My A51m died in 5mins.. Possible help?

So dell has issued a replacement on its way but it may arrive abit late..

So I bought my a51m with 2080 and 9700k config which arrived last Saturday, I immediately started a repad/repaste on it got that done and started it up for the first time yesterday it was in the bios runnning on battery for about 3-4 min which I noticed the power button was flashing an orange color which I guess was low battery and I shut it off added a 970 Evo plugged in both power adapters 330w and 180w, 510w total. It started and got into bios fine again and I unplugged the 180w for a second to move the cable abit plugged in again and I noticed the bios changed the power from 330w back to 510 again and 30 seconds later it shut off... No smell no burning from what I know everything on the board looks fine... I tried pressing the switch on the motherboard under the plastic panel, unplugging battery, using just Power adapters.. It's just dead.. Anything I can do or is this laptop just a brick?

If I can get this working I'll just reject the replacement... But if anything I'll just put this heatsink and the 2080 in the replacement so I can keep my thermal pads and all hopefully with no problems this time around..

 

It is possible to share pictures of the re-pad and re-paste you did?

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It is possible to say what thermalpad thickneses you used? Some look to be too thick and other too thin.

When you removed the heatsink there was good contact between the GPU / CPU and the heatsink?

 

Yeah that pad job doesn't look very to me. You very well may have killed it.

 

Without much load on GPU... I doubt it. Even the best pad job wouldn't save this DGFF graphics card from oncoming death. Some will have to die before others. That's life.

 

Pad job dosent look good how? When I. Take off the heatsink every area where the stock pads were the new pads are on those exact same spots... So I mean idk what you mean by not a good pad job

I used the same thickness ones in the s.k thread that shows the guide and when I took the pads off everything had contact with the motherboard areas

 

Please see the picture below. My observation is that some of the thicknesses might not be correct. In addition, did you change the thermalpad for the heatsink at the back of the GPU?

 

YO hold up! those Heatsinks are not on my A51m

 

During PMs I had with the OP, he confirmed that these were added by him.

 

Nothing wrong with the heatsinks being there, @S.K has them there to and his unit is fine, if anything they keep those chips alittle cooler, they have burned in other aw 51m before.

 

You mod things on your laptop without any knowledge you break it and yet gets a replacement. It blows my mind..

 

First of all how are you positive I broke it? And secondly there is a Guide of how to do it with all the sizes of PADS listed made by @S.K he pretty much guided me through the whole process and I was sending pictures to make sure each step I did was right and pads were in the right places I spent nearly 18 hours to make sure I was being extra careful becuase I never have put this many pads in a laptop like this, I was in the BIOS for God sake don't even get to windows, no load was on the system so heat was not the problem nothing on the motherboard was burnt. I've built plenty of desktops and messed with enough laptops to know what I'm doing and if taking a laptop apart WITH pictured instructions right from Dells website is hard to follow then I must be stupid, the dam thing ran for 15min just fine on battery until I plugged it in so obviously something shorted out, and I don't get why I'm pretty much being blamed by more than just you for breaking it, most of these 51m have burned out, shorted out, displays freaking out, gpu vrms popping, but no no let's assume this guy in this thread broke it (me). Cool cool..... So thanks for not even helping me and just assuming I damaged it. I'm not saying that the possibility of me causing the damage isn't there but to just jump up in here and say "yep was your fault man" is kinda crappy especially with how easy it is to take this laptop apart prob one of the easiest dell has had In years I mean all these videos im seeing on YouTube of people putting this laptop in front of ac units, replacing endless pads and thermal paste to test the best effective method of cooling and still works, or even @S.K himself doing many more teardowns then I did with this thing 30vs2 and his Is working like a charm. I'm sick of this tbh feel like I'm getting more blame the actual help or support. And yeah I got a replacement so what? I also have accidental warranty just in case so the replacement was deserved. Geez....

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When I apply thermal paste, I make it is as thin as possible, as it just needs to fill gaps between the 2 metal plates, so we're talking smears here and you should be able to almost see the CPU writing... any more and you're insulating. Thermal paste is always has worse conductivity than the metal, so it's better to have no paste vs too much. One of the reasons why repasting is a good idea is bcos they put too much for some weird reason.

Any spillover is insulating.
You're not putting icing on a cake, you are trying to eliminate micron gaps between 2 flat metal plates.
Any dust = bad.
Again with pads, as small as possible to cover the contact areas and no more.

