Alienware M11x Bottlenecking?

I'm not super literate when it comes to troubleshooting issues with laptops, but for some reason whenever I'm playing a game (particularly Skyrim at the moment) I seem to be getting some lag over time. When I first start up the game it runs nice and smooth, but after about 5-10 minutes the game starts getting choppy. One thing I have noticed which strikes me as odd is that if I alt+tab out of the game and wait about 30 seconds I can play again just fine without any lag for another 5 minutes or so.

Any ideas?

 

Sounds like it is over heating, Get a program to check temps and keep it open in the background, when it starts lagging go out and check the temps.

Throttlestop works well for doing this as it is simple, light and keeps the max temps you have reached during that session in a nice little list.

 

The point at which I start experiencing lag is at 78 degrees celcius it appears. I didn't think that was considered very hot for these laptops. I do have a cooler by the way.

 

What are you using to measure your temp? I use ThrottleStop 4.00 and it shows my max temp when playing Skyrim up to 82 degrees Celcius. Even at that temp, my R2 i5 with 4GB of RAM doesn't lag at all.

 

Use throttlestop > TPL button to increase your TDP and TDC so you won't get throttled.

 

What should I set it to? I want to make sure I'm not going to damage any part of my laptop.

 

i just put 200/200 there so i'll never get throttled

 

I'm scared because once I messed with some Throttlestop settings which were supposed to prevent bottlenecking and after about 30 minutes my CPU was at 100 degrees celcius. This doesn't seem right.

I have never really cleaned out my Alienware M11x or anything like that, it is just standard out of the box. I use a cheap cooling pad which does seem to help quite a bit but still doesn't seem to prevent the overheating if that is the problem.

 

You can do what a friend of mine did once and put your laptop in a minifridge and connect it to a monitor lol

 

It seems as though my theory is correct and the FPS starts dropping at 78 celcius. I tried setting 200/200 and it didn't make any difference really.

I have a few questions.

A.) How can I increase the temperature at which my laptop bottlenecks?

and

B.) Why is my laptop heating up so fast? It seems as though even if I set the temperature higher it will only mean a few extra minutes of gameplay, right?


By the way I'm not sure if this is useful information, but as soon as I exit out of the game my temperature drops rapidly. 2 minutes out of game and it went from 78 to 55.

 

If the CPU is at 78C, how hot is your GPU?

Clean your laptop out and replace the thermal paste if you have to. It's not rocket science and there are lots of guides all over the internet if you feel uncomfortable doing this. If you think you don't have to do this ever then you will keep running into problems caused by too much heat.

As soon as you quit or ALT+TAB out of a game, the core temperatures will drop instantly so what you are seeing after quitting a game is normal.

 

Did he really?

Howd that work out for him lol?

 

Could anyone point me in the direction of a good guide to cleaning out my m11x? It has never been cleaned before and I would also like to replace the thermal paste, however I have no idea what that even is or where to begin. I'm using google at the moment but it's not always the most reliable. Thanks!

 

Just to inform you guys, i also experience strange latency things on my M17x R2, i think i recall some other postings on the net also referring to latency issues in Skyrim. so i do not think these issues are especially related to our beloved M11's