Dell XPS 8940 Freezing and CPU Cooling

Happy to hear your problem appears to be solved . . . thanks for sharing!

What CPU do you have in your rig?

Noctua D12L is the biggest cooler you can actually install into the case With 2 fans it is pretty much a Mini D15L from Nactua.  Temps can still get toasty because the RTX  card still dumps a ton of heat into the case and DELL's fan curves are meant to be quiet and not cool, so it has to actually heat up. Typically 75-78c  MAX under Load (gaming for a long while.) With averages in the 65s while gaming or 3D rendering. 

Nvidia recommends a 550-watt PSU for the RTX 3060, but the card itself is only 170-watt TDP that can go to 200 watts. So even at 500 watts, the total TDP with the i7 11700k 125-watt TDP base is 200, 251 watts max TDP. You are at 451 watts total TDP under maximum load.  Even if you were to plug in a ton of USB devices, chances are even with RAM and SSD and so forth you still won't hit 48 extra watts to cap the PSU.  The Samsung 980 Pro has a maximum of 8.49W your average SSD is 5.0 watts maximum. 

Even if you were to install a RTX 3070 which some of these systems came with. you are still looking at a maximum of 230-245 on the GPU.  251 + 245, technically the maximum on that is 510 watts of power.  But the TGP on the RTX 3070 caps out at 220 so the chances of you ever hitting 240 is pretty much 0. 

If you were to actually upgrade to an Rtx 4060 TI 16 tb, you actually gain back Headroom since the card tops out at 170 TDP.  The RTX 4070 is 250 Watts TDP maximum.   Mind you that is if you had the K unlocked version.  If you have the 65-watt CPU the non-K you could actually get away with a 4070 since the maximum TPD hits about 200-218 on average it's pretty hard to get that one up to 220 watts of the maximum on that CPU. I have tried hard. 

@TomWhite5656,

You've posted this in other Subjects too...

However, I'm not positively convinced that the problem IS power?

I too have an XPS8940 SE. I don't have as high powered card you do, only an RTX2060 6GB, from Dell and the oem provider is MSI. I too have a UPS connected.

According to MSI, my card:

• Chipset: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
• Core clocks: 1710 MHz / 14 gbps
• Memory interface: 192-bit
• Video memory: 6gb gddr6. Power consumption: 190 w

I will assume the Max. is listed. but on other sites, mine is even lower? The above is from an Amazon page selling the MSI RTX2060 6GB.

Matter of fact, check this site out, https://technical.city/en/video/GeForce-RTX-3060 and this is the table for specific RTX models:

If I'm not mistaken OP indicated that the problem was thermal . . . not power. ". . . CPU spiking to 100C under no load"

"Freezing" appears to have been resolved with an enhanced cooling solution, at least for this specific case.

@ProfessorW00d​ 

Dup, can't read, sorry, you are correct. I picked up on the 600W required mostly. Still, if the standard 500W  SE PSU and standard cooling isn't good enough, why wouldn't more people have a problem, other than when a new BIOS is installed sometimes?

I know . . . and "spiking to 100C under no load" sounds more like a very bad mount or completely dried out thermal paste. It could have been a marketing ploy by Micro Center, but 100C on power-up is just whack. Fresh thermal paste on the OEM cooler may have solved that issue.

@ispalten​ That is because the non-K version of the 8940 comes with this little Dell cooler that actually is smaller than the standard Intel pancake cooler.  Even the DELL Luxury cooler that they installed with the K version would be better suited to just be installed on every 8940 from Dell.

@ProfessorW00d the standard pancake cooler for the dell can hit 100c on boot. It really is that bad. 

(2) Upgrading the TERRIBLE cooler on the Dell XPS PC... - YouTube

YIKES!! . . . that is bad.

@ProfessorW00d​ 

I sort of agree about the Micro Center, they sold the cooler but also did something else as well. That or the new paste with the cooler was the fix.

@JamieLinux 

Watched the video. More about the numbers from a game, but interesting that Dual Rank Ram was part of the discussion too? My XPS came with a Single Rank 16GB stick, and I replaced it with 2x16GB Dual Rank. Doubt that did much in terms of heat though.

Maybe the more powerful Nvidia (and I assume AMD) cards can push the CPU up, possibly due to closer proximity to the CPU Cooler itself? K version of the i7 seems to be part of the problem here too?

@ispalten​ Yeah, I didn't understand him adding the single rank vs dual rank. As it's kind of moot.  Yes, dual rank is better in 2 dimm configs. however, you want 4 single-rank DIMMs in 4 x config due to stability and not overloading the memory controller. (this is more a whole topic within itself lol.) 

As far as the numbers go yeah performance is better even on the Dell luxury cooler and the best with the Noctua cooler. This is due to the fact you get way more thermal headroom. Heck even going from the Noctua cooler that he showcased to the D12L with 2 fan configs gives so much thermal headroom that you could restrict the fans to 800 rpm on the CPU fans and 800 rpm on the system fan and game on it, granted it will be 85c and feel like a heater but it won't ever thermal throttle.  You couldn't ever do that with the Dell coolers either one or even the lower in Nactua one.  But at the price I paid for it; if I could do it all over again. I would just get the 645LT SFF AIO CPU Cooler from Asetek and the intel mounting bracket and the fans and call it a day.  having to spend 300+ dollars on proper cooling, it would been about 200 going the water cooling route.  That should have been installed in the first place speaks volumes. TBH the fact that they pretty much install water cooling on every system going forward by default makes me feel they realized they screwed up. 

Yes the AMD GPU and Nvidia GPU dump tons of heat into the case. That is how GPUs are designed unless you get a GPU that is designed to suck air in from the case and blow it out the back.  That is why most people who had the 8940 did the custom brackets for the front to install a 120mm fan and 2 80 mm fans.  That way you got more airflow.  Anyway, I am getting too winded with this. 

The little Dell cooler on the 65-watt CPU (which comes with that one.) is 100% not adequate for it.  The irony is they didn't even give you the stock intel cooler. They gave a CPU cooler that is 1/2 the size of the Intel version.  The only ones that got a decent cooler are the K version because the base power draw is 125, not 65, even though with enough thermal headroom the 65-watt part will pull closer to an average of 100 watts on slightly higher workloads or gaming.  The only difference between the K version and non K version is when paired with a Dell motherboard. the K version can run unlimited power draw and time on P1 and P2 (short and long turbo times) and the Non-K can only run up to 220 watts on the short and 96 watts on the long. Also can only run up to 60 seconds on the turbo max timer without disabling Windows memory integrity and installing Intel xtu. With that, you can profile it to run up to 128 seconds which does help. 

I know that because I have the highest Dell 8940 scores on the xtu website using the Dell motherboard on a Non-K processor at 5000 points the next highest one to me is using a non-dell board. 

The K version would still 100% have the same freezing and lockups we would have because outside of it just being an unlocked processor. The motherboards are identical.  For example, you could take a 11700k and install it on the motherboard that had a non-K version and it would work fine. 

That could be the source of the freezing 8940 here as well.  Fortect shows the internal temp of the 8940 as 145.4 degrees F. 

@bmoura8​ 

The normal running temperature for a CPU is actually between 120f  to 175f per actual specifications and can tolerate and run 100% fine up to 212f or 100c, the thermal cutoff of most CPUs is 105c as at that temperature solder starts to liquify.