Alienware M17xR3 + nVidia GTX 580M + 3D Display

Hi,

I just received my Alienware M17xR3 and tried playing games like The Witcher 2 and Crysis 2. I noticed that the performance of the game would suddenly shuttered every now and then for a few seconds before going back to normal.

To check what is happening to the system, I installed a 3rd party tool which display the framerate, GPU clock and GPU temperature on the display (OSD). It turns out that the GPU temperature rises very fast during gaming. It rises quite quickly to around 68 Celcius, but every time around that temperature, the GPU clock would be reduced and the framerate would be around 5 fps. Within few seconds, the GPU temperature will go down to around 60 Celcius and the GPU clock would be set back to its original value. This would repeat every now and then.

I try propping the system so that the back would be raised to allow cool air to go in into the vent beneath the system and it helped a little. With this, the temperature rises rather slower, but the throttling still happens.

Now, the question, does Dell aware of this behaviour? This is insane as what use is a powerful system with powerful GPU which got throttled every few minutes of gaming? As far as I remember owning XPS M1580 and XPS Studio 16, the GPU temperature would normally rises to nearly 90 Celcius before it got throttled. Would there be any fix to this problem?

Thanks.