Dell Latitude E6400 - Overheating issues with minute tasks such as playing flash videos for extended periods?

mm ok the frequency goes up again after some minutes of cooling, but the fan is blocked at maximum speed also a 40°C cpu degrees.

so after an overheat and downclocking, frequency slowly comes up again but the fan always blow at maximum speed.

any suggested fix ?

I had this problem too for 2 months. strange 100% usage just using internet, fan always at maximum speed.

i opened my e6400 when i read this topic and i figured out that it should be  an overheat problem.

the fan was very clean (i clean it often) BUT the heatsink near the fan was very very very dusty !!!

BUT BUT BUT THE REAL PROBLEM FOR ME WAS ANOTHER !!!!!

the screws of the cpu heatsink are not tightened !!! i can turn 2 of them with my finger !!! now i know very well why i have had always the fan at maximum speed and cpu at 800MHz.

but i have noticed that when a downlock appens, the frequency doesn't come up again when the cpu is cooled. is it possible to fix this problem ?

Two heatsink replacements and one motherboard replacement with BIOS A20+ and I have no more issues with heat. I believe the change of motherboard did it, but when they changed the motherboard they changed the heatsink & fan assembly as well. The replaced motherboard had BIOS A17 on it, but A20 had just been released at the time, so I tried A20 and am currently using Windows 7 64bit with BIOS A25 and have experienced no heat related problems with speed or fan. My problems all started off when I noticed when docked my fan would constantly be running on high. But Dell seems to have sorted it all out for me, so I hope you get the same outcome. Going on 5months now and still no heat issues. Although I am going through winter atm, so will be interesting to see if it can make it through an Australian summer. But last year I was having heat related throttling issues through the winter period, so hopefully it is all sorted. There is an application you can use to return the frequency of your CPU if the BIOS does not bring it back up after throttling, called ThrottleStop.

I believe that these most recent posts declaring that the solution is to simply clean the dust, are posted by Dell employees. If you think about it logically, if dust were to cause air blockage, then the CPU/GPU temperatures would reflect that. However, looking at these posts and the data returned by various monitoring utilities, you see that the processing units are operating within the normal temperature range.

I recently have sent my laptop off to Dell in hopes that they replace some poorly designed hardware. I have, like many others, only experienced the 2.8GHz to 800MHz throttle when docked with my two 1680x1050 HP monitors. I have the NVidia 160M Graphics card.

When I initially was going through the Dell support lines, I was given the same old procedure ("did  you run your antivirus?", "have you reinstalled the operating system?", "did you start it in safe mode?"). It wasn't until I mentioned this post that they finally recommended I send it in to the depot.

I'll post again when my laptop comes back. From other posts, I am not very encouraged. Others seem to have sent their E6400s and have seen no improvement, but I encourage everyone (who's under warranty) to not take a screwdriver to their laptop. Send it to Dell as often as you have to, and make them fix it. We all payed about the same amount for these, and they're not cheap. It's too bad about this situation, because I have never had any issues with Dell (which is why I bought one for myself) until now, and I definitely won't recommend them as much as I had been.

I'm glad I found this thread! I have an E6400 with 4gb of RAM running Windows 7 Enterprise. For the past few months it's been slowing down and eventually locking up almost every day. It nearly always happens when the machine is docked and connected to a 22" monitor, though it has happened on a few rare occasions when undocked. It consistently seems to happen every afternoon when the machine has been running for a few hours or I've opened a lot of internet windows over lunchtime with media heavy content. Audio and video (Winamp, Youtube, Windows Media Player) in particular seem to kill it after they've been running for 10+ mins. 

As with the other posters, Task Manager sits at 100% but there's no discernible process obviously causing this. The CPU temp sits around a steady 35c. I've ran every virus and malware scan under the sun, killed all the processes bar essential ones, ran diagnostics, have every update and patch applied, have cleaned the machine down to a barebones version and still the problem persists.I was about to put on XP as I thought it might simply be a Win7 issue, but I'd have preferred not to do that after paying for Win7.

After reading this thread I've opened the machine and cleaned the fan and heatsink area. There was a little dust, but not really a lot. I'll see if that helps in the meantime.

Gary- Let me know how the dust cleaning goes. The reason that I'm skeptical about this approach is that if dust were blocking the ability for the CPU's warm air to be exhausted, then that would be reflected by the CPU temp. You're stating that the CPU sits around a steady 35c which indicates to me that the CPU is able to pump out the generated warm air without obstruction.

CyrusB- I appreciate your info on this. Hopefully my laptop will come back from the depot with your same success. I'll keep you posted.

