[Alienware 17R4 / 15R3] - Disassembly + Repaste Guide + Results

Sorry I didn't clarify but I meant after the repaste and reassembly if I could just fire the machine up or would I gave to wait a couple of days? Thanks!


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Oh no I meant the laptop. It took me a while my first time, probably too long, but then again I also spent 600$ for 4 years accidental damage so if I screwed it up myself, I was surely losing a lot of money. It depends how careful you are haha

 

Sounds like a great idea considering how much they need it.

 

Alright, the 2nd Dell tech has been here, and he brought with him a heat sink with what Dell is suggesting as the proper height thermal pads. First off, it looks exactly like the picture in this thread (1070 version). My old heat sink assembly had slightly different support arms though. It might just be the bend in them. I didn't get to study it fully since the tech was working. Also I forgot my caliper, so I didn't measure the pad height. I can tell you the super thin one, was super thin though. That's about all I gleaned. I had the tech scrape off the toothpaste pad it came with and put on the kyronaut paste on the CPU and GPU. After getting it all back together, I ran the CPU test for an hour. These are the max core temperatures. I'm fine with these results. Yes, there is still a core differential, but not like I had before, and it's 20 degrees cooloer than before.

Core0 74
Core1 67
Core2 70
Core3 62

In any case, if you have this issue, don't let dell send out a tech without a new heatsink and proper sized thermal pads. That first visit was wasted. Also, these techs aren't careful, and they are argumentative. I had to talk them into using Kryonaut. The 2nd guy was saying the Dell paste is better than Kryonaut. Um, no. The techs too would miss screws, miss speaker grommets. You basically have to watch them like a hawk to make sure they do it right.

 

Well, these are pretty new laptops and the majority of them likely never even touched one. I believe they have videos that teach them how to disassemble these, as I was talking to one of the techs and he was telling me about it. But often times the laptops go through changes before they reach customers. I won't discredit them, but they are imperfect humans like all of us. But the whole "Dell paste is the best" now that's just idiotic haha. Even toothpaste is better as proven by iunlock

 

Will never happen with Dell. Resellers can do this because they care more for their customers and can earn a few $ more. Even if you paid extra for this service from Dell, they wouldn't offer this. They prefer to earn more money on their overpriced hardware like ram, ssd's and extended warranty. This is Dell in a nutshell.

 

You can use it right away.

The temperatures are good, I would consider this to be acceptable.

 

Pulled it apart again. Didn't take nearly as long this time.

As much as what is under lying with cables, damage.... The outside looks new and I have made repairs.

With that said... Onto repaste finally.

Success so far!

Haven't had a chance to get hwinfo on there, but running OCCT. Sitting on a padded stool blocking bottom vents. Only about 10 minutes, while still updating drivers ....

Clock max 3292MHz
63C max
59C current

1-2 degree difference across cores. Running 100%

No performance on in BIOS.

Optimus disabled, "performance" via fn+F7 used.

I'll beat her up a little more tomorrow and maybe thread with a dual tear down and many photos. My OCD may show a bit....

Ocd wouldnt have forgetting the vram pad, failed the ocd community ... It was 3am... Toddler had me burnt out... Thats my story and stickin to it!

 

Bloody kids

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Hrm... So after the repaste I get bios warning:

ac adapter wattage and type cannot be determined

Have reset defaults, etc.

I need to unplug and plug back in for charge.

Verified cables were secure, the cable just below the fan on the mobo is tight.

Only changes: swapped hdd for ssd, swapped single memory module of 8gb 1rx8 2666 ddr4 for two 8gb 2rx8 2133 ddr4.

Haven't taken multi meter to psu yet.

Did I screw something up?

Edit: tested, outputs 19v good
Edit 2: I'm a dumb ass.... Bent pin. Straightened out. About to turn back on.

 

I've repast mine today with Kryonaut and I still have 10°core differential but the hole temps seems to drops 20 or 25°C I'll send some test later. I think it's the uneven heatsink (i didn't replace the "0,1" I juste bent the arm but just a little). Thanks Iunlock for the very good guide.

