Warranty Concern

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Well, let me start off by saying that I received by M1530 at the beginning of this year as an exchange for a Vostro 1500 I had a bunch of little issues with. To be honest, there was nothing truly wrong with the Vostro 1500, but I'm a sly-talking-Computer-Science-major that was sick of dell support giving me the run-around dozens of times, so I bullied them and got a $1400 system to replace my original $800 purchase (bwahahahah).

Now the dreaded heat issues related to the 8600m gt are starting to rear their ugly heads. Dell covers this issue a year past the regular warranty, so I have until February or something for the card to die or warrant a replacement.

So my issue is that I originally did not want to deal with dell support so I went ahead and put some AS-5 on the GPU and CPU. Previously I was experiences system shut down during heavy gaming. The AS-5 only lowered the temperature a couple of degrees average (celsius) and it's been over 200 hours for the curing.

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I want to go through dell technical support to try and get a replacement mobo for a shot at lower temperatures, or even bully them into just replacing my system again. So my question is what will happen when they notice I put new thermal compound on the CPU and GPU? Honestly, will the average dell tech even think twice? The person who put the compound on in the first place used an enormous amount. Are these guys really smart enough to say something about the different compound?

Do they even take off the heat sink before removing the MOBO for replacement? If so this is even a complete non-issue.

Otherwise, I should have enough pull to get them to send me the mobo out, seeing as to how I have a case history with a corporate case manager who really put some lipstick on my to make me happy. The guys they send out in my area are cool and would not say about the new thermal compound.

Sorry for the long post. I am a now-and-again lurker on this site and I give my props to this community.

 

Officially what you did pretty much voided your warranty but you can try your luck with the tech guys that dell will be sending out if they will not rat you out. I tried asking them that same question just this month coz my 1530 is again overheating. That is if i'll buy an AS5 (coz i heard is quite good thermal compound) and have the their tech guy apply if for me, but the answer i got was negative and according to them this will void my warranty. by the way i already had 1 mobo and 2 heat sink replacements before but still im overheating, hence i dont think a mobo replacement will help you that much. Cant even play Modern Warfare 2 without crashing. I suggest, do the following regularly

1. clean your fans specially the inside of it, remove the fan from the heatsink and there will be quite a dust buildup between it and its exhaust. maybe every 3-6 months.

2. apply as well AS5 every time you do your quarterly or semi annual cleanups, obviously after your warranty expires.

3. buy a good notebook cooler

4. i also have a small fan at the right side of my 1530

 

lie. cheat. steal.

it helps keep the prices up for the honest people out there.

 

Its hard to tell exactly if the tech will care, but I could've smeared anything between the heatsink of my M1330 and the tech wouldn't have noticed. when they replace for overheating issues, they'll replace the mobo and heatsink/fan combo

 

Fraud is against the forum rules so this thread is now closed.