15 R3, 2 red 3 blue blinking code, problem, #2

One more thing I forgot to mention was that my 15 R1 came with a 180W adapter. I tried using a 240W and no throttling occurred.

oh, don't even mention! I had a 15 R1 that I loved (4k touch panel with the best colours I've ever seen on a display), but I sold it a few months ago. I had both the 180W and 240W adapters, and it was incredible the increase in performance that the laptop would achieve with the latter. The 180W would lead to ridiculous issues, such as an unplayable amount of screen tearing in games, and believe me, glitchy and low performance on OS effects. What? (!!!). Things like dragging windows around in Windows OS or even Ubuntu was a painful thing. Felt like the 60Hz screen was set to 24Hz.

I must say that Alienware laptops have such weird issues, and I got to learn a lot from their failures, but this has been incredibly frustrating since I humbly and simply wanted an Alienware for daily use, not to fix. A laptop from the brand was a dream since I was a kid applying Alienware's skins and screensavers to Windows 98.

I just ordered a 300W adapter to test the 15" R3, as Dell itself offers it to me when I look up accessories for my laptop in my profile. The 300W one is common for the 18" models only, so I was surprised finding this out yesterday. It will hopefully arrive tomorrow, but with your explanation I got to understand that the TDP limit is already defined, and providing more energy won't really make a difference if I won't use it. Still, better to test than only wonder.

In a few hours I'll repaste and reassemble it once again, even though I always do it thoroughly and don't recall being careless. Plus, I'll try to follow your guide on undervolting (I was using -110mv and had no BSOD, but let's try new approaches).

Thanks for your reply as well, and I'll keep you all posted on this painful but interesting adventure.

So yeah I love to talk about this stuff.

basically from what I know since I own a 15 R3 and the original R1, These are the terms that I like to describe as:

Power Limit Throttling:

Basically it Hits the maximum TDP of the CPU and it can’t push more to it because the TDP was already set, for example: If I have my 4710HQ doing a stress test and using 3.5Ghz on all 4 cores it thermal throttles because it gets way too hot and it reaches its maximum wattage that it’s been set by from Alienware (45 watts in my case).

Thermal Throttling: This was because my Fan profiles and 7 year old paste with plenty of dust was causing and I added some really good thermals pads on everything the board had, also they were 2mm ones and I also reposted with some cooler master performance thermal paste. I also adjusted my fan profiles so if the GPU or CPU started rising above the specified temperature in speed fan, it would ramp up the fans until it cooled down.

what I suggest doing is undervolting   the laptop until you reach a Blue Screen of death.

Then reduce the under volt by 10mv

so if the under volt which caused the BSOD was at 0.065mv then make it go to 0.055mv.

Then for the cores I suggest you lower the speed when it uses all the cores to x29 since it can’t handle all of them at its turbo speed.

Finally adjust the wattage to be 5 watts higher each time it says power throttling until it stops.

No Problem. I'll try my best to help you get rid of this issue. and how coincidental! I also have the 4k version and I calibrated it! Mines has been used for a while but I've done many things to increase its lifespan. I upgraded from 16Gb to 32Gb of DDR3 1600Mhz ram and also adding a 2Tb HDD inside and 4 M.2 SSD's even though there all SATAs. I also use a Graphics AMP since the 980M inside has such low VRAM but the Board inside might suggest they removed some of it due to heat issues?

btw, it's amazing the fact that you got it up to 32gb RAM. I did not manage to find 2 16GB DDR3 modules for sale at the time. I had the AMD m390x variant, which would be slightly less performing than yours, but still...what a lovely machine!! Hope yours is alive and well.
I even got 2 Alienware Graphics Amplifier right now that I can't use. 1 amplifier was from the R2 (which I should sell at this point as I sold the laptop) and the other one is for the R3, which as you saw here, is basically dead  

Fun fact: the R2 with the AMD GPU would have the same performance improvements if I connected the GPU to an external monitor or by using the internal screen. I don't even know how that was possible (since data is going back and forth through the same cable from the Amplifier).
As far as I remember, for the R3 with the NVIDIA GPU, I couldn't even use the internal screen with an external GPU, so in the end the R2 was a way cooler laptop.

Hello! Hope everyone is alright these days. Apologies as I had too much going on lately and did not manage to keep you posted, but I kept on trying having a working laptop. Still a big nope!

Just want to share that:
1st - the touchpad is causing short circuit on my laptop. If I plug it in, laptop won't boot;

2nd - I continue facing boot issues with blinking codes almost every time I disassemble the laptop, and for most of the times (besides the touchpad shorting case) what helps me is to simply connect a monitor via HDMI. For some reason the laptop manages to boot and show me its warning messages (video config not supported and such...);

3rd - as of now, I downgraded my BIOS version in order to perform undervolt (current BIOS' versions have that locked). So now my laptop is undervolted and using liquid metal thermal paste, and....I continue seeing crazy high temperatures. Fun fact is, putting my fingers on the heatsink over GPU and CPU, they are running cold.

2 things I believe could be the reason:
- the thermal sensors of this laptop are just not functioning properly, and at times I even see that message on Dell Diagnostics tool on boot. The temperature readings display from ~60°C to ~100°C and back to ~60°C in less than a second. This is abnormal and of course does not reflect real temperature readings.
- the CPU and GPU are not what are running hot, but actually the VRMs surrounding them (mostly GPU). Putting my finger on the heatsink, the GTX 1070 is actually fine, but the VRMs are on higher temperatures. To be clear, I did put new and good 1mm thermal pads on them.
Unfortunately I do not have a thermal gun, and GPU-Z points out the hot spot on the GPU at around ~105°C whilst the GPU is at ~92°C (on idle). It does not feel like it's that hot by touching the heatsink, but anyway... from my experience (which is at the same time not that deep into electronics), such components running very hot are most likely due to shorting, but the fact that the computer does not turn itself off makes me doubt that at the same time.

Anyway, I spent lots of money and specially time trying to work around bad engineering of this Alienware, and got deeply frustrated with the brand.
I think I will have my last shot by reassembling everything and trying to reach out to Dell's support to see if they can have a look at it, even though it's out of warranty. There's a 50€ cost + shippings just for their quick analysis, which is ridiculous when I think that these issues come from factory and I am the one who already got ripped out a lot because of it and don't have a personal computer for more than 8 months now.

Anyway, I hope at least my comments can help other users on some steps whilst debugging their laptops, and any replies are still welcome as I don't know when (and if) I will manage to send the laptop to Dell's support.

Take care!

I say now a new motherboard would be needed. It seems like a deep issue inside of the motherboard that can’t be fixed so i recommend you really replace it. I really don’t want you to personally keep wasting your time for something that throws out more errors.