M14X R1 overheating

[Youssef Tarek Youssef]

Hey guys, I'm kinda new to the forums here, but as there seems to be a lot of experienced users I wanted to ask for help.

Well my problem is that my M14x is overheating and I can't do a repaste until I move in september. Because we don't have any thermal paste here in Egypt... Anyway the temps get to the high 90s on load, and they're in the 70s on idle, which cripples my gaming performance. I've thouroughly cleaned the laptop and am using a cooling pad... So I don't really know what to do.. Possibly undervolt the cpu? I guess that wouldn't change anything in gaming performance. Well anyway, any help would be really appreciated.

Thank you

[Ninjahunter]

Hmm, to my knowledge, you cant mess with the voltage on the CPU of an M14x, but usually a majority of overheating is from the CPU.

But M14x R1 is known to do very poorly in warm weather, 90 degrees under load is pretty standard, and 100 is the point where it will crash. If your overclocking anything, you may want to test without overclocks. CPU overclocking deffinatelly cranks up the temps, and as for GPU overclocking, you can leave the memory clock at stock, 90% of the gains are from the GPU core overclock, the GPU clock mostly increases temp.

I have a couple suggestions. Firstly, Bios A03 Have a higher fan speed than any of the later bios, this can have a very large effect.

Secondly there is a thread over here to control the fan speed(more effective with A03): http://forum.techinferno.com/hwinfo32-64-discussion/65-alienware-fan-control.html

If those two things dont fix your problem, sadly you will just have to wait till its possible to re paste.

Other than that all i can say is make sure there is adequate air flow and to keep it in the cooled area possible.

Hope that helps

[BAKED]

No wonder it overheats, you're like in the desert dude ;D

What about using throttlestop to lower the multiplier?

[Khenglish]

Your idle temps are very high, which indicates lack of air flow. Your radiator has probably gotten clogged with dirt. You can pull the fan out to clean out the radiator to avoid repasting.

[Youssef Tarek Youssef]

Thanks for the replies guys.

I had already cleaned the fan, but I did it again, and this time I removed the optical drive and the ram cage (or w/e it's called) and to my surprise I'm now idling at 38c for the gpu and around 50c more or less for the cpu, and on full load cpu never goes higher than 75-80 degrees, and 70-75 degrees for the gpu and that's really rare, it's usually around 65 on load. And I'm now using the a08 unlocked voltmod bios, which is working great, and btw those temps are with the 800/1000 overclock which seems to be very stable, but temps only go up 2 or 3 degrees at 830. So yeah, it's kinda fixed. If this might help other people, I could do a thread regarding the steps that I've taken to get these temps. And @Suoah Yes, haha. But I do have a/c on almost 24/7

[Youssef Tarek Youssef]

Ok, so I have finally found some thermal paste, branded ZP Heatsink Compound. And it's "specs" are:

Thermal Conductivity: >1.22W/m.k

Thermal Resistance: <0.201°C-in²/w

High thermal conductivity, low bleed, stable

And it comes in the form of a plastic syringe with a white acrylic glue-like substance.

Should I use that, I'm a bit worried about using it since it's an unknown taiwanese brand and it was really cheap, like dirt cheap. The equivalent of 50 cents... Or 5 egyptian pounds. Couldn't find any better, even though the place I went to is called a "computer mall" and they sell every kind of computer components, from cheap gpus and cpus, to high end stuff, like the gtx titan, or intel haswell i7 extreme cpus.

[BAKED]

1.22w/mk is the lowest I have ever seen in a thermal paste. But if your current thermal paste is dried up it would improve the temps a bit

[Superjoe]

Have you updated your BIOS? I mean it is probably not the answer but I was just given the same laptop and the fan worked like garbage. The BIOS was on A03! I updated to A08 and it vastly improved the fan operation. Hope it helps.

