XPS M2010 Video cooling

Hi, 

OK, this is a little long winded but it's for the best, bear with me please. 

Too bad no one got back to you sooner. I'm writing this on an all original m2010 and have gone through the same problems as everyone else, except that I had the good fortune to be working for FreeGeek, Portland Oregon at the time. (An electronics recycling organization.) And learned and saw allot in a very short time, with good instruction and tools.  

Here's the bad news.  The Chinese made Dell video cards are ALL made with incorrect solder and then were installed with *** heat paste, including the CPU heat sink. The solder can't stand up to the high heat and rapid cooling cycles of the Dell m2010. Micro fishers are caused in the poor amalgamate and the card stops functioning with multiple 'opens' in the circuitry. The combination of poor materials, poor assembly practices and worse engineering  on Dells part made for many thousands of very expensive paperweights, IE the m2010. 

The good news. If these inherent problems haven't destroyed other components in your machine there are several remedial and preventative steps you can take.  First, don't get rid of the 'bad' video cards you may be able to 'refurbish' them to a state better than 'new'.  If you got replacements from Dell then you got recycled parts simply pulled from other non-working machines and sent to you without testing. They were at best on the way out and that is why they consistently failed. 

Follow the steps below (as closely as you can) and it will (80% likely) bring your machine back to life and make it rock solid for as long as four years. At which time you will need to repeat some of the process. 

First, if you haven't already download the owners manual and the service manual from Dell.com support. Once you have them familiarize yourself with the steps for removing the video card and the CPU heat sink. Purchase some Arctic MX-4 Thermal Compound, (it's a little expensive but it the one really important thing to make this repair effective and long lived.) $10-$15 for 4gr. Plenty for future use as well.  CRC Lectra Clean (Heavy Duty Electrical Parts Degreaser. $8.95 at Home Depot.  And/or some 70% or better denatured alcohol, a box of Q-tips, roll of  paper towels and perhaps a plastic narrowish putty knife (to speed removal of the old heat paste.)  

OK, here's why the problem cycles without a complete removal of the thermal paste and reflow of the video card. At assembly the workers put about 3 times too much very poor quality thermal paste on both the GPU and the CPU. As soon as the machine fires up this paste melts and oozes out all over the surrounding solder connections causing them to over heat and/or short out, or perhaps cause other opens.  This made the techs think it was a motherboard problem, and sometimes it was but they failed to understand or admit the problem. If no substantial damage has been done, all you need to do is to remove the ***/excess thermal paste from both sides, reflow the video card, replace the thermal paste with the MX-4 good stuff, reinstall the parts and VOILA! your baby should fire back up and run until the next scheduled thermal past replacement in about four years. (that's about as long as any of it will stay soft. Thermal Paste does not function when it's hard.  

OK, here's the part you've been waiting for. How to reflow your video card. It's super easy anyone can do it but it must be done right or you'll just ruin a good card.  

Spoiler, it's done in the oven. I know, I know, sounds Micky Mouse and impossible but if it didn't work I wouldn't be typing this right now.  

After you have the card in hand and cleaned it very, very clean with the CRC Lectra Clean and the Alcohol, find a flat metal pan (cookie sheet or something like). Make 4 even sized half inch or so balls of aluminum foil (to act as 'legs' to get the card up off the sheet). Place the cookie-sheet in the oven, put down the balls so that the video card sits nice and level on them. (be gentle) 

Now, this is important close the oven and preheat the card slowly to the lowest setting on the oven, perhaps 270 or so, lower is better for about five minutes. Then, raise the oven temperature to 385 degrees for fifteen minutes more. Shut the oven off and just crack the door open to let it cool slowly, do not touch or move the card until it is quite cool or you will undo all your efforts and make even more cold solder joints. If it's at all hot, don't touch it!  

After it's cool, and you have removed all the old thermal paste from the motherboard apply a rice grain size dab of the Mx-4 to both the GPU and CPU. I use a credit card to spread and smooth out the paste into an even but fairly thin layer so that the excess doesn't ooze out again and cause the same problem as before.  

