Dell XPS M1730 Owner's Lounge, *Part 3*

knock on wood, you're one of the few lucky ones

 

Same here, rock solid M1730, no problems or overheating issues for the past 1 year of use. Warranty expired though. I'm now actually taking a gamble of my beast that it will not fail - or at least not so soon. I'm keeping a close eye on my GPUs. Rule: Never go over 75*C on gaming. (Even though 75 is safe but just a personal benchmark, I know they run cooler than this most of the time around 60s maxed; rarely reaches the 70s)

 

Thatz interesting, i eagerly await your results

 

did some canned air anti-dusting today, amazing how much dust gets in @ two weeks of use ...

 

Usually you will notice more dust during spring/summer, it's common open doors and windows...this is good for dustflow. Thats an extra thing to take care for. Anyway I always put my beast in its backpack when I'm not using it.
Cheers

 

also, my school and my workplace are very dusty places and in spring lots of pollen are in the air (extra dust) and in summer there is smog (extra dust)

 

I really don't think so. People that come to forums tend to be the ones who are having problems. Satisfied customers without problems are usually silent.

 

Agreed... why look at the manual if it works, right?

 

There are also people who admire the beast and found ways to keep it healthy and so much alive. They want to share their knowledge with others and help them out the best they can.
There are a lot of examples around here.

 

Very true friend..

 

While I agree with what you guys say, you can not ignore the fact that the M1730 has a weak spot, namely the GPU that tends to burn.

 

+1. That's something to bear in mind. Also a google will bring this forum straight up so all the problems are in one place.

 

I came here the moment my beast was in production @ dell factory, no real problems so far, apart from one GPU change

 

a question to 8gb owners, which type of memory did you install in your m1730?
i am looking to purchase for mine and making a small survey

 

be interesting how many XPSm1730's dell sold so can do some maths to work out how many tons could be broken

me J951N no OC an X9000 on 2.8ghz> gaming with crysis max 81C (Hwmonitor1.16, room temp19C, only played half hour)
then played On 3.2ghz for about 2 hours> max gpu's 68C all 3 fans 100% speed continously, do ya think me gpu's will burn on 2.8 or 3.2 or either? with a well maintained clean system.
mfractal, maybe wouldnt have been a weak spot if we had gpu fans to be on 50% continuously but when gaming kicks on 100% speed continously for all Beasts + clean system, so the weak points to dell.

 

hikkoo, if i had a x9000, i'd run it at 3.2 all the time
your GPU's will be safe @ 68° , not @ 81°

 

@hilkko, like psyloid mentioned, if you have an overclockable cpu the problem kind of goes away as the fans are always on and keep the gpu temps down as opposed to let it head, then cool it down and repeat. And yes, blame is dell's, the bios should control the fans differently and the problem would be solved.

 

This is a long outstanding issue.
I would have thought Dell would have had this sorted by now!

 

They don't care anymore, since the model is discontinued.
Some people even tried suggesting it on the dell suggestion site, but they don't care ....

 

Hey ifti, long time no see.

On the contrary, the M1730 is not the only one. Also the Studio 15 and newer 17 and even some Inspiron models suffer from a really ridiculous fan controller behavior. Compared to the Latitude models the fans turn on and of randomly and make the CPU/GPU temps fluctuate instead of trying to keep temps stable.
These fluctuating temp is a real hardware killer. Dell seems to be ignorant in recognizing this issue, while the business models lack this issue.

 

So it'll be the M17x model for us all then.....
Dell seems to have too much money.

 

yeah, i am not worried as long as i have warranty. while they have spare parts they'll keep on replacing them, once they run out of spares they'll have to replace.

 

I can wait it out. I've 2 years left still. It's Dell's turn.

 

Actually that thing I had at the bottom of sig for ages about "Vote for new M1730 BIOS", shows that Dell know about the issue but there's no info if they are currently addressing it.

 

that vote has been out for a very long time, if they cared, they made a new bios by now, it's probably just a few hours work to change the fan behaviour in BIOS, if i had the skills i rewrote it myself ...

 

if there are enough people caring about that issue right now, we can contact some of Dell's representatives on this forum and try to make this happen. But if it's only us three-four then i doubt they will bother.

 

I think it would be interesting to open a dialog and hear the what the Dell engineers have to say about it. Although the Dell eng's aren't going to make a huge profit working on it. So don't hold you breath.

 

yeah... true.. i guess they won't allocate resources to fix this system unless we really press hard

 

TBH I'd like to know why the system was designed the way it is, I really hope there's a logic, well some logic behind the current / default set-up.