 

You need to remove the thermal pad above the CPU that contacts the little gray squares if you ever hope of proper thermal conductivity.

 

Is that where we would put that new thermal Tape that Alienware is using now to help even to the core Temps?

 

And the 0,1mm pad maybe useless ?

 

You can ignore the thermal tape completely (if you cannot source the appropriate thickness of thermal tape) since the component does not need to be cooled.

 

Ok great, do you guys have a picture of which one? I was going to test this out today myself. My temps after repasting this 15R3 from the outlet are good but just the temps are about 6C off from Cores 0/2 to 1/3.

 

Since I repaste, i've got a bios message saying : "checking media presence" anybody knows how to remove it ? thanks

Solve : i just need to set windows boot manager first in boot sequence.

 

Before I attempt this.. I just want to make sure I get it right the first time lol

Can the arm be bent by hand? Also remove the thermal pads near the same location as the arm? Or replace them with 0.5 pads? Thanks again!!


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When I receive my replacement 1070 15R3 I am going to do a temp test and see if the untouched temps are consistent, if they are I will not bend the arm at all and assume it's not needed. I think everyone should do the same that gets a new Alienware. Or at least eye it up and make sure it looks like its laying perfectly/near perfectly flat if you choose to bend it.

 

Working for a small electronics company should make opening this thing up a breeze here goes..


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Not sure if I have the revision 15R3 heat sinks or not or thermal pads not sure if someone can chime in? Thank you also I was able to take the sinks off without taking the mobo out


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If the thermal pad in the picture below is thicker than a sheet of paper, remove it.
@CSHawkeye81

Otherwise, leave it be.

 

Awesome thank you for the quick chime in


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Much cooler than before I would hit 100c's at sometimes..


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I removed then completely they're not necessary at all? Thank you again for your help!


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Thanks for the clarification Mobius. I will check them out tomorrow and take a picture as well.

 

Well done guys! Unfortunately I think I have to open mine up again. I had someone from mobius' Discord chat remote in and properly stress the CPU. It seems like I wasn't doing it properly because when running at 4GHz with an undervolt from this guy I had a 20C difference between core 0 and the rest with it peaking in the 90s after a few minutes

Anyone got any ideas and any further tips when I open this back up? Do I have to apply fresh liquid metal if I check how much contact there was by removing the heatsinks?

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You don't need to remove and apply new fresh liquid metal. Only put on more if needed.

 

Ok cheers

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Anyone got a link to the small black heatsink screws? Think I may need one

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Yep, you need at least 8 hours or OCCT with large data sets to have a good idea of the max temperatures for the CPU, and then linpack for 8 hours to test general stability.

 

It's not the tests, left it for several hours. It was the songs to unlock power and put more juice through it

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Did you make sure that the OCCT tests were holding the CPU frequency stable all the time at 4.2ghz without throttle at over 80W? Or was that the issue that you didn't notice?

 

Yeah I did all that and it worked fine, however in some CPU intensive games it was unstable. It's really strange I don't fully understand why there's such a big difference from his stress test and mine...

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So I did some testing after my thermal job (playing overwatch on epic) for about 30 minutes (default factory settings) and the unit maintained 90c's.. is that tolerable? Also, I followed everything from the guide.. replaced thermal pads, bent arm, removed the 0.1 pads that could've gotten in the way and reposted with grizzly.. each chip die was evenly spread with it but maybe it wasn't enough paste? I dunno are these temps ok?


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Ok that's weird then, because even very heavy games such as battlefield at 4k ultra settings had similar temperatures as occt large data sets in my case

 

I know I've been doing exactly the same! But I was getting an issue where CPU would throttle to 700MHz for a couple of minutes periodically when I played.guys this is related

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Ok I never had the 700MHz thingy, even when Heaven was running for 12 hours to test the GPU OC, the frequencies were rock stable.

