The thing is it never ran this hot before and the Overheat scaling seems to kick in. It will go from 90 FPS encoding video to 17! Still at full CPU speed. What bothers me is the speed at which it heats up. It's almost instant. I suspect there is somthing amiss with the heatpipe/thermal interface.
Since you already cleaned out the fan/heatsink, it's possible that the heatpipe and/or thermal paste is losing efficiency. It would take something unusual to make this happen and I can't think of what off the top of my head, but who knows. Could be anything.
It would certainly be a cheap/short test if you wanted to try to eliminate those 2 variables. (Always do them only one at a time to be sure you can pinpoint the problem)
#1.) Get some thermal gel ( you'll notice Dell uses a thermal pad so gel would help) and replace the pad with new gel
#2.) If that doesn't seem to change much, then you could buy a new 500m heatpipe system off ebay for pretty cheap and replace yours to see if something went south there.
And even before you try all of this, I'd have to say that your temps are certainly well within reason. If it's the performance decrease that really bothers you, you could try updating/backdating to a newer/older bios version. For example, many 600m owners that play games, prefer the old A06 bios while Dell is currently on version A16!!! The trade-off, of course is that everything gets just a lil' hotter since the system won't slow things down when things heat up.
JMWarren_2003
9 Posts
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February 8th, 2005 00:00
Mike
Leo_s84
496 Posts
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February 8th, 2005 00:00
quietpc
285 Posts
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February 8th, 2005 01:00