Alienware M18x GPU Cooling Design

[AssimilatorX]

Aye! U R right . Cooling the vram is not pressing isue it mostly stand for 1300Mhz EZ without cooling. I have not checked but i sore they had some reference standard up to that XXX it must work stable. The pressing issue is the GPU cooling m17x GPU cooling is relatively not bad but is lack of proper design. Since the highest gpu is 5870 for m17x dell had no interest to do anything. R3 housing a single 6970M performs similar than 2 5870 not really point to go for single.

[mw86]

Aye! U R right . Cooling the vram is not pressing isue it mostly stand for 1300Mhz EZ without cooling. I have not checked but i sore they had some reference standard up to that XXX it must work stable. The pressing issue is the GPU cooling m17x GPU cooling is relatively not bad but is lack of proper design. Since the highest gpu is 5870 for m17x dell had no interest to do anything. R3 housing a single 6970M performs similar than 2 5870 not really point to go for single.

there is a point to get a single 6970m the R3 M17x having one gpu you don't have to deal with crossfire problems (there aren't really any but microstutter and that's not a big deal), its lighter than the R2 and supports the 2nd generation I7 chipset, faster and more amounts of ram and sata 3 hard drive support. So getting an R3 is a nice powerful portable package that doesn't have crossfire issues. R2 has the RGB display and fully unlocked tdp on CPU with xm first generation I7 chips.

[AssimilatorX]

I know the tech works behind R3, i mean for me is no point only i find one attractive element 16GB of ram when you dealing with Hyper-V or vmware it could come handy. Personally i much prefer dual grafics (remembe my 1st one 2xVoodoo2 24MB from Diamond) soon we going to hit 4gb on a single card.

[AssimilatorX]

There are advantaged on both side. Who goes for what is a personal issue (preference)... LOL

[mw86]

Merged into a new thread/topic, I encouraged the discussion I apologize... that was my first move of a bunch of posts I see how it helps organize the forum. Back on topic I will be using the IC diamond on my GPUs and CPU on my incoming M18x it will be the second one I repaste with it so I get a little practice before hand. I believe I am going to try a thicker layer of IC Diamond over the various places Dell has use pads on the video cards to see if all temps can be dropped on the GPUs.

[Jimbo]

You could try this stuff - Arctic intros the G-1 'thermal glue' | News | TechConnect Magazine

[mw86]

Maybe someone can try it and compare it to others I may buy son to try not sure though. Nice find Jimbo.

[Michael]

A little OT but i found it funny.
A tech came in today to replace a motherboard in my work HP ProBook 6540b laptop.
I was surprised to find that HP bundles a Shin-Etsu thermal paste with their motherboards and even more surprised when i saw the tech squeeze the whole freaking tube on top of the CPU before putting the heatsink on it. I didn't even start the argument because i knew i'd lose my time there

[mw86]

That just proves HP doesn't know how to apply paste check my picture in the IC Diamond thread... There I show an HP motherboard 2 years in with core 2 quad 2ghz with a glob of paste over the CPU... Check it out its scary looking... It was probably worse at your work with that tech.

[AssimilatorX]

You could try this stuff - Arctic intros the G-1 'thermal glue' | News | TechConnect Magazine

Nice find apart from one thing, it says "glue" is there any chance it can be removed safely??? It happened with me a few times OEM paste burned into the cpu "nicely" gluing the heat sink and cpu as one ... when i tried to remove the heat sink, it just ripped the cpu off without i could open the zif socket. If you know you never going to touch it is good, but you cannot be sore.