My XPS M1730 (Core2 Extreme, 8800M GTX SLI) started overheating about a year ago, especially if playing a game. I noticed that the air coming out if the back of the unit was getting extremely hot and it would lock up if I played certain games. I ended up disassembling it ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=385427&highlight=xps+m1730 ) and found that the heat exchanger fins were completely clogged with lint. I cleaned the layer of lint and dust off of them (it was like a layer of thin gray felt) and the laptop worked fine again. Since then I clean them every six months. I just did it today and figured I'd post some pics of the fins after six months of use. At this point the laptop still works fine, but the air coming out of the back of it is noticeably hotter than it is with clean/clear fins, especially if playing games. This laptop is my primary PC and I use it daily for work and personal stuff, so it sees a lot of uptime in a variety of environments. After a couple of times opening this thing up and removing the fans to get at the fins, it only takes me a few minutes to do this maintenance. I used a can of spray duster stuff and a small vacuum to get everything cleaned up:
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Holy dust!
Have you tried undervolting to keep the CPU temp down too?
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Nope, I've never had a problem with it if I keep it clean.
XPS M1730 Overheating Fix
Discussion in 'Dell XPS and Studio XPS' started by rmcdaniels, Apr 11, 2010.