Put the machine back together per the service manual instructions and pictures. Fire it up. It should work like new again. If it doesn't don't despair. Sometimes it takes more than one try to re flow a video card. If it's really really toast, just try another dead one. Like I said this isn't a 100 percent all the time fix because the motherboard can become damaged due to the ineptitude of Dell's assembly process, however the motherboards are surprisingly cheap just as the video cards are exorbitantly expensive. 

If you get it up and running, find a way to extract as much heat as possible for longer video card life. A little $5 product from Ebay or Amazon works well on this machine. Go here for a demo. The cold air intake is in the center of the case just behind the DVD player. You'll easily see the grill for it if you look. 

That's all I have. Don't be afraid to DIY,  it really works! Just be careful after you get the video card hot. 

Good luck, I hope this answers some questions and help get you baby back up. I just love mine, the sound is great and the view is still unbeaten by any modern machine. 

Sincerely, 

Steven McCullough

Wow, that's terrific news. Makes me feel great that I've helped to revive even one of these wonderful machines. 

I messed up on a one or two points in my original post however. I recommended using a cheap heat extractor, which would work but I've discovered a better way. Dell, in it's beneficence, decided to make all their machines run nearly silent, which, one would think a good thing. However, at the expense of a good deal of performance and reliability. Too much so in my opinion.  I won't go into the justification of that statement but if you are an overclocker, you'll know exactly what I mean. Back to my point. 

Go check out the I8kfan GUI  download. It's a fan control exe for Dell Laptops (some not all) and it works great on the m2010.  It may not be for everyone but it makes my day!

Here is how I use it. First let me say that I don't care about fan noise (for the most part) especially if I'm playing my favorite 'game' Microsoft Flight (FSX) which is about the most system resource greedy game (inefficiently coded) ever invented and abandoned by the company of he who's name shall not be spoken. 

The reason this little number is so helpful is that (appart from being free) it allow great flexibility in how and when the fans run, plus it give you a system tray readout of (in this case) CPU temps. I wish it were GPU and or Chipset temps but some info is better than none and being able to read the CPU temp allows one to more or less add ten or fifteen degrees to impute the GPU temp.  

I have it set to run the fans at max RPM all the time, period. I'd rather replace a cheap fan or two than an unbelievably expensive Video Card. If you do opt for this exe, just be careful how and when you use it. 

When I'm gaming, I also use a little program called End-it-all, or Enditall.  What this does is shut down all background programs not necessary to playing that particular game and gives me back enough system resources to keep from going to the blue screen of death, memory overrun BS.  What a shame the m2010 can't be upgraded to use the newer multiple i3, i4 thru i7 CPUs. 

I have seen a few people who claim to be using Windows 7 which is supposed to be more economic of resources, I have it and like it on my other HP 2000 piece of S - - -. That laptop is newer but  from nearly the same generation as the m2010 and is nearly ragged out where this quality monster is just getting it's second wind. The only drawback to using '7' seems to be that there is no bluetooth driver available and one has to resort to using an external adapter. No big deal, but that's not 'stock' and wouldn't be necessary if Dell had ever be able or allowed to write drivers for 7. Oh, yes there's some obvious skulduggery going on there too. Don't know who or why but follow the money, I always say. Dell  management may be inept but I don't believe they're out to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to money (at least not on purpose). Anyway a few are running Windows 7 on m2010's but I have now idea of the success level or performance enhancements IE efficiency of system resources. 

So, ignore what I said about an heat extractor, the software solution works better for me. I'm running 33 to 40 CPU temps at idle and no more than 60 degrees ( C ) maxed out gaming. That's running very cool with ambient temps of 75 degrees Fahrenheit.  Speed-fan is good to for checking things out and Nova Bench will give you a handle on many things.  Hope some of this helps.

Sincerely

Steven44444