Yet another issue with my AW 17 R2

Hi, as the title says I have in my possession an Alienware 17 R2 with a i7-4710HQ processor and a 980m video card. After calling dell I now have the 240w PSU as well and I am currently using A00 (tho the issue i have right now occured both on A00 and A06).

The issue is : When playing games the laptop stops charging for one second ( the power button "skull" turns yellow ) and then goes back to normal. Additionally the processor often drops to 800mhz according to Hwinfo. and the two things usually coincide. Another things that happens is that after it stops charging once or twice the processor never goes back to 3500mhz but stops at 2500mhz. which leads to significant fps drops. For example in dota 2 the game starts at 120 fps drops to 30 for a sec when the laptop stops charging then goes back to 100 and the 2nd or 3rd time this occurs it only goes back to 70 fps. The whole thing happens like every 15 minutes or so. However, once it was happening every 30 sec. i restarted my pc and then it went back to the usual 15 min gaps.

Do you think this can be solved by asking dell for a new PSU as i still got one month of warranty left ? or does the problem lie somewhere else. What i've tried to do so far is change the bios but that didn't help.

 

Ask for a new psu anyway, for sure it has something to do with the power being cut and thus running on abttery for a brief period. But is desktop charging enabled?

 

Shouldnt be.. as i cant seem to find how to turn it on/off on win 10

 

right mouse click on the battery icon

Just be sure to check it out. If its not on, then I suspect something is wrong with the psu.

 

Sounds like you are overloading the socket in your home. The power supply would not just start and stop. If they were going to quit, they would quit.

 

^^This does seem like what is happening. Does this happen in any other places?

 

throttling issue could be caused due to VRMs overheating, im still yet to recieve updates on my throttling machine from dell, have u tried reinstalling chipset drivers again, try BIOS A06..

 

I actually doubt this is the issue. You are drawing 250W max around 2amps which should be minimal stress on a standard 15A circuit. I actually have the same issue with my psu, when it hits 185W it just dies and basically reboots itself. So I get a disconnect for a second or 2 and it happens at lower wattage when the psu becomes warmer.

It could be the rectifier bridge or even bad caps inside of the psu, I need to get a replacement but I have spent way too much time on the phone with Dell for a laptop I have had for less than a month....

 

You shouldn't doubt it, unless you know the electrical circuitry of where he lives inside his walls. If he has his PSU plugged in to one outlet, a lamp in an outlet 5 feet away and say a mini fridge on the other side of his bedroom, they are probably all on the same circuit. In a smaller/older home, this will overload the circuit quickly.

 

This is true but you also can't assume he does at the same time. I have seen many Power Supplies in my line of work that have failed this exact way. I bet these AW PSU's have china capacitors in them.

I know with my PSU doing this issue which I have a video of if you would like. The PSU doesn't even disconnect long enough for the indication light on the adapter to turn off. The max draw according to my fluke ammeter is 5 amps for my circuit (without the laptop) this is being run on a 20 amp circuit on #12 wire on a grounded system. I say this just for more verification for you that either one of our possibilities is possible and without more information we cannot say which is correct.

 

Cavell219,

Yea, totally possible as well. He hasn't posted back, so I suspect it was either circuit overload, or he called and received a new PSU. Would be nice to know either way.

 

Sorry for not paying attention to this post much,

What I did was call dell and get a replacement laptop instead. They gave me a nice new 17 r3 with the 6820hk processor. And now I have a whole new type of issues to deal with as the r3 is not perfect either.

One thing that I can say about the current discussion is that I have tried plugging the old PSU in different sockets around the house and it was the same issue everywhere. what I could try just for "science" is try my new psu on the old laptop see if that changes anything.

 

What issues do you have with the R3?

I too have had a complete motherboard failure on my new R3 after only 30 minutes of use. Awaiting repair right now. But I'm not going to let it put me off the Alienware brand just yet.

 

well the weirdest issue so far was that one night the laptop did not want to start at all after pressing the button or holding it for long or anything. that continued for 2-3 min, I fetched my old laptop to check what the internet has to say about that and then when I tried again it just started as usual.

other than that u know the usual driver stuff. once everything was upto date its all fine.

I am a little disappointed from how windows looks in 4k and how fullhd looks on the 4k if u scale it down. but its not dells fault this time ...

On a side note . I plugged the new psu I got into the old laptop (for which the post is originally made) and its working just fine now.