Hi There,

Yesterday I walked in to the computer room to find that my alienware was off (powered down).  When I attempted to start it the alien light under the power button lit up real fast, I heard a small click inside and then nothing.  The green diagnostic light on hte PSU was not on and the reset button did nothing.  I tried different outlets to no avail.  So, I figured I had a PSU problem and bought and installed a new Corsair 800w PSU.

After installation the system booted just fine, but about half way through the bios load the CPU (back, liquid cooler fan) fan went to 100% (I'm assuming, thermal control center is junk) and stayed there.  After 5 minutes of idling the system shuts down without warning or any error messages.  If I start a graphics intensive game during the 5 minutes of uptime I do have the FPS are WAY low, around 3-7 FPS, and it only lasts about 30 seconds before it shuts down.

I thought I may have a GPU problem so I bought and installed a GTX 560 Ti, to be sure.  It came with a GTX 260.  No change.

Of course, I completely dusted everything, all vents, fans, boards, intakes, everything.  I removed the PCI fan to make sure there was no dust or obstructions.  Cleaned out the back vents.  No change.

I did F12 from bios boot and did Unit Partitician Load and ran diagnostics on all the fans and sensors and everything tested ok.

The problem is the back fan won't stop running at 100% and the system shuts down within 5 minutes of boot.  Also, if I try to restart immediately after a shut down, I will be lucky to even get past a bios load without another shutdown (ie, I have to let the computer sit for a while before getting to Windows again).  As far as I can tell, there is no actual overheating.  This is based on physically observing the heat coming off the CPU/GPU and their fans and on the feedback from command center.

I have started in Safe Mode to see if a program was causing this and there was no change.

Something had to have caused the old PSU to stop working.  It almost seems like the new PSU is causing that back fan to work overtime, but the diagnostic test controlled the fan just fine (down to 0% back to 100% with no problems). 

Does anyone have any suggestions or experience with things like this.  It seems like, through my internet research, this is problem somewhat common with alienware Aurora's.