E6540 Owners Thread

Dell UK have seriously downgraded the e6540.

The Dell Online Store: Build Your System

Processor is now a i7-4600M, and memory a meagre 4 GB.

Is the processor downgrade an admission that the cooling system was insufficient for an i7-4800MQ* and discreet GPU?

*When gaming and the CPU is above 2.7Ghz, the system will likely eventually throttle. Thus I have two power power profiles set up for gaming - CPU fixed at 2.4Ghz for shooters and 2.7Ghz for FSX. These work fine.

 

Turnbull2000, I'm thinking it's a shortage of the UK i7-4800MQ SKU?

Is there a way to force the fan to maximum to prevent overheating yet?

 

Even with the fan running full speed it doesn't help the throttling issue. My machine got up to 96C within minutes and then starting throttling. This is even after repasting.

 

yup, seems to be the norm with this machine.. I've repasted twice with little improvement.. The shared heatsink between gpu and cpu has never been particularly great for cooling, combine that with the i7, the tiny fan, and the poorly designed (imo) bottom cover and we hit 90C easy. I still need to get a Dremel to try my hand at improving the bottom cover (I'm glad I got a hold of a spare to hack apart!), but that may be a while. I'm glad I got the upgraded 3y warranty, I'm expecting this machine to have heat related failures in the future. Should've gone with a precision

Have you tried running it with the bottom cover off? When I'm at home I sometimes take the bottom cover off and put it on a cooling pad. Seems to help..

ALSO, I use ThrottleStop. The latest version supports our CPU's.. Lock the multiplier to 22 and it doesn't go over 70C while gaming. Most games aren't cou depndant and the 8790M will be the bottleneck 99% of the time in games any way. Can't say the same for those of you using business applications though.

 

I have one of these E6540 mainly for computer programming which came on Friday from the outlet. I seem to be having an issue with playing DVD movies. It gives me an error windows media player cannot play this DVD because there is a problem with digital copy protection between your DVD drive, decoder, and video card. Try installing an updated driver for your video card. Which of course I have done for the intel and the AMD.... The only way I can get it to play DVD movies is to double click the dvd drive when it first starts windows 7 within the first few seconds or by ejecting the whole dvd drive unit/bay and then plugging it back in. If I let it boot up the whole way then it gives me that error... Another thing I have noticed is when I try to burn DVDs even though its burnt it I can not see any files I have burnt. However cd's record and playback fine. The drive is an OEM MATA DVD- RW UJ8C2 revision 1.02-1EJ. What is interesting is if I stick the dvd disk I just burned in my old laptop I can see what is recorded onto it but as I said I cant see it in the dvd drive on the E6540. Anyone on here had that? Or am I best talking to Dell support? One its running on the E6540 it works fine until I shut it down power it off and restart the laptop.

Thanks

Well in the end it got fixed with this fix from Microsoft...I will paste here just in case any other users have this issue..
http://support.microsoft.com/mats/cd_dvd_drive_problems/en-us

 

Can you guys run a test for me please?

Take the bottom cover off and load the machine, see if the poor ventilation is the issue here. If so I might follow hizzaah in taking a Dremel to it, though I wonder how much it would cost to laser cut new vents in to it for a neater job.

I remember some guys in the HP dv6 thread ended up cutting a hole in the base plastic to allow the fan to have direct airflow.

 

Playing Borderlands 2, Throttle Stop used to lock multi at 22x. With cover I was getting 75C on CPU, 71C on GPU. Without cover I'm getting 64C CPU and 62C GPU.. 10C difference by taking of bottom cover. I'm going to turn off Throttle Stop and see what temps I get.

Edit: Hitting 80C without throttle stop. Going to keep using it

 

A drop of 10*C is impressive. This does suggest that the lack of ventilation is the issue; when I get my unit delivered, I will most likely run the test again to check.

Review Dell XPS 15 (9530, Late 2013) Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

XPS 15 Haswell has the same heat issues - again, no vents directly underneath the fan. If I recall correctly the rMBP 15 with 750M also has the same issues with heat, and the same design flaw. My current HP laptop has a vent underneath the fan - kinda ironic for a company well know for toasty machines in the past.

 

Even the fatally flawed M1530 had a vent under the fan. Seems an odd omission.

 

Okay, starting tomorrow I'll call the Dell support until something gets better. Either they repair my laptop, or they change the model (is that even possible?).
In order to play any somewhat modern game with the ATI gpu I need to throttle cpu AND gpu, and even then after some time I get horrible slows. Even when disabling the ati card and using only the integrated intel gpu isn't much better... Performance is worse, sure, but it starts throttling anyway (even with throttlestop and the CPU set at 1.1 GHz or less).

I hope it's just my particular laptop that is more flawed than others E6540, but I'm kind of mad here. It's perfect for work, but if I paid it's price it was to be able to play at least a bit.