Issues with two Alienwares.

Question

Hi there guys.

I am a user and an owner of two beautiful Alienware's. One is 17 R4 with i7 and the second one is 17R5 with i9 on board.

So I have an issue with both of those (Probably I should stop buying refurnished devices).

So I'll start with the older model.

17R4 with i7 - 7820HK, QHD, and GTX 1080 on board.

I was happily using it for two years when I started to face an issue with throttling, overheat, and power drops.

As my warranty went off like a year before, I went with online guides for the replacement of thermopaste on GPU and CPU and thermalpads. I replaced the lambaste with liquid metal and it was working great for a while. I isolated everything I could and I got a significant drop in the temperature. Like on cold start it was giving me 20 degrees celsius on both GPU and CPU and the temperature didn't go higher than 30 degrees without playing games. Then I decided to play with an overclocking and it was working fine, faced just random crashes once in a while, but I could play a whole session of 4-7 hours with no issues. But at one point I noticed it start to throttle, I started to do an undervolitg and etc, but that didn't help. I noticed that the Toshiba SSH I had there and Northern Bridge started to overheat. I replaced the SSD but the device still throttle. I replaced the whole cooling system and the liquid metal, put back a usual thermopaste and the device started to freezer and crash as soon as the system faces a medium load. How I still can use it and play on it, but I had to reduce the maximum power consumption by the CPU to 70%. But this is annoying to know that the device can do much more, and I want to know, if it is possible to get a replacement of the motherboard with a cooling system, not for free of course...

The second device is 17 R5 i9-8950HK, QHD, and GTX 1080OC.

It had no issues from the start and working perfectly till now, but it has weird behaviour of turning off some of the modules on the PC when it is loaded.

What I noticed first is that sometimes it is turning off the internet. Like it shows that there is a connection, but I can't connect to the discord, or open the new page in a browser. It s just showing "new tab" straight ahead, not loading anything at all. If I try to run the Windows troubleshooting, it straight ahead( without any thoughts or loadings) "no issues detected, rate the troubleshooting", which is weird, because when there is the internet and there are no issues, the same windows troubleshooting tool loading for 30-50 seconds and only then gives something like "we couldn't identify issue". After that, I noticed that in the game if it stays with no significant load, it looks like the game switches to the intel graphics card, as the game drops FPS significantly and after starting playing again it is switching back to the GTX card. Fps remains low till the restart of the device.

What made me think that this is a hardware issue, is that at one point I took my device with me to my work and tried to do something more than an internet browser on the battery itself, without plugging it into the power supply, and it just turned off. After that, it refused to react to the power button at all. Only after connecting it to the power supply, it started to work and finally turned on. Then I started to pay more attention to the device itself, and I noticed, that when there is a big load on the device it starts to drain the battery without charging it. I didn't turn on the option of saving the battery, which will keep the battery on level of 80% of charge, but I can see how the battery gets drained, even though the device is connected to the power supply. So I assume this is a hardware issue as well.

Would be glad if I could get a proper certified help with two of my devices, even though both of them are out of warranty coverage.

Kinds regards,

Stanislavs S.

ejn63 · Answer

You can arrange post-warranty repair with Dell, or any computer shop you choose.

Before committing any funds (neither troubleshooting option will be free),

1. Have you run a full hardware diagnostic on both systems (F12 at powerup)? If not, that's a starting point.

2. On the second system, run a battery report (see below) to determine how much of the battery design capacity remains. Bear in mind that on many newer Dell systems, you must have a partially charged battery even on AC power (the system draws from the battery under high load).

To run a battery report, open a command prompt with elevated privileges and type powercfg /batteryreport. If your battery is at less than 50% of its design capacity, you can start to see issues with it.

woedzer · Answer

Sorry, my bad. 17R4 not with 7820HK but with i7-6820HK...

woedzer · Answer

Hey ejn63.

Thank you for your reply.

As for battery capacity is currently at 86% so the battery should be fine. I really doubt that this is a battery fault, as I was swapping the batteries between two of my AW devices and on R4 it is working fine, but on R5 other battery behaves the same way.

As for the diagnostics, I was performing those, but no issues were spotted at that point. I can try doing additional tests and diagnostics again. Will note the results here afterward.

crimsom · Answer

Hi @woedzer welcome to this user to user discussion forum. This is not Dell Support.

17 R4, liquid metal has to be replaced at about 6 month intervals because it migrates onto the motherboard. Liquid metal is electrically conductive, so expect motherboard and other parts to electrically short and be destroyed. Dell recommends using a paste that is not electrically conductive.

17 R5, Windows 10 has introduced a driver feature that turns off hardware function that it thinks is not being used. Visit Device Manager and disable this feature.

17 R5, when battery charge drops below a defined level, the 17 R5 Laptop functions as Desktop with the ac adapter. If Windows 10 defined level has changed, but it back to 10%. If Battery cannot hold its charge, it has come to the end of its useful life (Battery FAQ), typically 2 years, and should be replaced or removed due to its safety hazard. Original 6-cell Laptop Battery 99Wh Dell P/N 9NJM1, 4-cell Laptop Battery 68Wh Dell P/N 44T2R.

Please click on Kudos to say thank you for response from another user. Please share an update on progress, so that other users derive benefit from your experience. Thank you.

woedzer · Answer

@crimsom

1. I know what I'm doing. I took all the precautions not to allow the metal to get out from the chip surface to the board. Used heavy-duty vinyl tape around the chip and on the motherboard and some rubber sealing around as well.

2. What is the name of this function and how to locate it?

3. Battery itself is working fine. I reproduced the issue by using the same battery on a different device and using the different battery on the same device. Issue persists on the r5 with using any bnattery. The device, without being connected to a power supply is shutting off while having 70-80% of a battery charge.

Unfortunately, I can't share the screenshot, but even now it behaves weirdly. Battery stays at 80|% charge, and the context menu, that appears when hovering the mouse over the battery, states that it will be fully charged in 4 hours and 31 minutes.

ejn63 · Answer

'As for battery capacity is currently at 86% so the battery should be fine.' Are you referring to the current state of charge of the battery, or the percentage of its design capacity that remains?  These are two different things. When you run a battery report, it will show the design capacity in WHr, and the current charge capacity.  What are these two numbers you see in the battery report?

crimsom · Answer

Use key combination shift + windows + s to create Snip and share image by clicking on camera icon (Insert Photos) in your post header.

woedzer · Answer

Screenshot 2021-04-21 112653.png

The weirdly behaving system you have here on the forums, that is not allowing to use .jpeg or .bmp images... So this is how it looked like. And in few minutes it went back to 100% and was showing a "Full charge".

woedzer · Answer

@ejn63  The designed capacity is 98,998 mWh and the latest full charge capacity is 85,557 mWh. 85,557 mWh divided by 98,998 mWh gives us approximately 86%.

crimsom · Answer

You are not surprised that the on screen information says 4 hr 31 min to full charge, and in a few minutes, it went back to 100% full charge!  What did the on-board Battery Report say?

woedzer · Answer

https://filebin.net/091r7tf49u5q4fnq/battery-report.html?t=9068dwo0

This is a battery report.

What funny thing is, that both diagnostic tools, in the boot menu (F12) and in Dell Support assist, show no issues or problems spotted on both devices.

Alienware

Issues with two Alienwares.

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