Alienware 13 R3 Laptop constantly overheating

[Fisto, He-Man's treuer Kumpan]

Hey guys,

i've had some serious problems with my gaming laptop for some time now. It's an Alienware 13 R3 that i bought back in mid 2017. Here are the main specs:

- Intel i7-7700HQ
- 32 GB RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060
- Windows 10

It worked perfectly fine for about half a year, but then i noticed it starting to get really warm when playing more recent games. The hardware is perfectly capable of running all my games super smooth, but there seems to be something really wrong with the cooling. HWinfo shows, that the CPU heats up to almost 100 °C within just a few minutes of playing and then the damn thing just shuts down and goes dead.
The really bad thing is: It does it even with really old games now. Just recently I was playing "Just Cause", which is a game released in 2006, and the piece o' ♥♥♥♥ still overheated and shut down!
A gaming laptop from 2017 can't run a game from 2006 without shutting down due to CPU overheating!

Now I know that this is not a problem with the hardware itself. During the first months it ran Crysis 3 and Doom 2016 perfectly smooth without any overheating. Currently I am able to sort of compensate the problem with two external cooling units and speeding up the internal fans with HWinfo. Testing it recently again, the hardware was able to run Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019 and Far Cry 5 with almost maxed out grafics without any performance drops, but as soon as i take away the external cooling units, the CPU temperature shoots towards the sky and the thing dies again within minutes.

I already disassembled the thing twice, cleaned all the fans, applied new thermal paste and basically removed every little piece of dust i could find in there. There was no sign of any damaged components as well, so I'm really running out of ideas what causes the overheating.
I don't know if this thing is just so poorly constructed that the overheating is more a mechanical problem and the air flow can't be vented properly, or if something went wrong with the hardware over time. Btw i never changed anything concerning the CPU (Overclockoing, Undervolting, etc.).

So now a couple of minutes ago, I wanted to play CS:GO without the external cooling units and guess what, shut down after not even two rounds!!!
And now I've had it.

Since all my actions seemed to be in vain, the only remaining step i see here is to contact DELL support and have them sent someone over to take a look at it.
Is there anybody out there who had similar problems (especially with the Alienware 13 R3) or with any idea how to deal with this problem?
Any help is greatly appreciated!

[Raoul]

So fans working fine, replaced the thermal paste and still overheating.. Maybe play around with system cooling policy and maximum processor state in power options and see if you can get it to at least stop shutting down but I would think contacting DELL might be the way to go.

[mtono]

can you undervolt the thingys in your laptop? (cpu/ gpu)

[_I_]

contact asus for rma
may be a damaged heatpipe

heatpipes are not just copper bar/tube, they have a fluid/gas aind porus foam in them
if the gas/fluid leaks the pipe will no longer conduct heat

[Fisto, He-Man's treuer Kumpan]

For now I tried undervolting the CPU with ThrottleStop.
I decreased by 100 mV and tried CS:GO again without external cooling.

No shutdowns at all, after roughly an hour of playing the game.
So to anyone with similar problems, I can recommend downloading ThrottleStop, then watch this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfIxf73RGEg

and simply do what the guy tells you. It was pretty fast and easy to do.

The CPU still gets pretty hot though. We'll see how it's gonna be with some recent games.

Anyways, thx for all the advice so far!

[TheGerman]

So, this worked a little. I went to 140under. The best thing I did though is replace my paste on the CPU/GPU with the IC Graphite thermal pad. No more stinking paste! this thing works great! take the laptop apart and clean both CPU/GPU well with a toothbrush and lightly scrub. After that just buy one 30mm thermal pad and it will be enough to fit on both CPU/.GPU. I went from 83-84c to 64-66'ish. You can barely hear the fans anymore!! I was amazed. Just take your time cleaning the GPU (CPU is easy to clean). 10 bucks on EBAY or Amazon but worth every penny.