-Tea wrote, you can upgrade your card. GO 7800 GTX is MXM III which won't be compatible with your laptop as it looks like. You are looking for an 8600M or 3650 or maybe 9500M GS and if you want to take a risk 9600M GT (so far only a few people could install this card successfully so check around).

 

kk yeah the temps are way way high Sadly they have been almost the whole time I have owned the machine. Yes the fan runs, it changes speeds as well and I have opened and blown out the whole vidcard/heatsink. So it is not normal and if I were to replace it might as well upgrade right? lol I hate having an Alienware and getting much worse FPS than others on Wallmart comps : /

So on the upgrade... I dont want to "push" it I just want a card that is a big enough upgrade that I can at least turn my video settings up to say, half or more, would love to go to all high and add the shadows but I dont know if this machine can do it, it should but who knows, so far not my favorite. Thank you for the suggestions on the cards. Is there anyone out there that has this machine that has any of the better cards in it and they run well without trying to force it or "make it run right" just plug in, change settings, update drivers, done.

 

Check the link I gave you. The 8600GT and HD3650 work just fine. Are you sure you have the original heatpad in place?

 

Yeah I checked the link, great link btw ty vm! That sounds good I just wanted a confirmation lol This is the only comp I have and would hate to screw it up but I hate the way it is right now to.

I would hope it has the original lol I have not changed anything from when I ordered it and it was shipped. The only time I even ever opened it was to double check the dust buildup on the fan and heatsink.

 

Still pretty sure something's off with your heatpad. Alternatively, how are you measuring GPU temps? The ATI GPU's are not exactly a breeze with respect to that.

 

Did you clean it out?

It could be like everyone is saying that the heat pad may have a gap and is not in contact with the heat sink. It needs that or the heat just sits. I may look like its intact but it may not be take a close look.

 

I am using speed fan to get the temps and the graph shows it spike up very fast when i open WoW then drop to the bottom of the charts the second I close or even just minimize WoW. And idk about the heatpad. Being that I am new to laptops that are even able to change the vid card I have not looked into them much at all with the vid card issues. I have not done anything but have this machine sit on a desk seance I got it shipped to me from Alienware. It has had probs from almost day one with heat just kept getting the run around from Alienware about what was going on until right after the warranty then they told me to take a hike basically unless I wanted to pay $39.00 to talk to a tech and that was just to talk to one. So I am doing this on my own now.

So I will have to open her up and take a look again at the heat pad. Thank you all so much for the info so far.

As for the card I talked to Alienware as an anonymous person and they told me that I could upgrade to the Nvidia go 7600 or 6600 or the ATI x1400 but not really any others. Is this just crap from unknowable reps or what says you all about this? Ice Tea your incite?

 

Celsius or Fahrenheit?

 

Fahrenheit. There is no way I could get the temp at that Celsius without basically gas and a match lol.

Sorry if that was not implied well enough. Idk if a comp would even run at the lowest temp I mentioned in Celsius without shutting down?

So far unless I can get someone to conferm that the swap to the 8600GT or the HD3650 has been done and it was just a take out, plug in and then just drivers and settings I am going to go with what the "knowledgeable" guys at Alienware said and get the Nvid 7600 and probably regret that I did not get the highest up I could doing the same amount of work I just don't want to screw up my only rig atm Was the installs done on the chart that you linked Ice Tea? Or are they just what should work from looking at specs? Cause I would love either of the two cards in this.