Overheating & Throttling Issues

[rotflcopter]

I got an Alienware 17 R4 in January with a i7-7820hk and GTX 1080. For the first few month every game was buttery smooth at ultra settings. Then around June it started lagging, stuttering or had graphical glitches in games that became more frequent. I used HWinfo to determine that the laptop was hitting 90+ C on the CPU and 80+ on the GPU, which throttled accordingly. I updated the drivers, decrapified eveything and verifiedthat I'm on latest BIOS. I cleaned the fans/heatsinks and bought a massive cooling tray to try to fix it and I upgraded to a larger ssd to and then reinstalled windows as well. I noticed no improvement in the gaming performance from all this. I intend to try undervolting or limiting the CPU to 99%, but I'm dubious of how this supposedly helps with thermals. From there, I think I only have one options, which is to repaste the CPU and GPU. I plan to contact AW support first and see if they can offer anything or get a tech to come out and do the repasting for me.

That sums it up. I just want to be sure I haven't missed something simple. I'm really disappointed in this AW design flaw in the cooling system. I mean I paid for the high-end components, but they can't run at their spec..Well hopefully I can fix it..

 

[hang-the-9]

I doubt you will get someone to actually visit you unless you bought onsite warranty. You will need to send the laptop to them for the work. If the fans are clean, only thing to try is to re-do the thermal paste with a good model.

 

[rotflcopter]

I contacted support and the unit I purchased included the on-site support. A tech came out and replaced the heatsink & fan assembly and repaste, but the unit still throttles. Just avoid AW products.