Alienware Area 51 Overheat Repair
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
This week we had an Alienware Area 51 laptop come in. This laptop was very impressive. A couple of the technicians played Quake 3 on it for hours making sure that the overheat problem was fixed... =)
The customer had been fed up with the laptop shutting off. It would run Win32 apps just fine but when you went to play a game such a Q3 the laptop would go zap and just shut right off. Alienware had sent the user a new video card and tried to help him but the unit continued to shut off. Then it came here.
Right off the bat it appeared to be a bad motherboard or an overheat problem. We cleaned the unit out and made sure everything was correctly seated. Between the CPU and the heatsink there was a little metal sheet to xfer heat that had become "bad." It was very dry and we could instantly tell that it was not doing its job. Often in laptops, a piece is there for a reason. In this case, the sheet was removed and a very thin layer of heat xfer paste was applied and the heatsink was firmly put back into place.
After a cople of hours of playing Quake 3, we determined the problem was heat related and that the laptop was totally repaired.
It sounds easy enough but this unit did exhibit problems similar to a bad motherboard.
An accurate diagnosis is essential here.
posted by AbsoluteRaleigh @ 9:46 AM,
6 Comments:
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At 4:39 PM,
Life Guard of Humanity said...
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hey i have been having the same problem when i play games the laptop lags and its impossible to play the game but then sometimes it plays very well. and sometimes it gets soo hot that it turns off. Alienware has changed my video card for me 2 times and my cooling hardware (not sure what it called) 2 times and i still have the same problem,could it be the same issue as you have described? this my email address i would REALLY appreciate it if you could help me. kavehahmadi@hotmail.com
THANKS! -
At 12:01 PM,
AbsoluteRaleigh said...
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Hello,
It really depends on which model it is. If you'd like to send it in we;d be happy to check it out.
Also, once they worked on the machine, did it fix it for a while?
Some of the models seem to need an annual service...
Stufing all that high end gear into a laptop is just, well, let's just say that computers and heat don't go well together.. -
At 2:18 PM,
Damianism said...
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Hello All,
I had to take a moment and post this information after reading the thread here about the Alienware laptops overheating. My step son came to me last year with his Alienware Area-51m ( I believe that is right model, but not sure), completely bummed out because it kept overheating and shutting down after a short time of game play. He spent hours on the phone with Alienware, and wrote numerous e-mails and was pretty much just given the run-around for a month. It was hard watching him go through all this considering how anti-climatic it was for him thinking he had purchased one f the top-of-the-line laptops only to find he cannot use it. It was devastating for him to say the least. One of the computer technicians he spoke with had suggested that maybe the CPU fan was not functioning properly, so they purchased a new fan, which didn’t happen until after about a year of not being able to use his Alienware. Given the fact that Alienware commonly combined cooling pads to help with the heat issue it would appear that they have been aware, to some degree, of the overheating problem for some time. So here were are over a year later when he brings this issue to me, along with a new CPU fan/heat sink assembly and asked me if I could swap it out for him. I have personally built over 30 gaming PCs and completed hundreds of small upgrades on laptops, i.e. memory, HDD, replaced parts, etc. I decided to make it a learning lesson for him and we changed the fan together. This is where it gets interesting, because I didn’t expect to see what I saw when we cracked open the laptop and removed the existing CPU fan. I fully believe that what we found has caused hundreds if not thousands of Alienware customers to experience frustration and unnecessary expense. I wanted to inspect the old fan and see if I could identify any abnormalities. That’s when I noticed, that on the old heat sink of the fan, where it comes in contact with the CPU, someone at the Alienware factory had forgotten to remove the foil from the face of the heat sink prior to installing on the CPU. It also appeared that they used no additional thermal grease outside of the foil cover either. Once we PROPERLY installed the new CPU fan, and reloaded the OS we have had no problems with the laptop besides the keyboard randomly stops responding properly, ( L becomes 3 while typing something), but that’s another issue altogether, which I believe was tied to a dead CMOS battery. Well I hope this information was helpful, and it would be nice if Alienware stood behind their products and replaced the laptops that may have been damaged do to overheating, because of an assembly line mistake. The chipset on this laptop is having issues since the overheating and has not worked properly since, and since this isn’t the end users fault, the manufacturer should replace them to avoid a class action lawsuit. Who wants to shell out close to $4,000 for a machine Alienware can’t seem to engineer or manufacture properly?
If you have had the same issue, send me an e-mail so we can include you on our list of customers who have purchased a faulty Alienware laptop. I have an appointment with an attorney who specializes in such cases who might be interested in speaking with you. My e-mail is equitable1@yahoo.com, my name is Damian. Thank you for the opportunity to share this information with others in our cyber community, and I hope it was helpful and I hope Alienware opts for customer satisfaction over company profits. I will keep you posted. -
At 6:13 PM,
AbsoluteRaleigh said...
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Damianism: We have seen several (maybe 40) of that model. ALL of them we have seen here have that "foil" piece. On some laptops they use similar parts as a "spacer" but we have been unable to find any use for it at all on this model. We also wondered if it was a mistake. Cooling systems on some laptops are so bad we can't tell if they're bad designs or accidents! Regardless of its purpose we also remove it whenever we find one. It has been a while, but next time we get one of these in we'll double check the foil piece and see if we can figure out if it is supposed to be there or not.
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At 6:16 AM,
dale said...
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Damianism, thank you for your input. I was having a similar problem with my brothers area-51 laptop. After reading your post I realized that the fan ran constantly on his machine...duh. I took it apart and realized that the heatsink compound was dry as a bone! I then replaced it with some artic silver and viola!
Moose1981@hotmail.com -
At 11:03 PM,
AbsoluteRaleigh said...
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Dale: Did yours have the foil piece also?
