Hi everyone.

 

As a big simmer I am since the last 25 years, I had lot of overheating problem with Dell's laptops I bought in the last 7 years. My Inspiron 5150 died because of that, my XPS Gen 2 burned 2 video cards in a year before being replaced with the M1710 (which is running pretty cool) and now I own the M1730. As this one is more powerful than the M1710, it run much hotter.

 

As I own my M1730 for less than a week, yesterday I did serious testing with the cooling fans while flying FS2004 for hours. The left side of the laptop is getting so hot causing me to feel like burning my finger when touching the metalic parts of the right side connector. Even by placing hockey pucks under the laptop to raise it sufficiently for better ventilation, the bottom keep too hot.

 

I turned the laptop on the side while flying to observe with a flashlight how the fans are working during a game or a sim running. The left video card's fan was working very badly. The thermo sensor controlled by the BIOS is not controlling the fan efficiently. The fan start for about less than a second, stop, start again 2 second later, stop, restart, etc etc etc. That's not sufficient to evacuate all the heat generated by the game. The middle fan is spinning continously at low speed and keep the bottom cool enough. Same for the CPU's fan. As the M1730 is my 5th Dell's laptop, beleive me if you don't do nothing about that, you are running for big troubles in less than a year. For those with a 1 year warranty, you are about to have big frustration with your nice machine. Fortunately, I always bought 3 years warranties so I never ran out of warranty with overheating problem.

 

I did some test with I8kfanGUI V3.1 founded here: http://www.diefer.de/i8kfan/index.html and let me tell you, this little software I was using on my M1710 is perfect for M1730 too. I was awared that the software doesn't control the 3rd fan and I was anxious to know if I would be able to use it or not. So I ran the software with manual fan control at minimum speed and observed how the 3rd fan was reacting. I stopped manually both CPU and left video card fans to see if the middle one was still spinning and it was. I restarted the fan manually at low speed and beleive me, the left part of the laptop was running pretty cool. No more heat. Just running so cool that I can't get any overheating problem in the future. The three cooling fans are evacuating the heat so efficiently on this laptop, but they have to work constantly to do the job. The middle fan is still controlled by the BIOS even if you force the other two to stop manually. So don't worry, run this software and you will keep your laptop in a very good health for years. During my game play, I did check the middle fan very very often, and it never stop spinning until I quit the game.

 

Be advised you are running toward overheating problem if you don't act now. After all, Dell is giving wrong video drivers for this laptop, and the BIOS is not controlling the fans correctly, so I don't see any problem forcing the fans to run low speed continously to keep it cooler. Dell offer a very good technical service when your latpop is still under warranty, but as soon it expire, you are by your own.... Better prevent now.

 

Andre.