Hi Guys, I am new to this forum but i have been following Linus for quite a while now.
A few years ago, when i still was young and naive, i bought an Alienware M14X R2, which seemed like a good idea at the time, as i was travelling a lot and wanted to game anywhere i went.
It was only after buying my laptop, that i it became clear what a huge mistake i made.
Dells has included a GPU temperature throttle into their UEFI that, throttles everything down, when the GPU reaches 67°C.
After over 2 years of the community complaining about this issue, they still haven't fixed anything.
Now that my laptop is over 2 years old, i start getting mayor problems because of this. My laptop throttles the GPU down to a mere 200 something mhz and makes gaming impossible.
I updated every driver and the UEFI, opened my laptop completely and made an entire cleanup of the fan and heatsinks and everything is clean and i can clearly feel the airflow underneath and behind my laptop.
I make sure to have a 1-3 cm space between my laptop and my desk and still have this throttling problem.
Attached are some pictures of me stresstesting the gpu using MSI Kombustor 2.5, setting the Fanspeed to max with HWiNFO64 and monitoring everything with GPU-Z.
After doing a lot of research on the web, i found a "solution":
There is a bug in Nvidias Driverversion 331.65, that prevents the GPUs Boost technology, which weirdly prevents it from throttling. So my GPU wont reach its top speeds, but i can live with that, it's still better than not having a GPU at all.
The problem is, the GPU now works without any restrictions and when i stresstested it, i had to shut Kombustor down as the GPU reached 95°C.
After letting the GPU cool down a little, i started a game of Loadout and was amazed, i went from <10 FPS to over 120!!!!
But after 10 minutes, my PC shut down to prevent from overheating, so after restarting it, i manually set an FPS limit to 60 in the Nvidia drivers.
Sadly, Alienware uses one single Heatpipe connecting the CPU and GPU, to a single Fan.
Is there a way to further cool the laptop? I already have a laptopstand with an integrated fan, but it didn't change anything, as the fan blows upwards and the integrated fan downwards, so i guess they block each others airflow.
Will repasting it do a big difference? As i never repasted anything i am a little affraid to do it the first time on a laptop.
I really would appreciate your help without the hate about buying an Alienware product, i regret it enough and won't do it anymore.
Thanks a lot Guys!