XPS 15 motherboard temperature sensors

I have just purchased an XPS 15 (i5-560m, nvidia gt 420m, 4gb mem, 500gb HD, 1080p screen). Lovely laptop. The only negative for me is that it runs slightly warm for my liking.

I am running HWMonitor 1.17.0 to monitor temperatures. The cpu temperature settles at about 50C under light load. I have managed to lower this a little by reducing max CPU frequency. Below 50C the fan is on low and is inaudible. At about 50C the fan moves up to medium which is audible. This is slightly irritating.

HWMonitor appears to correctly reporting CPU, GPU (when optimus has turned it on) and HD temperatures. However motherboard temperatures (Sensors: Dell Inc. 00CKNG: TZ00, TZ01) are always reported as 27C and 0C respectively. Has anyone else seen this problem with HWMonitor? I was wondering if it is a problem with HWMonitor or with the motherboard sensors.

 

50° is about right... mine's also like that most of the time when it's under light load... the fan is ok for me... but my previous computer was extremely loud, so maybe it's a matter of perception only... i haven't checked the motherboard temperatures though so i'm going to let others answer that...

i have an i7 though, so maybe your temps should be lower...

 

That's like getting a 400 horsepower engine and telling 100 of the horses to graze on a pasture of hay because you're tired of hearing them.

 

A lot of us have experienced the same issue, the fan noise is truly irritating when it constantly kicks up and down. I'm quite irritated that Dell hasn't resolved this issue yet by either leaving it run on medium settings for longer periods of time or updating the heatsync to drop temps.

The heatsync in these laptops is really sub-par, unfortunately.

 

I know it sounds a bit dumb to crank down the CPU, but I don't think I really need all the power, but I do really like the screen and speakers which set the XPS 15 apart from the rest of the Dell 15 inch laptops.

I was surprised to observe a friend's Dell Studio 15 (Core 2 Duo P7450) running at about 60C, but it was mostly silent and the chasis felt cooler than my XPS running at 50C.

Is it the XPS range in particular that has heat dissipation issues amongst Dell laptops?

 

Not really, Dell Laptops in general have poor cooling systems. Dell builds them to last about a year or two before crapping out due to heat issues. I've repasted and even so was not able to drop the temps enough to stop the annoying fan from kicking up, down, up down at times. (sigh)

 

Which software did you use?