 

that doesn't sound alright

are you on overclock level 3 by any chance?

 

Okay, its been a couple days now. This is only playing WoW for about 2 hours. CPU and fan performance mode enabled. Maxed out settings. Level 2 OC in bios. Will experiment with OC settings later.

When I did take it apart again I did remove some of the Conductonaut as I thought I used a little too much and took it down to just a thin layer.

Are these okay temps? Should I have not removed any of the liquid metal? I did also notice the way it sat on the CPU was not very flat. However, I have not had a very uneven differential, but that may be due to the nature of the liquid metal.

Thanks!

 

That's the strange part of it all... those were default settings not over clocked at all and the max temps hit were 90's under max loads.. maybe it wasn't enough thermal paste (grizzly) so I bought 2 (waiting for them to come in) I'll try again but I bent the tension arm too lol weird right?


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Wow I wish I can maintain temps like that running 3.8 ghz nice dude


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This makes me want to swap out my Gelid Extreme to liquid Conductonaut lol. My temps are still about 8-9 deg apart and 80 deg OC to 4.0 on OCCT. That's with the arm bending mod as well. I'm afraid of doing it myself, but don't want to ship it out to have it done as well though lol. I mean Gelid Extreme did work because they were at 90+ on stock clock and about 18 deg difference. I'm OCD and would like everything to be perfect.

 

lol I'm super OCD as well so I know what you mean.. i wonder if the liquid conductonaut is easy to apply?


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Join NBR Discord and message me to schedule a remote session to figure out what's wrong.

 

It wasn't as easy as I thought it was. It didn't really want to stick to the die at all. Was like chasing around a bead of solder with a q-tip. Lol.

I actually did the tape around the gpu twice. The first time it started coming up at the edges and I was nervous about the liquid metal making its way under.

The next day I took it apart again and there was some on the tape. I cleaned that up for a while to make everything nice and neat and then went through several qtips kinda rolling them on the die to soak some up. Grabbed a paint brush from one of my son's painting sets and taped it off to only expose about an eighth inch and trimmed it up. That was much easier than using the supplied black qtip.

But I'll take it that isnt a bad result so far.

I thought perhaps 70 was a bit high considering it was just WoW and not a benchmark with a large data set. The vents weren't covered at all and the fan was on performance mode.

I almost pulled it back apart again to check out the liquid metal.

 

As you were saying, you have fan performance mode on, do you just tolerate fans going on at max speeds 24/7?

Also, what kind of outdoor and instance fps do you get on a OC 2?

The temps themselves look great to me! Thanks in advance for replying.


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I only put this on performance mode when playing WoW. Its the only game I play. Otherwise I leave it off while I am working.

Outdoor and in Dal I was between 50 - 80. I did drop shadows a little, dropped 'ssaa 2x + cmaa' to 'ssaa 2x' render scale at 200% this gave me a relatively steady 110-120 fps in Dal

I didn't pay attention to instances. I sorta gave away the guild, Electric Mayhem on Thunderhorn, and quit raiding when my son was born a few years ago and am just learning the fights again... Sooo... I was a little busy tanking but noticed no drop in how smooth game play was.

All in all it seems like a pretty steady machine.

Unless I can get temps lower I don't see myself OC very often though. I don't want to cook her and diminish the life of the cpu.

I want to see 4.1 Ghz and 62C max

Not sure if thats possible. Any opinions on that?

 

Re-pasted mine last night. Ordered it 1/8/17 and got it 1/18/17. Attached are the photos. They did an awful job pasting. If you are going to use the Grizzly thermal like I used, it's essential to tape off the CPU and GPU like iUnlock did. I did as well. It has the consistency of solder. I put it together and getting beep error codes. Going to work on it again tonight, I probably have a cable loose. Here are some pictures.

 

I would really leave that tape on. When you put the heatsink on you're squeezing that stuff out a little. Grab the super 33+ tape that iunlock suggests and cover those things up. You don't want to jump anything and short something out.