Dell M1330, GPU Temps, Burnout etc.

I just got an m1330 about a month ago and use it to play half life 2 and team fortress 2 sometimes. When I quit out of the game and immediately check my temps with hwmonitor, I get around 81C or 82C for the gpu.

I have read the other threads but am still unsure of what I should be thinking. Will these temps cause my laptop's life to dramatically shorten? Should I be worried or taking some extra step?

thanks

 

That's not too bad considering it's inside of laptop without much airflow, but it does seem hot for an 8400GS. My 8800GT in my desktop does get into the low 70s but that has excellent airflow over it unlike a laptop. Not really sure about the 8600M GT in my 1530...I do not worry about temps that much on it mostly because I did not build it myself.

 

mine goes up to 100C just playing WoW on lowest settings... *sigh*
its not OCed or anything, something is seriously wrong

 

i have 8400 gs on my system and it shoots upto 85C i think this is quite normal as there has been not much problem yet. however i dont game and these temps are recorded during hardware rendering with maya

 

where is the gpu located from a bottoms eye view?

would a cooler, this one specifically: http://www.amazon.com/Targus-PA248U...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1214889442&sr=8-1

Help cool down the gpu?

 

There's been reported a few degrees advantage of using a coolingpad, IMHO definately not worth it, especially since you didn't buy a thin & light to put it on top of a platic box with fans?
In addition to it's desktop realestate it will also screw up the comfortable typing height..

If you don't have the 9-cell battery, try a flexible ruler under the back edge of the laptop to increase the airflow, make sure the cooler fins in the fan assembly aren't clogged (check under cpu/gpu/ram-cover), upgrade to bios A11, do the copper mod if you feel comfy or get somebody to do it for you if you're out of warranty.

 

what about the zalman nc1000 cooler? Isn't that supposed to be the best?

also how to you upgrade to bios a11? How will this help cool things down?

 

I'm absolutely paranoid now after a motherboard replacement and have done everything in my power to keep temperatures low which kind of defeats the purpose of having a state of the art designed laptop that is handicapped by its own design. Anyway, because of the GPU overheating issue and the fact that I really don't want to send my M1330 back to Dell for repair every 6 months, I've chosen to do the following in hopes that I will get more life out of the thing. My specs are an A04 revised ( probably refurbished ) motherboard, using the A11 bios, running in Vista on powersaver mode. I'm using the Zalman NC1000 cooler but can't really tell if it does anything due to the placement of the fan and the fact that its nowhere near the M1330's fan, but the big slab of aluminum on the Zalman can't hurt. The temp in my room right now is 82 F. (Vegas in the summer) and I've got a fan blowing towards the computer with the A/C in the house kicking off and on when needed. I'm only doing light tasking right now and Riva tuner has the GPU at 51 C. and coretemp has the CPU's running at close to 40 F. Now, whatever this means in the way of longevity, I don't know as I've kind of cut back on the graphic intensive games that I used to play on it ( shame really ) as I was hitting mid 80's C on the GPU. and that probably didn't help the life of it causing those vertical lines and a replacement motherboard was eventually needed.

Fact is, I'm pretty happy with those temperature numbers that I have right now. Most of the time I don't stress the CPU and GPU because it's mostly surfing, e-mailing, etc and that's why I keep it on powersave mode, but when I need to encode DVD's into DIVX or MPEG, I'll switch it to dell recommended setting where I'm hitting low 60's C. CPU and and Mid 70's C. GPU when converting a DVD into some format which can take an hour or so to convert.

Now, what this means in the long run is anyone's guess on how this will limit the stress on the GPU and the overall thermal issue with the M1330, but I can safely say if I'm a further candidate for a failed GPU/Motherboard at this point considering how much I'm going out of my way to baby the system, then Dell has completely failed in all aspects of the design of the M1330 and you can expect huge amounts of owners coming across this GPU issue as long as the M1330 continues to be sold.

I had reduced my previous failed GPU due to lack of cooling, playing Graphic intensive games a lot, encoding lots of DVDs to various formats and running at Dell recommended settings all the time. If my motherboard goes South again, then I won't ever buy another Dell product in my lifetime as I don't know about everyone else out there, but having a spare $2000, to spend on a Notebook, is becoming harder and harder to find these days.

