Fortnite cause overheating on new XPS 15!?!

I have a Dell XPS 15, it has a 7th gen i7 and 8gb ram. Whenever I play Fortnite, the fan kicks in within in 10 minutes of playing, and it gets super loud. I have the majority of the settings for the graphics on low except the viewing distance. I have a fan that needs to run in order to keep my laptop from heating to an untouchable keyboard. But I think the overheating sometimes causes lag. Should this be happening on a $1400 computer when I see people playing on computers less than $1000 and the fan doesn't kick in when they play it on there computer?

 

The XPS 15 is notorious for running HOT.

It’s cooling solution is chincy and even Liquid Metal doesn’t solve its thermals. Some have installed these with thermals pads everywhere, undervolting and LM with some decent results.

But at the end of the day, this is a business type elegant machine first and a gaming machine second at best.

It’s well equipped but doesn’t have the capability to cool it’s hardware efficiently.

 

Lowering your settings should shift some of the workload from the GPU to the CPU, so even if you think that the game will result lighter to run, you are basically reducing the temp of the gpu, not for the cpu.
If you don't want to hear fans, use headphones

 

OK thanks, do you think a computer fan pad will help? I am thinking of getting one

 

That's something I personally stay away from. Not that they're unsafe and worthless. That's not the case. I want the laptop to stay as elegant as possible and as "minimalistic" as possible. I'd rather repaste before relying on external cooling solutions.

 

Agreed.

Cooling fan pad does not help 9560 thermals very much, unfortunately.

This is not a gaming laptop so there is only so much you can do. But an undervolt and repaste bump performance significantly.

- A simple undervolt will help and takes just a few minutes to set up with free ThrottleStop or Intel XTU software.

- The Dell factory CPU/GPU paste job is terrible on these machines. So repaste is important in my view. Fairly easy and for a beginner takes a day of research and some more time to execute/test.​

 

@Al913

Something stupid to do first: put your notebook in "Ultra Performance" in Dell Power Manager before gaming.

I suggest also to undervolt using Intel XTU as it is simple ( you don't have to open your notebook ).

 

This is a common misconception with XPS. Though it is not you, it is Dell that don't make things clear in their sales propaganda. You are not paying extra for better performance. The premium price is on behalf of the sexy sleek exterior design, materials and such. The thin lightweight design actually has a negative impact on performance - cheaper laptops with half a kg more in heatpipes and fins can in fact get better performance with less fan noise out of the same chips.

The thermal design is borderline and very sensitive to the thermal paste quality and application - one thing Dell obviously can't do properly in mass production (telltale printed paste rectangles on the heatsinks) - hence typically better results after manual repasting. Presumably this is because manual pasting takes more time, and they also obviously don't have time for QC despite the price tag.

To see if you need repasting... Use HWinfo64 to monitor temperatures, clock frequencies, and throttling flags. Undervolt. Run the Prime95 CPU benchmark for a few minutes. If thermal downthrottling of the clock kicks in around 100degC, repaste is in place (temperatures in the eighties are normal). Similarly, for the GPU run Unigine Heaven. Mind the throttling threshold is lower, in the seventies (different for different XPS 15 models).

 

A laptop that can play Fortnite that doesn't enable fans, does not exist. You are exaggerating there. What you are experiencing is the fact that you have a thin laptop that needs to be cooled. In order to be able to cool a laptop with a small volume, you need to ramp up the fans much higher to attain the same amount of cooling as a thicker laptop. And high fan speeds in combination with a small fin area causes a ton of noise. Nothing you can do about that.