Vostro issues while gaming

I have a 1700 Vostro and love the notebook. It's mainly used for work, however I am an avid gamer. I use my desktop for gaming, but I purchased the Vostro with the intent of doing some gaming on it while traveling or at work, etc.

Anyway, I noticed that after playing any game for about 15 minutes or longer my CPU would start to throttle. This is even with speed stepping disabled in the BIOS and the Vista power setting set to performance. Looking at the ntune temp monitor while running a 3D app in a window shows the CPU start to throttle when the GPU hits 96C, which is odd since the 8600 shouldn't throttle until 145C according to Nvidia's specs. I tested this with the latest Bioshock drivers, WHQL driver, and the Dell installed drivers.

I ended up taking the notebook completely apart (I'll take some pics tomorrow, my wife just shook her head while I was doing it). The cooling set up doesn't look very good for the 8600 at all. The card is near the power indicator lights on the right side while the fan is all the way over on the right side. A single heat pipe is all that cools the GPU and it is only cooled by the one fan. Not to mention that the fan is cooling the heat pipe with some pretty hot air.

Anyway, I just wanted to see if any other 1700 owners are having trouble with gaming. Doing things that will tax the card rather than running benchmarks.

 

Disabling speedstep in the bios usually locks the cpu in at the LOWEST speed, there really is no advantage to having it disabled, its a seamless process, and doesnt hinder performance,most likely what you have now, is a considerbaly slower cpu than you should have at all times. I also dont think the GPU's threshold is 145C, thats 293F. The card should never get near that hot. You might want to call Dell and ask for a replacement. My 8800 GTS doesnt get above 87c, 96 is too hot in my opinion, you may want to ask about the temps in the gaming forum, and see what other members with a similar setup to yours are getting. Good luck

 

I put everything back together. Putting Arctic Silver 5 on the CPU and the GPU. Dell uses way too much goop. There were pads on the GPU memory and chipset, so I didn't replace those.

The 8600 still over heats. At 96C it throttles the processor. I think that may be a feature of Santa Rosa, I'm not sure. The GPU Core doesn't throttle. CPU temps are at 47C with the fan set to always on.

Anyway, I'm on the phone with Dell right now and have been for about 2 hours. They are trying to get me to buy an XPS. After asking for either and RMA number for the system or a new 8600, they are sending out an 8600.

If they didn't have the delays they are having with the 1330, I would probably return this 1700 for one. A small sleek notebook is starting to look pretty nice compared to this monstrosity. Still, I love this screen and keyboard for work stuff.

Hopefully the new card will not overheat. If it does, I think I will just return the 1700 and deal with wait time on the 1330.

 

95C+ is about the right temp where the cpu throttles. mine goes from 1.7 to around 1.3. i'd be careful though, but you can still exchange it so it doesn't really matter. I ran bioshock on my inspiron 9300 with a 6800go card and now i don't know which part got fried, either the video card or motherboard i'm guessing. the laptop was running at about 105 degrees for about 15 minutes then died.
what i did to force the cpu to run at full speed was by going to power settings and choosing "always on". that made my cpu stay at 1.7, which is max, when below 95C.
I'm assuming when you do work on your laptop you don't need a 17in screen, or maybe you do? but what i would do is get the 13in xps and just buy a 22in lcd from dell for $200. plug the 22lcd when at home and just use the laptop screen when mobile at work.