Help with Nvidia 555m gpu please!

Hi all,

I purchased an Alienware M14x last October, and it's been amazing.

Recently, however, I've been having significant gameplay issues when using my Nvidia 555m graphics card. Games that used to run great (Tribes, Skyrim, etc...) now start to really lag and jump after maybe a minute of playing. The first few moments of playing a game everything is super smooth and normal; things get choppy after about a minute.

I've done all sorts of testing with different drivers, settings, I've re-installed Windows, but I'm still having this problem.

Also, though, my laptop has been running hot pretty consistently. I've never had the fans or inside the case cleaned. Even idling and just using the integrated graphics card, I still get a pretty consistent hum of the fans.

Could a physically clogged system be slowing down my gaming performance? The system has never over-heated and shut down, so I'm not sure if the issue is that bad. But hey, I don't know too much about hardware, so any help would be really appreciated.

IF I am in desperate need of a cleaning, do you guys know how much places usually charge to do that? Or is is something I could do myself?

THANKS!

 

You probably facing throttling issues, due to the excessive heat you experienced.

You may want to clean the dust off the vents/heatsink/fans, and if that helps, its all you have to do. If not, probably you need to repaste the gpu.

To clean them, its fairly easy. Get a can of compressed air (any hardware store has it, pc stores, home stores, etc), then see if you can remove the back panel (i dont know if you can do this in m14x). Once you remove the back panel, you should see both cpu and gpu heatsinks, and hopefully alot of dust/stuff clogging the fans and the vents.

Use the canned air to spray all the dirt off, shoot directly above the fans/vents/heatsinks. You should see alot of stuff coming out.

Also if you have an air compressor, its even better, since it has more power and runs infinitely instead of a can of compressed air.

So to recap, all you have to do is remove the back panel (located at the bottom of the laptop, usually its hold in place by scews) and see hows the situation there. Clean it if you need to.