Hello everyone.

I made a Reddit post here detailing a few grievances I have experienced with my XPS 15 9560, and I would like to focus on the last bit because that is where I am stuck at right now.

After reading about throttling, undervolting, etc, I proceeded to do an undervolt/repasting combo for my machine. I have done this many times in the past and know the associated risks, so I took every precaution when doing this. After the repasting was done, I tested my XPS which was performing loads better than before the repasting and the CPU temperatures were a lot lower than before the repasting. However, after some 10 minutes of some light gaming, the screen went pitch black but the fans kept running. After a short while, I went ahead and turned it off and on back again, only to be greeted by 2 amber lights, 1 white light, indicating a CPU failure. I left the laptop alone through the night and tried turning it on again in the morning.

(Small note: I do not have a battery installed because the original one was swollen and I had to remove it. Therefore, this had been a desktop laptop for a few months).

When I tried turning it on first thing in the morning, the lights were showing 2 amber lights, 4 white lights (RAM failure). The fans did not run this time. I opened it up, fidgeted with the RAM sticks (2x16) until the fans finally ran for a few seconds when I turned it on. The error lights went back to 2 amber, 1 white. I decided to do yet another repaste job, just to check my work as well as any sort of damage on the motherboard (no physical damage I can notice). I put everything in place back again and turned the laptop on, 2 amber lights, 4 white lights again, which is what has been happening ever since it stopped working.

Now, I am no expert, but it would seem that something broke off in the motherboard as a result of the 10-minute gaming session. The odds of both RAM sticks and/or the CPU suddenly getting damaged after running fine for a while seem low.

For the record, the only thing I changed in ThrottleStop/FIVR was the undervolt settings. I did not change or remove any temperature limits whatsoever. CPU and Cache were at -100 mV and IGPU was at -50 or -60 mV, can't remember right now.

I can't think of a reason why this happened. I was planning of padding the VRMs after a couple of days and now I am regretting not having done that right away (if that is the piece that failed).

Thoughts?