E6540 Owners Thread

Unless Dell issue a revised backplate with ventilation above the fan, replacing the heatsink/thermal paste/motherboard seems futile.

 

The Dell tech just finished up, I'm going to stress test the machine and see what happens. Nice guy, been in the job for 7 years. IIRC he said that he hasn't worked on lots of overheating E6540s yet.

Seems like the fan does get louder than before - hopefully indicative of higher airflow.

 

So after a week of no replied emails I get another email from someone else who says they will just refund the purchase price - not really acceptable to me. I don't know why I went from US support to being bounced back to foreign.

 

I've been invited to send my laptop in via Depot service to have the motherboard replaced. They're still acting like this has never been heard of before, I even offered links to this thread and others, I was told that clearly "the motherboard is causing too much heat". I'm so flustered by that that I don't know how to reply/proceed.

 

My new E6540 definitely throttles down to ~1Ghz if you put any stress on the gpu while the cpu is loaded. I run engineering simulations that are very cpu taxing, so I'm not typically stressing both at the same time. When just the cpu is getting hit it normally stays above 2.7Ghz (90-98C max cpu temp), but when I fired up the valley benchmark just for grins the cpu speed dropped like a rock. I work with it docked 99% of the time, so it is lifted off of the table a bit for airflow. Interestingly the cpu temperatures are lower when the gpu is being used due to the aggressive throttling...

 

Perhaps even overly aggressive throttling. Too bad it's not effective. The GPU overheats and throttles after the CPU does, but both go down eventually. That poor sad little heatsink simply doesn't have the surface area to keep up.

Ahh, I'm sure you have a "hot motherboard", same as me. Call Dell and let them tell you that you don't understand.

 

Has anyone else had any issues with the USB 3.0 ports (both on the laptop and on the e-port when docked) randomly dropping USB 3.0 hard drives?

 

No issues when I have used it to backup and restore the main drive

 

Engaging @DellCares, response is useless links to "What is hot?" on Dell's support site, as expected. Emailed the Basic Support rep back last night, around 8PM EST, no response yet, 4:30PM EST the next day.

I so very regret not getting ProSupport.

 

Spoke to another Basic tech. First tech logged my chat against someone else's service tag. Some guy named Dale got offered a refund on his E7240. No idea who that is, service tag wasn't in any way similar to mine.

Went through entire explanation again, was told again that depot service is my only solution, escalated to a tier 2, he told me depot or nothing as well. Dell is sending me a box, and I'll send them my new laptop, and they will waste 2-3 weeks of my time, and send it back exactly the same as it was when sent out.... And I'll get to do this same dance again in a month, and they'll tell me I'm imagining 800MHz, or I need to clean the vents.

I used to be a very vocal and positive proponent of Dell at work, because their business service was so good. Now I'm looking at the few failed machines around the office that are waiting on service, listening to Dell deny the thermal issues with the E6540, and wondering if I shouldn't just find some other vendor from here on.

Edit: And I don't even want a refund. If I wanted my money, I wouldn't have purchased a laptop. I want a LAPTOP, that's why I paid you the money in the first place! Offering an unhappy customer a refund is better than not offering, but it doesn't resolve the issue and give the customer what they wanted!