Emery Pearson

I was having overheating issues, so decided to use Dell support rather than crack open my laptop myself, they told me they would swap out my fans and heatsinks and unclog any vents for me at my own house for free. Sounded like a good deal so I took it, but they tech they sent initially started up on battery, and my GPUs were turned off, so he never actually tested them before leaving. And now, after turning my 280Ms, there is a green grainy distortion on my screen that isn't there when I use my on board graphics. So not only did he not check to see if the overheating was solved, he took off without even seeing if my GPUs worked. On a side note, if I use my TV as my second monitor, even with my laptop monitor shut off, it lacks the distortion that my laptop monitor has. Dell said they would get back to me on Friday, was hoping someone had an idea what was the issue. I figure it can't be the monitor because it works fine with the 9400, and I am maybe thinking it can't be the GPU which is associated with my HDMI port because my TV doesn't become distorted. Edit: Forgot to mention the motherboard was replaced as well, due to faulty USB ports. The only modifications to the BIOS were to enable RAID and disable PCIE Gen-2

I suppose your right, guess it will give me the chance to air dust every little corner as well. Thanks for the tip, I was looking for a cheap solution like this. Any idea why the over heating became an issue? This thing made it through a Iraq deployment without a hiccup, and its quite cooler here, and in the last 6 months it's just about croaked on me. Arizona is a bit hot as well.. What is normal for my 280's by the way, the second one runs fine. I knew something was wrong when the entire left side of my PC was just about on fire heh.

I have been experiencing odd sluggish frame rates, but not at the initial start of any of my games, and it would disappear for a moment after alt-tabbing(GPUs cooling I assume). r I am running two 280M's in SLI with 170.63 drivers on Windows 7 x64. The overheating seems to effect both cards, but it's the primary one I am looking at, seeing it holds at 220-228 degrees while gaming. The secondary seems to hold about 10 to 25 degrees less. I WOULD like to replace both fan units entirely, but it isn't an option right now, so I am trying to make the fans more aggressive. Right now, the only time I EVER hear my fans hit 100% is when it initially start with the computer; it's almost like they are capped at 80% or so. I recently tried everything under the sun to change any of the fan speeds in my M17, and HWiNFO64 has had more luck than the rest. I was curious if it's even possible to access my fan controls. Through HWiN, I have access to the Fan 1 slider bar, which from what I understand, should effect the other two? But regardless, I can't get any changes in the speed to save, they reset every time I close the tab. If anyone as a clue, I could use some help, my performance on my M17X is disappointing to say the least. By the way, I am freshly reformatted with my BIOS updated to A07, I can't upgrade beyond 170.63 drivers either, something about Nvidia removing Alienware from their list of supported GPUs.