m17x- is this a heat issue?

I haven't yet ran the hardware test I'm supposed to. I've only seen the issue twice.

I purchased the laptop mainly to be able to get a good framerate in WoW raids when I'm on travel- while I can normally hook into a wall no problem at a hotel and get a decent latency for most of the night (exceptions being around "pr0n-o-clock", depending on the hotel), my old laptop would cry and moan for the serious fights, and I would become a pretty fail player.

Thus far, the m17x is almost as good as my desktop, which is exactly what I expected!


Here is my problem- Twice now, after the machine has been active (with the GTX 260M turned on), and running WoW, I've had the machine do a hard lockup. The screen freezes and whatever note was playing repeats endlessly in the audio- it's fully unresponsible to everything except holding the power button and turning it off.

Essentially I'm "testing" it under the following conditions:
1- The laptop is on my dining room table. About a foot and a half behind it I have placed a table setting, a vase, and some books- this is to simulate the typical amount of space that I would have at a hotel room between the laptop and the wall after putting it on the desk.
2- Under the laptop is a tablecloth. At a hotel, it would likely be placed on bare wood.
3- The dining room is not airconditioned (most of the house is not), and since it was the weekend when I did this test, it was during the day, and the temperature was somewhere in between 82 and 88 degrees. The warmest I would expect in a hotel room would be about 77 degrees or so- usually I can just change the temperature to whatever.

Does what I'm describing sound like a heat problem? I can of course relocate the laptop to a cooler area and put it on a bare surface, and I can also grab that program that monitors temperatures today and try again- but I figured I would ask and see if anyone has had an issue with this at any time in the past (google seems to imply that it's not very common).

 

Grab hwmonitor if you think heat may be a concern and track it. I would guess patches to the game or video drivers first.

 

I didn't find out about hwmonitor until late yesterday, so I haven't had a chance to try it yet. There are never any patches to World of Warcraft that you don't have (you literally can't play without the most recent version), and it's a huge playerbase, such that I doubt it has an issue.

As far as driver patches go- the nvidia site has I think a slightly newer version current than I have on the box, but it also mentions that "your vendor" will have the patches you should use, and I didn't see any drivers listed at alienware for the m17x yet. If hwmonitor reports increasing temperatures later, should I just go ahead and grab the nvidia patches?

 

we really want be able to tell if you are having heat issues until you run hwmonitor in the background while gaming for a good deal of time. once done hwmonitor should show your max temps for that session or you could just take a screenshot and post it.

 

Awesome guys, will do that later and let you know.

Thanks for the help.


Also seriously, the keyboard LEDs? Those are the coolest things I have ever seen. I have the first one set to go from Red->Orange (meld), then the next frame Orange->Yellow (meld), etc, all the way to Purple->Red (meld).

The second one is the same thing, but offset by one, so while the first is going from red to orange, it is going from orange to yellow. The second is offset by two, etc.

Because the effect is blended, it's like a slowly rotating rainbow across the keyboard, and the effect is very smooth. You don't even see it as only four spaces, it looks continuous!

 

Mine has done the same thing playing AION beta. Every other game I play I have no problems, heat never got over 78c on gpu's and cpu never broke 61c.
Might be a driver issue? I really don't know?

 

Find out what drivers other M17x+WoW players are using.

 

if you are overclocking the cpu or gpu's, it could be unstable overclocks. Sometimes this will not show but on particular games for instance when i oc to 3.06 it seems to be completely stable, passes occt & wprime but when running crysis it will bsod eventuall, when running eve-online if i happen to be mining at the time it will bsod eventually also. Set it back to 2.93 and all is good.

 

I tried setting the clocks back to default and still got the hard lock up after about 45min of gaming? Like I said that game is the only one that does it out of 4 games I have loaded. My M17 has no issues at all with it, I will try different drivers.

 

Perhaps try disabling SLi for it, it should run fine on 1 260M and I don't even think it supports SLi.

 

I would ditch the tablecloth.

It could suck up against the bottom of the laptop blocking vents.

 

yeah...notebook manufacturers do advise against placing your notebook down on soft surfaces such as tablecloths. It would be a good idea just to eliminate it for troubleshooting purposes by placing it on a flat surface.

Although I know its tempting to want to put your notebook anywhere, after all it is supposed to be mobile.

good luck pal.

 

actually yea get rid of the table cloth because a sager owner actually had that happening and he was worried it was messed up ....long story short i was laughing