Just had my M1530 Motherboard Replaced...

...and everything seems fine.

I was playing WOW when I heard a pop. After about 30 seconds, the laptop instantly shut off. I was able to restart, and surf the web just fine. I loaded up WOW again, ran for 2 minutes and instant shutoff again.

This sounded like thermal shutdown, so I installed a pc monitor program and noticed my GPU at 85C just idling. Which is pretty weird since the CPU, GPU and the Northbridge Chip (i think) are all connected by one heat pipe and one fan. And the fan was running just fine.

Anyway, called up XPS support and they ran me through the diagnostic startup and it shutoff again. So they assumed bad motherboard and send out a new one. I called on Saturday, motherboard shipped Monday, tech got it Wednesday and installed it on Thursday.

When he was taking the heat pipe assembly apart, he noticed one of the two screws that hold the heat pipe on the GPU literally had popped off the motherboard. Well, the nut that the screw is screwed into. So no contact, no cooling.

Nice to see the root cause of a problem and have it fixed. Now why a screw would pop off the motherboard is another issue... Must be thermal cycling from the really hot GPU, i do play a lot of WOW.

 

Yea, you are right it was probably thermal stress on the components that led to the failure. Good to hear you got it fixed though!

 

Do you get proper airflow when playing?

 

I have the 9 cell battery and I put it on a board, on my lap. So it should be getting as much airflow as it can.

 

Thats what I plan to do with my M1330 - put it on a board, then put it on my lap, just so its on somet solid to aid airflow.