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I've an XPS M1530 which completed its two years late last month.
Here're the replacements I've had:
3 motherboards (one additional heatsink)
2 optical drives
webcam
battery
dashboard (the touchpanel with the multimedia keys)
display
ram
Ok, now that is shocking, right?
*None of the motherboard replacements were because of the GPU failure (surprisingly)
Replacement number one was because my power socket gave away.
Second was when the engineer came to replace my ODD, he overzealously cleaned my heatsink which resulted in really high temperatures. The third was a misdiagnosis - the problem was the ram but they changed the mobo.
Weirdly enough, the motherboard has been the only consistent part on my laptop. My original screen developed these white spots and my replacement too seems en route to doing that.
*Optical drives are the worst. And I guess that goes for all laptops in general. They have an annoyingly high failure rate.
*The webcam and battery got toast by my doing, actually. I left the computer switched on in the backpack and when I took it outt, the metallic base was so hot that it almost burnt my hand. (Note: even that did not fry my nvidia gpu)
*The dashboard failed because one of the engineers screwed up during the replacement. He was a bit rough while reinstalling one of my motherboards and broke a fragile little clip that holds a particular cable in place.
I don't know how many of you still have an ailing XPS M1530 with heating issues but going through 3 different motherboards, I have made an interesting observation. The heating issue, obviously, is contained within your heatsink assembly. The most common problem is when the outlet grill thingy is jammed with dust. Blowing it out is usually recommended every 2-3 months.
The other issue which I've observed is with cooling pads. Dell hasn't been very consistent with that. Once when the engineer opened my heatsink, he cause the cooling pad to dry up (the laptop was on for a very long time prior to it so the pad was in a paste state) in such a way that it impeded thermal conductivity when it was reinstalled. So they sent me the cooling pads when I explained the problem to them. The engineer reinstalled the new cooling pads onto the CPU and the GPU but that didn't make a difference. So they sent me a new heatsink (which funnily, had the cooling pads pasted on it). And the difference I immediately noticed was that the new heat sink came with a lot of thermal compound stuck on it - Almost 5mm thicker than the cooling pads which were separately sent to me. This made a huge difference.
So, really. If you're out of warranty and you notice increasing temperatures, take remedial steps to fix your heat sink assembly issues before they take out your motherboard. Although, personally, I have yet to see that happened. I have seen my GPU temps go all the way up to 107deg C and CPU to 81 but nothing failed. The culprit has always been something else.
Just for your info, my current temperatures (web browsing) are:
CPU - 40
GPU - 47
Chipset - 43
Another observation here, my latest mobo/heatsink assembly turns off the fan much less often. My previous fan would go off as soon as the temp went south of 45. But this one keeps running till about it goes down to 40.
Now you might wonder why I still haven't gotten a new laptop? Because I'm an Indian customer and here they just aren't courteous enough to suggest that on their own. And I too didn't ask for it since I have another year of warranty left. So I've planned that should my motherboard fail (which hasn't yet happened, if you read above), I will ask them to replace my unit with a different computer.
Lets compare notes...
XPS M1530 2 year report
Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by VD17, Jul 21, 2010.