 

I thought the nc1000 cooler was great for the m1330

how do the fans match up with the intake fan of the m1330?

Also how do I go about updating the bios? Can I loose anything by doing this? What is the benefit?

 

review here for M1530 with Zalman NC1000... yes its the best.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=264531

 

Well, the cooler has a huge area of vent holes, but they are all below the fan of the M1330. Even if you moved the notebook to the lowest point of the cooler, it still misses out on the vent cooling. This might or might not be as much of a factor as I think it is, because the aluminum on its own stays cool to the touch, so overall I would recommend the Zalman because the fans are quiet and since it runs off USB, needs no powercord and it also provides a usb bypass so you don't lose out on that much needed usb port since we've only got two on the M1330 to work with.

As for updating the bios. Go to Dell, go to support and enter your computer model. What will come up is an option for various drivers including the bios. Download the bios and put it on your harddrive. Run the .exe file and leave it to do its thing. It will reboot your system, slowly restart the system ( it'll take the startup loading line longer than usual ) and you'll have your A11 bios.

Can you lose anything if you do this?

If you take precautions and just make sure you don't lose power while updating, then you should be okay ( It requires the system to be plugged in while updating the bios anyway ).

As for changes; I'd say anything that addresses thermal issues with the M1330 has to be a good thing. I've read positive comments about owners that have updated and are happy with the outcome. Whether it's due to the fans coming on earlier to improve on the thermal issues remains to be seen whether this is a big enough step to help our CPU/GPU's, but I'd suggest doing it anyway as I haven't read any comments about updating this bios version as being a bad thing to do.

 

I just updated to A11 bios and upon reboot my gpu is sitting at 73C

the fan isn't running though...

?

 

Question : Did the fan kick in at that temperature with the previous bios you had installed?

When you were playing games like Half-Life 2 with the GPU running at 82 C., were the fans running at maximum?

If you change Vista's settings to powersave mode, how low does the temperature drop to on the CPU and GPU?

73 C seems awfully high for idle on the GPU. Are you running Dell's graphic card driver from their website or one of laptop2go Nvidia drivers. With the 167.45 drivers on laptop2go, I saw a 10C drop in both CPU and GPU idle temperatures with only a minimal amount of graphics hit ( much improved performance over Dell's Nvidia driver though)

If you are consistently seeing that 73C at idle and it won't go down from there, then you can either return to the previous bios that you had ( assuming that one performed cooler) or be concerned that you might have a cooling problem somewhere because just for comparison I tested my system on powersave mode running need for speed most wanted, NFS Canyon and Doom 3 with the Max GPU temp at 76 C. 73C at idle seems excessive unless you have inadequate cooling or your ducts are clogged.

 

I updated with the video drivers you told me too and I am now around 58C idle for the gpu!

is it actually cooler or is it just a false reading?

 

That's a good question and open to interpretation. Some say there is no way using different drivers can drop the GPU temp that far. It also shows a respectable drop for the CPU using coretemp. Now, if it is a false reading, and no one has proven that conclusively, then the temperature of the GPU is the same as any other driver, so no harm done, but if it is accurate, then I'm happy to continue to run the 167.45 drivers as there has been no negatives to speak of in using them.

The point is we know we have a thermally challenged notebook no matter what we do and any cooling techniques we use ( cooling pads, fans, etc. ) can only help with keeping temps down. The situation you are in is trying to find out if your notebook is running abnormally hot. With my system on dell recommended mode, the GPU registers 58C at idle like yours, so we're in the same boat. If the 167.45 drivers are inaccurate and our GPU's are actually running at 73 C. at idle, then it's no wonder the GPU's are dying taking the motherboards with them. My motherboard doesn't feel like its running hot; the palm rests are cool, the fan is hardly running, so I'm still on the side that the 167.45 drivers run cooler and things like the zalman helps as well, so take what you read with a grain of salt and do the testing on your own to see if you can see a difference on when your fans come on and if your laptop feels uncomfortably warm while running.

If you can do your part in keeping it as cool as possible or running it in powersave mode to keep temps down at times you don't need all that processing power, then what more can you do.