Dell Precision M4400 Fan Issue and first impressions

It ramped up and started going full speed again. GPU temp is 63C, seems to slow down when the GPU is <=58C. I switched it to max battery, but it has yet to go down. I am going to try a02 bios, if not I will look for a cooling mat...

I don't think its cpu at this point, seems to be the gpu that's the trigger.

Bios A02 Works alot better, not to mention it boots faster. The GPU is now at 68 (7c hotter) but the fan isn't kicking in as loud. It's on the slow settings. Works for me.

 

hey polarlinks,

thanks for the answer on the hp. as for the bios, i just checked and the process gets reported as Q9300 as well.

about the fan, i consider the fan running quite alot all the time - though i only can report it as undocked (i do not own a docking station).

heatwise my system is similiar to yours idling. im about to give a stress test to the cpu and gpu - i've the feeling that the cooling is not sufficient. at least i get sometimes big performance drop downs. its kind of strange, i think the gpu runs few times to hot and gets downclocked. sometimes it clocks up again, but the performance never gets up for real (monitoring with nvidia ntune).

cheers,

gordon

 

Do you still have that SSD? There are several things you can do which possibly address this problem. For example, see this link: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=48309 which might be interesting for you as you are using XP.

To all others: make sure the SSD you want to buy either has a cache or is SLC, and doesn't have a JMicron controller.

Anyway, back to topic: A possibly loud fan is actually the reason why I didn't get a quadcore. I chose the 2.4 GHz P8600 for it having a lower TDP than even the T-dualcores. I can imagine that my system's fan could be running very loud had I taken a quadcore.

 

@polarlinks + GordonHo

The issues you guys are talking about are all covered in detail already.
If you run later BIOS versions (A06 onwards) you'll probably experience overheating and downclocking...not every system has the problem but most do. With A06 the fan also sticks at full speed after the GPU has been stressed, all well known issues.

Stick with BIOS A02 or A03 to solve these problems

 

thanks lptp-lvr.
i just ran a stress test on the gpu and cpu.

- gpu runs hot (105 celsius) and downclocks after 1-2 minutes. ill call dell tommorow and request a fix.

-cpu fpu stress gets the cpu quite warm (102 celsius) but stays there.
other cpu operations get a normal heat between 78celsius and 92celsius. in any case the gpu was not used for the cpu stress at all.

interesting enough, running cpu and gpu stress together the gpu downclocks as common, cpu behaves normal as well.
so nothing new / worse here.

 

Like he said, use bios a2 or a3. If I start having problems when running graphic intensive apps I will replace the thermal compound with artic silver.

As for the SSD I don't see how SLC would help, it might make the freezes be shorter, cache would be nice. I am going to read the article thx. (still have the ssd) After reading about it, seems like it might help my problem. I don't know if it's a fix. My one concern is as I start to multi-task heavily (I have the quad core after all) it's going to happen again. I finally have the laptop working the way I like it so I'm going to leave it alone. Once windows 7 goes rtm I might look for the best space/value out there.