Alienware M17 R4: what a hunk o' junk

[The_Q42]

I own an Alienware M17 R4 gaming laptop with an i7, 3080, and 32 GB of RAM . . . you may be thinking "wow, that was expensive" or "wow, that's fairly beasty."  Well, it was both (especially since it pushes max TDP on the 3080 and maintains a boost of near 4 Ghz on the i7 most of the time).

 

Key word: was.  This is simultaneously the most expensive system I've ever purchased (though a couple I built myself were close) and the least reliable.  Here's what I've been through:

 

• Within a few months of buying the thing, it bricked itself when installing a fresh GPU BIOS from Dell's support site (carefully following all of their instructions).  After explaining MULTIPLE times that a GPU BIOS is different from a GPU driver, they replaced the motherboard and I was back up and running.
   
• Shortly after THAT, they had to replace the system because my Thunderbolt port stopped working reliably . . . they also tried to tell me that the system wasn't compatible with Thunderbolt docks even though it's really just not compatible with power delivery via Thunderbolt docks, which I wasn't doing (the power brick is 330W!).
   
• A few months later, I started getting excessive heat problems that it never had before (20 minutes into a gaming session, I'd be averaging ~90 degrees C . . . a couple of hours in, and the system would just crash after averaging close to 100 C across all CPU cores).
   
• They replaced the heatsink.
   
• Several months later, the heat was back.  They replaced the heatsink.
   
• And that brings us to today.  After 15 minutes in Civ VI, a game from 2016, my CPU temps are averaging in the mid-to-upper 90s, and I'm getting frequent kernel-power crashes that I think I've tied back to heat (only crashes when the system is hitting these high averages).

 

So, now I'm angry.  I tell Dell to just replace the system, as I have zero faith in the repairs, but they want to either take it for 5 - 7 days to their repair facility which has "a very high success rate," or send out another tech.  I use the computer for both work and play (and I don't even game on it that often right now as I have a 5 & 3 year old), so I can't really do without it for 5 - 7 days.  The techs use crappy thermal paste, which is likely the problem here.

 

Hell, I've even got this system propped at roughly a 45 degree angle on a laptop mount that has space underneath for the vents to suck in fresh air.  I've done EVERYTHING I can to give this thing heat headroom (I have an external monitor and keyboard attached, and I use the laptop as a 2nd screen).

 

I COULD re-paste it myself, but this system is kind of a pain in the butt.  The CPU-side of the motherboard is facing up under the keyboard, so you have to take the entire thing out to get to the heatsink.  I also shouldn't HAVE to since it was just done in freaking February (10 months ago).

 

Why am I posting here?

 

Well, I'm wondering if any of you fine people have found ways to get Dell support to escalate cases to a point where more can be done than just repeating the same thing they've already tried twice (which has failed both times).  Anyone?

 

Also, if LTT is looking for a follow-up customer service nightmare video, I have transcripts . . . I also have lots of HWInfo logs . . . the attached screenshot is from about 30 min of OverWatch 2 (not very CPU intensive) and ~16 minutes of light load (web browsing).

[blaze117_x]

I dont have the answer to your question, as in I dont have much experience with dell support. But I have faced a similar issue with my MSI laptop
My laptop was a MSI GL638RC with i5 8300H + GTX 1050 ti (Not a beefy system I know) But after a motorbike accident while the laptop was in my bag laptop started having heat issues. As the accident voided my warranty I went ahead and tried repairing with 3rd party repair shops. The heat issues was very excessive as exactly 2 cores of my cpu was hitting temps over 100C while the other 2 followed around 80-90C
When running a cpu and gpu intensive task the heat just shoots up immediately.
One of the repair shops informed me that they had replaced the heatsink thermal paste and even tried shooting cool air off a fan directly into the heatsink failed to address the heat issue. They came to the conclusion of a faulty motherboard. As my warranty was void I couldn't do anything and I went ahead and built a desktop PC.
But the laptop was usable to a extent when uised with the following tweak.

Techpowerup Throttlestop
I used this to disable Boostclock on my CPUIs. This actually let me play games and do my work while making the laptop run with base clock values in CPU
Disabling the boostclock remedied my issue when I had no options. PC ran ok and games even had decent performance  ( with little performance degradation )
Maybe They gave you a faulty motherboard the second time?

[Alsace]

Does the cooling solution above the CPU use standoffs? Maybe they came lose and is no longer making good contact with the CPU die. That's what happened to my Asus GL502VS causing it to bottleneck when running games and sometimes during light use

[The_Q42]

4 minutes ago, Alsace said:

Does the cooling solution above the CPU use standoffs? Maybe they came lose and is no longer making good contact with the CPU die. That's what happened to my Asus GL502VS causing it to bottleneck when running games and sometimes during light use

It does (I think), but the laptop spends MOST of its life on my desk right now.  It hasn't been moved much.  I can check, but I have to take the whole bloody thing apart to do so.  That also shouldn't happen if the screws were torqued properly by the last repair guy.

