D630 Owners Thread

I am running the latest BIOS, I upgraded to whatever the newest one is last week. I use Virtualbox on my D630 to run other operating systems, and whenever I do, it cooks! Actually I can do pretty much anything and it's uncomfortably hot, though not as bad as it used to be. When I dock mine it stays around 180F. (At least 160, last I checked). I stopped using my docking station completely.

 

If it's still in warranty, I think replacing the heatsink might help. The thermal grease and pads may be hardening and no good anymore. I've gotten the heatsink replaced in one of my D620's when the thermal pad hardened and cracked, which caused temperatures to soar.

 

It is still under warranty. The thing is Dell came out three times in the last month, each time replacing the fan and heatsink, along with the motherboard at least twice.

 

Have you tried jacking the back of the laptop up by 1/2" or so? Since the service record for the laptop has that many motherboard replacements, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to see if you could try to get an Intel motherboard. I haven't had much luck with that myself, but I only had one motherboard replacement on my D620's record.

 

I asked Dell to downgrade my motherboard to the Intel version, but they wouldn't. I thought about doing one of the following:

1.) Calling Dell and demanding that after all the motherboard replacements I've had, to be downgraded to an Intel motherboard.

2.) Buying an Intel motherboard off of ebay and installing it myself. I am a certified technician with a lot of experience so this would be easy for me. However, it would cost money and void the warranty. I upgraded the screen from WXGA to WXGA+ a few months ago so its not like I never took it apart before anyway.

With my experience as an IT technician, I have found that if you have to prop the laptop up to keep it cool, there is something wrong with the cooling system. That's why I was inquiring about the "copper mod" you guys were talking about, and I was curious what that is.

I was thinking about upgrading the CPU since that thing really drags on when using Virtualbox but I haven't decided.

 

I suppose using #1 as plan A and #2 as a plan B wouldn't hurt. Escalating up to a supervisor might be helpful.

What CPU do you have in the system? Unless the CPU is really low-end, it's probably not going to be worth it. More RAM would be a good idea, although if you have 4GB, getting 8GBs of DDR2 when DDR3 is the current standard is iffy (although the E6400 still uses DDR2 if you're planning on getting one of those in the future).

 

Right now it has the T7250 processor in it. I have upgraded the RAM to 4GB. It does run fast but when I try to run a Virtual Machine it bogs down and heats up. For what I use my laptop for VM's are something I run every now and then but never more than one at any one time.

 

This isn't going to help the NVidia guys, but I've found using the heatsink from the Nvidia model can improve temps pretty significantly on the base Intel graphics model. I bought the Nvidia heatsink off ebay for $8 and took off the GPU thermal pad since the Intel Graphics don't need it.

I have one D630 thats sort of a parts machine/test bed right now and with the 65nm T7800 load temps went from 89C to 77C. Today I decided to install it on the D630 I actually use and with the 45nm T9500 load temps went from 65C to 60C. Pretty good. This is all at default settings (No undervolting or overclocking) and AS5 on both heatsinks.

I'm hoping to overclock my D630 some day with PLL Pin Mod. So the heatsink should help out.

 

I don't know what happened, but my D630's CPU has been running at about 80F for the past couple days. Nvidia GPU is still pretty warm at 140F though. Hmm, strange, but I like it.

 

Hi,

Would anyone please be able to assist with a couple of questions regarding memory and SATA operation?

1. What is the maximum amount of RAM I can install into my D630, the web manual says 4gb or 8-gb capable which is confusing me? Also, is there any recommended type of RAM to use in an upgrade, I hope to replace my 2 x 1gb chips with 2 x 2gb or 2 x 4gb if it will take 2 x 4gb chips? Or, is any type of DDR2 SODIMM OK as long as it is the same speed?

2. In the BIOS under SATA operation there are two options "ATA" or "AHCI" with "ATA" set as the default. What is the difference between the two options and is there any impact on performance etc?

Finally, not related to the above, I noticed that the D630 automatically shut down when I did not expect it to. When rebooting it said that it had auto shut down as it reached a certain temperature. Normally I use it docked but this was undocked, any ideas, I know they run hot and a bit noisy re the fan but this is a bit of a worry?

Thx for any help
Snaffos