 

i think the logic is pretty simple and that's the problem.
it's probably just programmed to turn on the fans once the cards reach a certain temp (70?) and keep them on for a while, say 30 seconds, then resample temp, if it's under turn off fans,and that's what causing the cycle. The fans kick in, cool the card and turn off, then the card heats up again, the fans kick in again.....
a stupid mistake by dell, fact is, they didn't repeat it in their next high end systems

 

the logic behind it is to make the notebook as silent as possible, without thinking about the concequences of the heat cycling

 

Fact is you'll find this fan issue also in the Studio and some Inspiron models till today. The only logic about this issue I can imagine that it looks like some 6 yr old kid from India programmed the fan controllers.

How hard it can be to program a 4-5 step modulating fan controller???
If you want to dim the light in your room, you're also not turning on and off the light switch all the time constantly, don't you?

 

The m17x still runs so loud it can become annoying at times. You guys should contact team blackhawk on facebook and also in this forum and press on about this dell shouldn't just sweep under the rug their LAST TRUE GAMING MACHINE!!! I wish they made them, they always had the best designs anyway. I was originally was going to get one with 9800gtx but i opt out and got a precision m6400 good choice though since its still up to date market wise screw this core I crap its mostly the same anyway.

 

i prefer a noisy machine that keeps cool than a quite brick
i am willing to contact team BH and Dell representatives here on NBR, but i need to know how many people are in this with me. They are probably going to ask for names and service tags of all affected systems (see http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ad-cursor-movement-polling-rate-problems.html : it's a thread about AW touchpad issue, that ALL alienware users experience and dell didn't want to do anything about, on the last pages of the thread Dell rep asked to email him service tags + names so he can pass it along) the more the marrier of course.

 

you can count me in, perhaps we can PM people that were on this tread recently (the ones that own a m1730) and ask them to join us, i wouldn't mind giving my name and service tag to a thrustworthy person (like batboy), but I dont want to post my name/service tag on the forum so everyone can read it ...

someone should also keep a list then with the people that want to be in on this, we can also refer to the vote thingy we did on the dell website

 

I would like to join the club too.
I know there are a lot more of us here at NBR who would like to join.

 

So is there any idea here forming to contact Dell directly as a group? Looking for better fan control?

 

To control the fans of your M1730 if you have a non-Extreme CPU may be possible after all, even on Windows 7, you will need the driver signature enforcement tool.

You may want to try i8Kfan to make the fans run at full speed.

Download I8Kfan from here:
http://www.acaeum.com/images/I8kfanGUI64.zip

Extract it into a folder say probably your C: drive or Downloads directory. Do not run it as yet or it'll not work.

Then, download the driver signature enforcement tool. Make sure you have UAC disabled so that the fan control feature can work.
Driver Signature Enforcement Overrider 1.3b - NGOHQ.com

Run the enforcement tool and choose test mode. Restart your PC and run faninst.exe in the drivers folder inside of where you placed your i8kfan folder. Select install driver and click install.

Run i8kfan and select Force fans to high speed. Make sure your AC adapter is plugged in, you should hear the fans roar to the max.

This is for x64 users only.

 

Wow, that's interesting. Have you done this on your M1730?

(Personally I've no need for it ATM)

 

Yeah it seems to work well, when I clock my X9000 down to 2.8GHz. I thought someone with a non-extreme CPU would want to try it.

 

I heard that I8Kfan only controls 2 of the three fans, unless there is a new version

check this

I dont want to burn out one of my gpu's !!

 

Yeah scratch that, it doesn't work as it only detects the 2 fans. Disregard my previous post. At least we're half way there.

 

thanks for trying though

 

Haha, the old news is true.

I've known that issue about the 2/3 fans for ages, but I thought you'd found a way around it with the second part of your post.

 

I8Kfan could have saved my M1720 though, if i had known about it back then, but I wouldn't have gotten the M1730 replacement then

 

M1720, hhmm.. What's that?

 

So, are we contacting Dell guys? The idea of pming recent thread visitors sounds good to me. I will be available to pm some of them tomorrow. Anybody volunteers to help?

 

No! Haha, I can't busy over the next few days. Best of luck with it.

 

I have exams in two weeks, after that i go on a 3 week holliday, after that I could help out if you want to wait that long

 

I'm keen to reimage my M1730.

Can anyone link me a "how to" guide (what drivers to install, what order to install them in) for reinstalling the drivers for Vista 32 bit?