Sspawn26

Don't quote me, but I'm pretty sure that Alienware has ceased production of the 18 series in favor of the 17 series with an external GPU.

I recently installed my new 780m. I started playing Arma 3 and I watched my temps climb to 90c pretty quickly. The card throttled itself like it was supposed to and the game started to lag. I tabbed out to look at PrecisionX and try and set a new fan curve because they wouldn't turn on. Then, all of a sudden, the fans turned on pretty high and dropped the temps down to 52c rapidly. I was able to play for a couple of hours with no problem. I tried to start up DayZ and the fans wont turn on at all after sitting at 90c for a while.

Whats going on? How do I get the fans to turn on before it reaches 90c for an extended period of time?

Do you have to flash the unlocked A05 to upgrade to non supported GPU's, ie 780m?

Parts you need are:

Flex cable- M9T51/ QBR10

HDD Caddy- XVNKP

Motherboard- GRP9C

Daughterboard with ribbon cable-YYFHR

And yes you can use previous gen processor and gpu's just fine.

The whole reason I bought my M18x was because I knew I can upgrade it in the future and breath new life into it. Kinda fun to mess with a laptop instead of a desktop. Sad to see them mess with a good thing when they could have just changed up the XPS.

I'm going to be installing a three pipe heatsink on my 2920xm from an M18x R2. The chassis are almost exactly the same. So much so, that you can switch an R2 mobo into an R1 without any modification other then some hardware.

Pretty sure the heatsinks are compatible from ealier models. Should be able to use a 680m heatsink. Right side part number is Y3WC7 or Y48TK. Order from Dell spare parts or maybe get a good deal on ebay. You also need to x-clamp, most heatsinks are sold without.