I haven't done my 51m, but I would imagine it's not applying a lot of pressure on the CPU, vs ATX mobo + Noctua D14, so I think I would go with 5 dots ~<1mm of a very liquid paste.

 

Could it be when you removed the power adapter and plugged it back in that sent a voltage spike through the system and it died?

 

Maybe do I ended up getting a replacement that's working alot better.. Not dead lol.. But gpu Temps are to high for my liking..

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I think the best thing to go about upgrades are do them one at at time. The problem you could take into consideration is don't start cooling mods right when you get the unit. Do a simple old repaste. Or a simple delid and his swap you know?

The fact that you put heatinks on those mosfet and then thermal pads on the 2 super chokes. The problem is u don't know if you are attracting heat and not keep the heataway. The heatsink has a copper shield on the heatpipes to smd to absorb the heat and to protect the smd from being burnt from the heatpipes. Instead of cooling the chokes you bridge a 9770k and and power delivery system together with thermal pad. You know? Cooling a mobo especially a power delivery circuit is almost a a false negative and you won't know till you are too late on the unit doesn't start up

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I am very hesitant to cool the vrams on my rtx 2060 becuase the was the and work is the heats going into the pcb not a external heatsink. It is a risk to short circuit and etc.

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http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-for-alienware-area-51m-9900k-rtx2080.829543/

Thermal Pad Guide for Alienware Area-51m (9900K + RTX2080)

That is the guide i followed and I'm sure @S.K knows what he is doing but I returned that unit and got a replacement I did repaste and replaced the thermal pad on the vrm of the 2080 because im not risking that burning up. My machine has stock pads in everything else for now because I sold what was left of the ones I had originally except my fujipoly 1.5mm ones which were for gpu VRM on the backside. After all the burning up stories I wa seeing everywhere including the power mosfets getting to hot I just went all out but I think I may have shorted it out with the heatsink or maybe the charger was bad idk, all I know is dell did send my replacement with newer power adapters to which is interesting. Leads me to believe it may have been. A bad power supply.


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As with any alienware laptop, they have multiple heatsink vendors and tolerances between those. You always have to measure pads yourself. People keep following guides blindly here and in the end expect dell to pay the price for their own mistakes.

Also fujipoly pads even though good performance pads are extremely hard. Peoppe are better off with gelids or acrtics. The temp differences between those pads isnt even 2c.

 

The 1.5 fit perfectly

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What concerns me is the immediate disassembly and repaste. While I agree Dell is pretty notorious with horrible paste jobs, I would always do some tests before hand to see what temps are like before hand. Otherwise you'll never know if you're doing it right and making improvements.

And are those before or after pictures of the thermal paste and thermal pads? Only reason I ask is because of the pattern on the thermal pads. I'd figure they'd squish and flatten out a bit after you put it back together.

Unless you used conductive thermal paste or forgot to plug something back in I don't see anything that would fry your laptop. But take the advice of the other members on the thermal pads as I normally only do repastes on my machines. I'm leaning towards you got a lemon. So when you get the new one try it stock first.

 

based on the look of your photos it didnt.

 

I got new one already and I repaded the gpu mosfets so far and repasted working nicely

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Maybe if you take a closer look you will see there is plastic on the top of the pads still and those pics were before I applied the heatsink again.

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Fingers crossed this one is a winner for ya then.

 

Thank u

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I based it on the second set of photos. did you measure the original pads?

 

I still didn't apply heatsink yet ALL of those pics are pre heatsink installation

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Did you measure the original pads. My point is dont follow a guide blindly since they have 2 to 3 different heatsinks vendors. They all have slight differences in measurement. and you used the worst possible pads to make it works. Fujipoly's are too hard. So if the measurements are off, you or have too thick pads and push th eheatsink up, or you flex the board to its death.

 

Do you own a 51m? Did you try to do it the way the guide said? S.k has opened many units, and his sizes for pads are pretty accurate. Yes they made contact, I'm not an idiot I've build more desktops than the average person and owned a fair share of laptops. Gaming once that is. I feel I'm being Hella questioned by something that isn't that difficult.... Geez

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Desktops are like lego....

I dont own the A51 myself because its not for me, I did repaste and repad an unit and I have repasted/repadded a 30+ other gaming laptops including 3 alienware models, blade 15, Triton 500 from my own a solid 10 times for testing different pads and setups. ALso made for example a guide of the AW15R3 about 2 years ago with totally different pad sizes than what iUnlock did and he knows his stuff as well. It clearly has shown that the variances are large and you have to measure it because they DIFFER.