Precision 3551 & 3561 overheating

This is what I did with my 7770, according to geekbench it actually performs better in cool than performance. 

I have a 5540 and it seems to be stable playing Halo and quake but I have the profile set for max cooling

Appreciate I'm a bit late with this, but there is a way to improve the fan noise / heat issue with this laptop and that is to replace the thermal compound on the heatsink (see here for the Dell instructions on how to remove the heatsink: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-uk/precision-15-3551-laptop/precision_3551_sm/removing-the-heatsink-assembly-discrete?guid=guid-4fb6fdbc-97f1-4c95-bc7d-97842d63314e&lang=en-us).

It's not that difficult, though I would highly recommend that you buy in some replacement spare M2x5 and M2x3 screws as some of the ones holding the heatsink in place are screwed in really tight and the heads easily shred. One screw I had to remove with a drill and a damaged screw remover device, which was a bit worrying, but worked out fine in the end.

Once the heatsink is off, you'll need to remove the existing thermal compound. I suspected that there wouldn't be much compound on there, but I was completely wrong - there was loads! It just must be really low quality stuff. Once I removed the existing compound using some isopropyl alcohol wipes, I then replaced it with 'Arctic Silver 5' thermal compound. Then you reattach everything together and turn the laptop back on.

What I ended up needing to buy (assuming you already have some small screwdrivers) was:
- Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound 3.5g Tube (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0087X728K/)
- Isopropyl Alcohol Wipes (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08LCKTVV2/)
- Spare tiny screws (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07GCDXX34)

If your laptop is still under warranty, I would suggest that you get Dell to do all this for you. The reason I knew to do this was because I'd convinced my work at the time to buy the same machine and they were convinced that it had an overheating issue. I noticed after the laptop was returned to me that the fan no longer came on all the time and heard that the engineer had at one point removed the heatsink. This led me to suspect that the thermal compound was the issue.

After replacing the compound, the laptop fan no longer came on at a high level all the time, which it used to do even when the laptop was idle and doing virtually nothing. Though this doesn't completely solve what is partly a design issue (whereby only a single heatsink and fan is used), but it did improve things massively for me.

Another thing which will also help is if you create a custom power profile and set the maximum CPU to 70%. You can do this by:

Start > 'Edit power plan' > 'Change advanced power settings' > 'Processor power management' > 'Maximum processor state' > Set battery and plugged in to 70%.

Another thing which I've noticed with this laptop is that the fans come on a lot more when it's attached to the Dell Thunderbolt 3 dock and drive 2 x 4k displays (even if you're not doing anything).

In hindsight, I should have returned the laptop, rather than listening to the excuses I got from Dell support at the time. I hope the information which I've been meaning to post for a while now helps someone out, especially if you are as irritated by noise as me.

I was having problems with temperatures on this same model. The temperatures were decreasing a lot after the change of thermo pads on the radiator.

Update: The change of thermopads helped only for a short time. The problem is with the construction of the cooling system. Over the last half year, in my computer was changed 3 times the mainboard and 1 time disk ssd. This is the worst model of Dell that I Had. 

@fah​ TurboBoost is Active. So you must to access in Bios-Perfomance-IntelTurboBoost- Unmark Enable and ready. 

@Milea​ Maybe TurboBoost is Active. So you must to access in Bios-Perfomance-IntelTurboBoost- Unmark Enable and ready. Dont forgget pulse F10 to save the changes

I have a 3551 that's had this issue forever. Is there any solution to the problem?

Even though I checked and precision 3551 laptop was set to Balanced power plan, I ran the command line:

powercfg /setactive 8c5e7fda-e8bf-4a96-9a85-a6e23a8c635c

This set it to High Performance plan. Then I used the UI to put it back on Balanced power plan and I noticed that it finally ran at the normal CPU speed and not constantly at Turbo speed. This also caused the Nvidia GPU to cool down considerably. It seems like maybe the power plan settings got messed up and still thought they were in Balanced but were actually in High Performance. Putting it on High performance (which was hidden) using the command line, and then putting it back on Balanced seems to have fixed this issue.

It eventually reverted back and was running consistently at over 4GHz and Nvidia GPU was overheating. What seems to be holding now is disabling Turbo Boost mode using the following commands to disable it on battery and plugged in:

as admin on affected laptop

(Plugged In  - AC)

Powercfg -setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFBOOSTMODE 0

(Battery - DC)

Powercfg -setdcvalueindex scheme_current sub_processor PERFBOOSTMODE 0