It's possible that the GPU could be causing problems seeing that I only experienced this issue when docked to my dual 22" monitors. Does anyone know if the NVidia 160M sensors are monitored by the Dell BIOS? Is it possible that an issue with the GPU could be triggering the CPUs to throttle and the fans to kick on?

So far so good. I cleaned out the small amount of dust this afternoon and also updated my bios to A25 (I was on A24). It's fine so far, but the problem has been intermittent anyhow so I'll have to give it a day or two.

As with yours, my problem mostly only occurs when docked and connected to the external 22" screen. I watched a film on the laptop while lying in bed at the weekend and for the 2hrs the Avi played, the laptop didn't slow down once, even with Windows Live Mail and multiple Firefox tabs open in the background. At one stage it got quite warm and the fan kicked on, but still no slowdown. I know if I even played the same Avi for 10 mins while docked it would freeze.

There is a HUGE disscussion on this very issue here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-latitude-vostro-precision/348221-e6400-overheating-throttling.html

It contains a plethora of information and the steps many others, including me, have taken.

People, I'm going to explain this to you in simple terms: THIS IS DELL's PROBLEM, NOT YOURS.

The fact that so many people have been experiencing this exact issue and it affects a number of Dell models, it's obvious that Dell simply made some junk laptops back in 2008. This is not a cleaning problem, a dust problem or a room temperature problem. This is a Dell engineering problem. They simply did not test these laptops in proper environments.

I had a Dell E6500 that suffered from this problem. I tried a whole bunch of things to try and solve the problem, none of which worked. It was 100% a bug in the design that caused the laptop to come to a crawl (like can barely move the mouse crawl) when it was used heavily.

Guess what?! DELL KNOWS ABOUT THIS! I have talked to reps that have been trained ON THIS EXACT ISSUE and they know full well the solution to this problem is the E6X10 series.

Dell is playing dumb because they don't want to replace everyone's laptop. Well, I'm not an idiot and I worked with Dell Pro I.T. Support to prove to them this is an issue on their end. Their first solution was to send me a replacement E6500. Fortunately, the replacement was missing some critical components that my old laptop had. So, guess what?! They sent me a brand new E6510!!! I HAVE NOT HAD THE PROBLEM SINCE! The E6510 is designed very well and does not suffer from the same overheating issues. The exhaust port on this thing is about an 1" wider than on the E6500. I can run virtual machines, process large amounts of data and do everything I want WITH NO PROBLEMS.

People, DELL designed a really bad laptop series. They rushed to get to market and cut corners. Whether it's 100% Dell's fault or possibly some of the component manufacturers, who knows.... But I know 100% that E6X00's are junk. You need to fight to get a E6X10 series.

Whilst the E6X10 series have beefier thermal hardware I'm not so sure that many, if any, people need to "fight to get a E6X10 series". I bought my E6500 from Dell via Grays Online here in Australia as it was slightly used. I didn't buy the optional warranty. I have had to tough this out buying any parts or calling Dell.

Whilst I realise that some people may still have dramas, and the systems are complex and could have many faults that show the same symptoms, the key issue of this thread - premature throttling even though the CPU/GPU isn't really that hot - is fixed in the latter BIOSes.

I can run a bunch of Virtual Machines on my E6500 now, and it gets quite warm, but still keeps performing very well.

Just a quick update. It's been a week since I cleaned out  a little dust and ran a bios update and the machine seems to have been fine since, have been using it heavily with no slowdown at all. Will keep monitoring it.

I've had the same issues for the past 12 months and Dell has replaced my laptop with a new but same E6400 laptop so I'm back with the same problem.

I hope I can get the latest E6X10 series replacement after paying over $2k for this useless laptop. At this time my only solution is to have to power down the laptop everytime it slows down so the chip can cool down. In a day I would be lucky if I could use it for 4 hours.

What is upsetting is Dell would not admit to me that it is their problem and that everyone else has the same problem. They keep putting the blame on the apps that I am running.

I just received my laptop back from Dell. The service letter states that they were able to recreate the issue and correct it. The letter states the corrective repair action was the fan. They also downgraded my bios back down to A17.  I have only had it up and running for am hour so, but the processor hasn't dropped below 2.79MHz.even after running multiple flash videos, itunes, and photoshop at the same time. Will post a follow up if there's an issue down the road.

+1 ThrottleStop

I installed ThrottleStop about 6 weeks ago. I have had zero problems since then. I installed SpeedFan at the same time so that I could monitor the temperature and it has never exceeded 60 degrees; mostly it runs in the 40s. I'm sure that my E6400 could use some cleaning, but I am just so happy that I don't have to keep swapping those blue freezer packs like I did all last summer. Before this, I tried just about everything suggested on this thread, with at best minimal success.

E6400 with docking station and 2 Dell 24" monitors

And what about the fan always on when th 6400 is docked?