[Youssef Tarek Youssef]

Lol, that's reassuring... Well I guess It will be better than the stock one, and anyway I can always get the better paste when I move to Marseille in a month

Thanks then

[BAKED]

I've been to Egypt, and there are like a centillion electronic shops. They are everywhere weird they don't have any decent thermal paste.

[Youssef Tarek Youssef]

@Superjoe I have, but usually A03 has better temp performance because the fan kicks on even at low temps, but I have an a08 unlocked vmod bios @Suoah There are lots of electronic shops, I'm not saying we live in the middle ages, but most of them only sell pre-built computers and external drives etc. but not computer components, and those that do sell computer components are all packed into malls, but they don't have any known thermal paste, only some random chinese/taiwanese stuff. And this one is the better one from the others i've seen, the others are sold in little sachets and don't exactly look like high-end stuff. But it sure is strange, I mean they sell all the latest components, but they don't have decent thermal paste....

Anyway, I've done the repaste, first time I did it really bad, and temps were much worse, did it again, and I can see that less is actually more when it comes to thermal paste. But anyway temps aren't any better... So is there a curing time for ceramic based thermal paste? I hope so, because temps are now alright, but not better than what i was getting after removing the optical drive. And btw... Dell does a horrible job with their thermal paste.. it was like all over the chip... and it's stuck on some of the pins, and I can't clean them well because i'm afraid that I would damage them.

Oh and my first repaste was a nightmare... I damaged the touchpad flex cable, and I thought I had to buy a new one, but I cut the damaged part and now it works... I almost had a heart attack.

[Youssef Tarek Youssef]

<strike></strike><strike>So my computer suddenly crashed when running a benchmark, and it restarted... And now the gpu isn't detected...</strike>

Fixed, so if someone could answer the question shown above I would be very grateful.

[BAKED]

I guess it has to cure before you reach the full effect. But that's just a guess as other ceramic pastes need to.

[Youssef Tarek Youssef]

Ok, thanks

[Youssef Tarek Youssef]

I really hope waiting for the curing time will actually help with the temps, as my idle temps are alright, 40c gpu and 45-50c cpu and my gpu temps on load are alright ~75 but my cpu temps on load can get to 98c... don't know if it's only a temp spike and goes back down, but this is what i got with hwinfo, while playing farcry 3.

[BAKED]

I really hope waiting for the curing time will actually help with the temps, as my idle temps are alright, 40c gpu and 45-50c cpu and my gpu temps on load are alright ~75 but my cpu temps on load can get to 98c... don't know if it's only a temp spike and goes back down, but this is what i got with hwinfo, while playing farcry 3.

How much thermal paste did you use? It's sufficient with a small rice grain sized blob.

[Youssef Tarek Youssef]

That's how much i used for the gpu, and for cpu I used a very thin line, the same quantity as on the gpu probably.

[AgentIroh]

If you don't mind turning overclocking off. it helps a lot (for me anyways) and I never get temps over 80C. Without going through the BIOS, you can "turn off" overclocking by setting your maximum processor state to 99% for whatever "Power Option" you choose. It will help with the temps, and repasting certainly does help, however you'll get slightly lower speeds.

[apt17]

I'm having the same problem. Also, is there a way one can lower the clock speed of the GPU?

[iangielisse]

Yes, you can lower the GPU voltage, this will lower the power consumption therefor the heat generated. You will loose performance though. I used a 0.95 volts as compared to stock 1.00 volts on my 6970m, this lowered the temps considerably, I did increase the clocks and memory via a bios mod tool. Be carefull and read up the pro's and con's before trying this.

What GPU do you have?

[Youssef Tarek Youssef]

An update to this thread: Having moved to Marseille, France. I was able to buy some decent thermal paste, a tube of arctic cooling mx-4. Did a repaste, and that really did the trick. My temps are quite good, about 38c average for the gpu on idle and 45 cpu on idle, and 65-70c and 75-80 respectively. Which isn't amazing, but it's not overheating at least.

[jonelanguage0]

So as my r2, this is always the problem with M14x