 

I also started getting the kernel-power crashes only a couple of weeks ago, and the laptop hadn't gone anywhere in that time--just sitting on my desk, so that seems an unlikely (if still possible) cause.

 

My temps are mostly OK during idle and low-intensity tasks, and the GPU is fine, but the CPU just bakes any time I do anything even requiring a moderate load.  Just about made me throw up playing Beat Saber the other day . . . 

[PDifolco]

11 minutes ago, The_Q42 said:

It does (I think), but the laptop spends MOST of its life on my desk right now.  It hasn't been moved much.  I can check, but I have to take the whole bloody thing apart to do so.  That also shouldn't happen if the screws were torqued properly by the last repair guy.

 

I also started getting the kernel-power crashes only a couple of weeks ago, and the laptop hadn't gone anywhere in that time--just sitting on my desk, so that seems an unlikely (if still possible) cause.

 

My temps are mostly OK during idle and low-intensity tasks, and the GPU is fine, but the CPU just bakes any time I do anything even requiring a moderate load.  Just about made me throw up playing Beat Saber the other day . . . 

Limit your power draw, your CPU draws 80W and your full power is 260W !! No way a laptop tiny cooling solution can handle that, my PC draws 450W on a water loop with a pump and 2 rads and still hits 80C sometimes...

If you cut max power by 30% (CPU and GPU) you should see around -13% performance, which is not a big deal if it allows you long cool game sessions

[The_Q42]

7 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Limit your power draw, your CPU draws 80W and your full power is 260W !! No way a laptop tiny cooling solution can handle that, my PC draws 450W on a water loop with a pump and 2 rads and still hits 80C sometimes...

If you cut max power by 30% (CPU and GPU) you should see around -13% performance, which is not a big deal if it allows you long cool game sessions

It USED to handle the stock settings just fine.  I did use Throttlestop for a while to calm it down a bit, but it's now crashing with that enabled too.  Downloading things from Steam shoots the temps into the upper 80's/low 90's in just a few minutes, and they stay there.

Sad thing is, the ambient temp in that room is probably 64 - 67 F or so (this time of year) . . . that's 17.8 - 19.4 C for my metric friends. 

I also shouldn't NEED to drastically reduce power consumption to get reasonable performance out of a laptop that I don't overclock and paid so much freaking money for.  It should manage that out of the box just fine . . . and it did, when it was new . . . right up until the first heat problem requiring a repair.  Since then, it's sucked.

 

Edit: to be clear, I'm getting crashes after an hour or less.  I don't have time to marathon game at this point in my life, sadly.  I only ever exceeded an hour or two  game session with this machine, across the course of its entire life, maybe once or twice a month on average.  That's not exactly beating on the system all the time.

[PDifolco]

4 minutes ago, The_Q42 said:

It USED to handle the stock settings just fine.  I did use Throttlestop for a while to calm it down a bit, but it's now crashing with that enabled too.  Downloading things from Steam shoots the temps into the upper 80's/low 90's in just a few minutes, and they stay there.

Sad thing is, the ambient temp in that room is probably 64 - 67 F or so (this time of year) . . . that's 17.8 - 19.4 C for my metric friends. 

I also shouldn't NEED to drastically reduce power consumption to get reasonable performance out of a laptop that I don't overclock and paid so much freaking money for.  It should manage that out of the box just fine . . . and it did, when it was new . . . right up until the first heat problem requiring a repair.  Since then, it's sucked.

 

Edit: to be clear, I'm getting crashes after an hour or less.  I don't have time to marathon game at this point in my life, sadly.  I only ever exceeded an hour or two  game session with this machine, across the course of its entire life, maybe once or twice a month on average.  That's not exactly beating on the system all the time.

Yeah I understand your frustation, but being unable to fix the cooling only reasonable action is to limit the heat generation...

[The_Q42]

55 minutes ago, PDifolco said:

Yeah I understand your frustation, but being unable to fix the cooling only reasonable action is to limit the heat generation...

True.  Dell is willing to replace the heatsink (again), but they've done that twice.  I'm concerned that all of the excessive heat the system has experienced due to bad repairs, tuning, or simple design flaws had negatively impacted the longevity of my hardware.  So I told them they need to, at the very least, replace the motherboard, CPU, GPU, and heatsink.  The GPU is probably fine as it never gets terribly hot, but it's integrated on the MOBO, if I recall correctly.  Given the fact that this system has essentially failed 5 times now in less than two years, I don't think I'm out of line . . .