Overheating issue? R2 88C

I got the R2 last summer, right before SC2 hit. It seems to have gotten progressively worse (higher heat, lower FPS) slowly, I noticed but I wasn't really tracking it. When I installed Assassins Creed Brotherhood last month it overheat/shutdown after 15-20 min at default settings (strange since I did marathon sessions of AC2 on this same machine at high settings right after I got it). The real eye opener came last week when it powered off in the middle of a game of Civ 5 (on lowest settings) while on my kitchen counter, a perfectly flat, clean desk-like surface. These days I keep it on a passive metal laptop cooler, but when Civ 5 came out I logged over a hundred hours on maxed out (DX9) settings in the first couple weeks and I dragged my mx11 freaking everywhere- all kinds of surfaces; frequently even my bed, and while it got really really untouchable hot on the bottom I never had any overheating issues with that game. I rediscovered this forum a couple days ago and installed the new BIOS and the new 270.51 beta drivers (I was still running the official Dell ones form last year). Everything started running better. Better FPS everywhere. Not to mention Civ 5 in DX10 mode. Then last night I installed ThrottleStop and again WOW. I'm even able to play Bulletstorm enjoyably now. So I got curious and installed RealTemp and IntelBurnTest to track my temps. I'm idling around 42C and maxing at 83 with TS off, when it's on I max out at 88C. That seems REALLY hot to me since I'm not even overclocking. As an experiment I bumped the clock speed in the BIOS up to 142 and played some Bulletstorm. The game ran great at first, but chugged intermittently in odd spots and got progressively lower FPS the longer I played (~2 hours). When I exited RealTemp had my max at 91C!

SO

TL;DR
is 83C under IntelBurnTest on High normal for an R2?
is 88C with TS on (30 TPL, 8 Forced TDP/TCP) normal?
Should I crack it open and reapply the thermal paste?
Should I get Alienware to replace my laptop?
What are some people's normal temps?

 

Couple of things:first, you should probably open up the bottom and clean out the fan and any place you see dirt bunnies in there. Compressed air works good, HOWEVER, do NOT spray it on a hot laptop. Let everything cool down first. Second, passive metal thermal sucks for an M11x. What you want is something with a fan that BLOWS cool air up into the grill on the bottom. The setup I built by combining two coolers gives me a drop of about 20c on both the cpu and the gpu. Yes you read that correctly. Thermal take has a std case fan based setup to run off of usb 5 volt, with grills AND a rheo you can get for something around ten bucks. Get or make yourself an aluminum m11x stand. Very easy to do for anyone with some tools. It's basically a flattened "S" when seen from the side. The top edge curls under to provide a base, the bottom edge curls UP to hold the bottom of the lappie and prevent it from sliding off. Now cut or dremel a bunch of holes in your aluminum base to let the air circulate, with LARGE ones situated right under the grill and slightly overlapping it, i.e. the series of holes should cover an area slightly larger than the grill area. THEN, take your thermaltake or other std fan, and using the corner mounting holes, screw it into the bottom side of your aluminum cooler such that it lines up with holes in the cooler and the M11x inlet grill. Make sure you set it to blow UP into the bottom of your M11x. What's nice about using the thermaltake, is that it comes with the screws, two grills for the fan, and the rheo AND is setup already for usb plugin. The rheo lets you run at low speed for general work, and when you're going to overclock and rock and roll, you can dial it up to REALLY move some serious air. Like I said, 20c drop. Nothing I've found on the market can compete and I've pretty much tested them all.
Bottom line, the M11x is a VERY well designed thermal package that REALLY responds to additional airflow. Be sure to add a grill to the bottom of your fan so you don't catch anything you don't want to if its in your lap heheheh.
AND, if you're going to do some serious gaming on your lap, go down to kmart or similar and in the kitchen dept. you'll find some wire mesh shelving racks for 1 or 2 dollars. Makes a perfect lap tray to put your cooler on while you're home, or if you game on the go a lot, you can easily cut it down to give you enough room on your lap for stability, while still fitting into your backpack/case etc. The mesh lets your new cooler really 'breath' . When you get around to overclocking and pushing your m11x to the limit, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how the above described setup knocks down those temps. Remember, the two things that tear up a lappie are heat, and on off cycling (which also has to do with heat). Here's why: as lead has become more expensive, the mfg's have quietly begun using less of it in their solder. This makes the board connections more brittle and the loss of elasticity means every time the laptop heats up and cools down, the connections expand and contract. They eventually 'work harden' and start to crack. That's when you start getting intermittent errors, and eventually broken connections. The more even temps you can keep, the less flexing.

NEVER block the airflow inlets/outlets on a performance laptop. You'll fry it, so playing on a bedspread or other soft surface is a 'no no'. Use the system I've described building above. You and your lappie will be happy a lot longer. BTW, if you have other laptops that have bottom inlets, you can customize a similar unit to fit them with similar results, tho they may not be as efficient as shedding heat as the M11x.

Seer

 

Your laptop is running too hot. Too much heat can trigger thermal throttling which will reduce your gaming performance. The best option is to pull your M11x apart and redo the thermal paste and clean out the dust. You might as well learn hot to do this yourself since it's normal maintenance for any performance laptop.

Once you get the heat under control you will be able to go into the bios and do some overclocking and use ThrottleStop at the same time and really enjoy your laptop like many other M11x-R2 owners are doing.

 

yep, buy some good thermal paste and reapply it, make sure your using your laptop on a hard serface like a table, and use compressed air to blow out the fan dust, you should be good after that. anything below 80 to 85C is safe.

 

Thanks for your help everyone. The cooler I have is actually an unpowerd Coolmax NB-400, which someone left in the stairwell of an apartment complex I lived in a few years ago, I've been purposing it mostly as a lap tray. I looked it up and with the right cord it can run over USB. Found the Arctic Silver 5 from my last build, going to be cleaning out the machine today. I assume this won't void my warranty?

A couple other things of note, just reinstalled Minecraft, and it won't go over 9 FPS. Ever. Pushes temps up worse (faster) then Bulletstorm. Defiantly whitelisted it too. Speaking of Bulletstorm, it managed to max temps up at 90C. Without overclocking.

I've always thought that Arctic Silver (and most pastes in general) took 48-72 hours to cure, but I read somewhere on here that it was around 200 hours (a week+) of on time, and somewhere else that it was 3 full startup/shutdown cycles with temps coming up to load and cooling down all the way. Anyone know for sure?

Hopefully I'll be posting back later today with some good results.

Again, thanks for the help, and Webb; TS is an awesome app. Much appreciated.

 

Just finished looks like the AS knocked ~20C off. IBT on high was ~60, and touched 69 on one core for a moment. There was almost no dust or as I was suspecting cat hair on the fan or heat-sync, however when I pulled it off there was almost none of the stock thermal pad left actually on the chips. It was a real mess. I like how simple they made it to disassemble, my old 17" Area-51m 7700 was to get apart and worse to get back together. Going to run some tests on the GPU now. See if Minecraft works :LOL:

 

Do a search for minecraft, there's a thread somewhere with the same issue and a solution.

 

cool thanks

Turned Force TDP/TDC back to 16, it was slowing down my IBT times.

Turns out my temps still get up to 86-87C in game. and it's a cold morning here. Any other ideas?