1 Rookie
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3 Posts
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3073
January 3rd, 2022 03:00
m17 R4 - Thermal pads
Hello everybody,
I would like to ask what thickness and what brand of thermal pads I should use for my m14 R4 Alienware laptop. It's not brand new (March 2021) and the previous owner tokes down the head pipes and damaged the thermal pads. I could not find this information anywhere else and I will be really grateful for a piece of good advice.
Have a nice day everybody!
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A51-06
5 Practitioner
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3.1K Posts
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January 3rd, 2022 20:00
I recommend using 2mm thermal pads as they work across most if not all Alienware laptops. But if you wanna be safe use 1.5mm Thermal pads. I would also recommend a fresh thermal paste job to make sure everything is good.
JOcean
9 Legend
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12.6K Posts
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January 3rd, 2022 04:00
This web page has all the dimensions needed for the pads.
Ellwin
1 Rookie
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3 Posts
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January 3rd, 2022 05:00
Thank you very much! But I noticed that the laptop mentioned on that page is "17 R4" and my laptop is "m17 R4". Are the dimensions the same? Because my laptop is much newer than "17 R4".
Have a nice day!
Ellwin
1 Rookie
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3 Posts
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January 9th, 2022 04:00
Ok, thank you very much!
Mayhem52
1 Message
1
January 10th, 2022 18:00
For what it's worth, I attempted this with my M17 R3. I purchased Arctic 1.5mm and Fujipoly 1.0mm Thermal Pads. I installed based on the thickness of the stock pads, roughly attempting to use my digital calipers to measure, and when I reassembled the laptop the heat sink did not make contact with the GPU and caused it to not run. I disassembled again and the CPU/GPU thermal paste was barely making contact with the heatsink and hardly spread out. I do not recommend going with 2mm or 1.5mm, it's too thick.
A51-06
5 Practitioner
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3.1K Posts
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January 17th, 2022 22:00
In my experience with 2mm pads I used on my area 51m laptop, I made sure all the screws were screwed tight enough to not be stuck or stripped but to make enough contact. I would check again with your 1.5mm pads and reinstall them as alienwares stock ones tend to degrade over time and become cement blocks.
AquaAngel
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11 Posts
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December 26th, 2025 01:35
@Mayhem52 I just did mine today as i purchased the M17 R3 from ebay. The machine has been opened and tempered with and had nothing but issues since the day i had it. whoever worked on it before put in a .5mm thermal pads everywhere. Caused a lot of overheating, crashing and hanging. sadly enough, in the process of updating the OS "Ubuntu" the machine crashed and damaged the OS. lost everything "thank god for the back ups" So decided to take it apart for the 6th time as i had a aftermarket Keyboard put in and put more fuel to the fire with more issues. So i bought a OEM keyboard for the machine and did all the thermal pads at 1mm all around with a MX-6 Thermal paste. Laptop is now running like a dream. No more issues. i did re-install Ubuntu on it and works flawlessly. No Issues at all. so what have i learned? Stay with the OEM parts for the machine and most the pads are 1mm. some say it has different thickness, but from what i have found so far? 1mm seems to do the trick.