XPS 15 L502x fan noise

Hi,

Welcome to the community

Apologies for the inconvenience. I will be glad to help you with the XPS laptop. Lets wait for the replacement computer and see if it will have the same fan noise. Feel free to add me as a friend by clicking my username. Send me the service tag thru private message so I can further investigate the issue.

Regards,

It requires a replacement.Please take it to the service provider.

I have recieved a replacement so far so good.

That's good news!

Feel free to post back here in the community for any concerns. Thank you

Sure glad jorgeo was lucky enough to have this issue arise during warranty coverage! Sounds like a stellar and most convenient fix!

Not everyone is so lucky. I find it odd that later in the very same week of my warranty's expiration, my fan became noisy making a strange sound (sounds like bearings are causing the noise) and I have had overheating problems ever since. I wish it would have acted up a few days earlier, or I wish that my fan wasn't rigged to fail after 367 days.

As far as PC's & PDA's, I've never purchased anything BUT a Dell in my entire life, next time, I think I'll be switching.

I'm so tired of this computer I do not know what to do! I'm having this same issue, Dell refuses to replace the unit, they keep trying to repair this machine, I believe this issue cannot be repaired because it's not the fan, it's some malfunction with this system. Dell has almost replaced every part on this computer, but they will not send me a new machine.   I believe that this is not fair and I have warranty. Someone please help....

I'm an IT consultant with 15 years of experience, and have used almost all brands of laptops for personal and from company-provided and this Dell is a nice piece of equipment that is probably built with a bad batch of fans (from all the complaints I see on the web - no excuse, QA should be better) but I will never buy a Dell for personal use anymore because of the crappy consumer support model they have (here in Canada anyway).

I called their customer support for the fan noise and they asked me to describe the exact sound, they insisted that I was complaining about a fan speed noise and that my fan is constantly starting up because of programs loading the CPU/Mem but that was NOT my complaint. It was the crappy fan that sounds like it's gonna spin out of it's bearing on LOW speed.

The tech logged onto my computer remotely, installed some tools, asked me if I can make them hear the sound of the fan over the phone, asked me if I was hearing the fan noise when the speed of the fan was at Maximum but I kept mentioning that the fan noise, the cracking noise and the unbearable noise was when the fan ran on LOW speeds, and it disappeared when the fan went to a higher speed.

I'm a techie and I RARELY complain but when I know what I'm talking about and the support rep on the other end is just following a script without acknowledging that its their product has a bad part, I don't waste my time, I move on and take my business elsewhere.

I ended up letting this go because it was so time consuming and I did not think it was going anywhere. Now I live with this crappy fan cracking everyday and every time the fan makes the noise I reaffirm to myself that I'll never buy a Dell laptop again. I've had it for about 14months now and already thinking of selling it and buying another laptop because I can't stand the noise anymore.

Actually, you will be surprised how long Dell didn't provide any support for the issue. I have the Dell XPS l502x, too and already a year I'm looking for solution, but most of the replies provided by Dell finih after leting people check theis systems. You willl probably get recommednadtion to use speedfan or other additional software - forget they will not work with DELL, too. My best choice is the recommendation to chnage to the newest BIOS. Believe me since A09 is doesn't matter. So if you do not like the noise will recommend just to change the machine, beacuse after a year you will see that the fan problem only escalate and DELL actually will not provide any support on the issue. It seems that  their are more than 500 issue on hte topic in the forum...

I have a mechanical problem, not a software problem. My fan is noisy because its not sitting tight. It sounds like a roulette table when the ball is jumping from one number to the other.

I have similar problems with my laptop, so posting here on your thread...hoping that someone will respond..:-) 

My laptop was heating up a bit too much (temperature above 90’s in normal load, and sometimes shutting down after hitting 100C), so I finally decided to open up my Dell XPS 15 (L502X) and replace the thermal paste. I have few questions:

When I opened it up, apart from the thermal paste on the cpu (i7-2630QM) and gpu (Nvidia GT-540 2gb), there were several white pads, and one grey pad. The grey pad was above the motherboard HM67 chip. This is the first time I ever saw a heat sink with thermal pad needed to cool down the motherboard. Or am I missing something? And what are all these small white pads? They seem to be covering different chips on the motherboard. Does anyone know the width of these white pads, and grey pads? Are all of these thermal pads to conduct heat? Or some are meant to block heat? I think the white ones are meant to block heat, but I may be wrong.

Anyhow, after replacing the thermal paste (didn’t do anything with the pads, since I wasn’t expecting to see them anyway), the temperature of CPU and motherboard remains in 80’s C, and GPU in 70’s C under normal load (20 browser tabs, and some MS Office work alongside). So, although it is not in the dangerous zone (90s and above), it is still quite warm for not so intensive tasks. I have cleaned the heat sink, and fan etsc also. I also used good quality thermal paste (CoolerMaster Gel Maker Nano). And the the fan still works in an annoying manner with bursts of sounds, instead of constant sound. It is very annoying, and I rather have the fan working the whole time than these annoying bursts (fan on, fan off, fan on, fan off, and goes on like this constantly). Any solution to fix this?

I am also considering downgrading to I5-2540M (lower TDP, and dual core), but its not worth it if the fan is going to behave in similar manner. Please share your experience if you use any other CPU on this laptop. I don’t think the GPU is replaceable on this one?

I have narrowed down the annoying fan noise problem. It is something to do with hard disk. My XP215 (L502X) came with a 750 GB WD 7200rpm hard disk. I created an image of my system on a portable drive, and restored the image on a 500 GB Hitachi 7200rpm, and well, the fan noises were gone. I don’t know how and why, but the fan behaves much better. To make sure that it is something to do with hard disk, I used the same system image to restore Windows on another 500GB hard disk (5400rpm), and the fan noises were back on that one. So, the only hard disk (among the three that I have) without fan noises is the Hitachi 500gb 7200rpm. I can’t explain why is it so. It is not a Windows issue, since I used the same system image, and did not re-installed a fresh Windows 7. Maybe some sort of software incompatibility with some hard disks, or something else.