My Alienware M14X

hello,

so im going to start off with some heat problems i have been having i think. lately i have been getting the BSOD while playing Star Wars The Old Republic. a friend mentioned it could be caused from overheat as i can restart it and have no issues and play the game again. so im guessing it was due to overheat and no from virus or dropped the machine. currently when i play the game i noticed from coretemp it was running at nearly 87-96 degrees Celsius i figured that way too high. i was doing some reading and alot of people mentioned to turn turbo boost off. i just recently did that (have not tested game yet) i also read up it may be time to do a repaste. however im not experienced in it at all. i live in canada ontario near toronto and was wondering if anyone knows of somewhere i could pay to get it done. would dell send a tech to do it for me? i also am using a cooling pad however im not sure it works that well.. this is the cooling pad im using

Nexxtech 10-17" Laptop Notebook Cooling Cooler Stand Pad Power by USB port 5 Lev on eBay!

the fans sorta just aim at nothing on the bottom of the laptop...

as for Star Wars The Old Republic im using one setting lower then optimized setting in geforce experience and in windowed

so im wondering and looking for advice and what to do... to lower the cpu tempature.

should i do a repaste? if so any ideas on where i could get one done?

should i buy a new cooling pad one designed for this computer?

also i noticed a little bit of dust on the fan and blew some of it off any tutorials on what to look for exactly?

any alternative programs or settings i should do to help with keeping it cool?

i also noticed it is most hot around the power button and top of keyboard

it has an i5 processor sandy bridge second gen i belive

thanks

 

How often have you cleaned the heatsink?

 

so i took the computer apart and it was the heat sink it was covered in dust basically a finger hole getting through and i did a repaste now running on good setting i never get over 71 degrees Celsius while gaming for hours

 

You see, I'm an owner of the alienware m14x. I had the same heat problems, even though I have a laptop stand that allows for a very good airflow my laptop still managed to reach a peak of 98°C in summer. I contacted Dell about this problem, They ran me through some diagnostics, but it didn't help because I also often clean the dust out of my laptop with the ait-compressor I have (very useful! or at least those compressed air cans, they do the same thing).

Anyway, a man from Dell came to change my heatsink. After that My graphics card was overclocked from 590MHz to 750MHz, and turbo boost on, and just as you said my max temperature was 73. But that only lasted a few weeks. After that I noticed it reaching the 90 degrees area. So I came with a small trick.

I wrote a simple .bat file that works as a clock frequency toggle. When I do not game I click it and it enables my turbo boost en sets my GPU clock to Stock (590MHz). When I want to game I Click it again, and it disables turbo boost and overclocks my GPU to 725MHz. Because in almost any games my GPU is the bottleneck, so I still get the wanted desire out of my overclocking.

But the heat still remains a problem. There I times again where I reach 98 degrees. And at most CPU intensive games, I still have temperatures above 90 most often. But gladly it never reached above 98. Because 100 causes a crash. And figured I'll keep using it like this. It's been 3 years now Since I bought this laptop, It's still works like a beast, especially with the SSD I put in it a year ago. But I also use my computer clean as a computer scientist. I has never a virus that affected my PC. Always kept it as clean as possible both software and hardware.

 

NICE! I'm glad it's running better now after the cleaning.