Dell XPS Freeze Issue

[Boldheart1994]

Hey everyone, i've owned my Dell L502X laptop for almost a year an a half now, and my extended warranty has run out. Several weeks ago i began to notice a bunch of severe crashes while gaming. The screen and keyboard would lock up, and the speakers would unleash an awful buzzing noise(note, I am certain this is not from the fan, it is the speakers.)

The exact same issue that I have is documented here on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24N4ipebCAs

Now, as I'm an avid gamer and this crash would happen constantly while gaming, requiring a manual restart a la power button every time, I set out to try everything to fix it.
First, we did some maintenance in case it was an overheating issue. We blew out the dust from all corners of the PC's interior(which was a chore thanks to the million screws we had to pull out), and then formatted the PC back to factory settings.

This didn't work.

I then googled and tried several things, including turning mcafee off and uninstalling it to no avail and making sure it wasn't an overheating issue.

Therefore, I googled more and found these wonderful people's modded BIOS solution:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-xps-studio-xps/635536-l502x-modded-bioses-download-gpu-voltages-more.html

Apparently the AC adapter likes to give the graphics cards a little too much juice while gaming.. This would explain alot.

After flashing the bios, I found that the rig ran smoothly with no crashes, and I found that reducing my Nvidia's 540m graphics card by .15 volts didn't cause any noticeable pc performance decreases.

..untill today when I was playing The Walking Dead for many hours(played straight through episodes 1 and 2, great game).

So the question remains, why does this happen? Well, I tried playing TWD again and something awesome happened.

It froze, but I was able to unplug the adapter quickly enough to keep from having to restart it, and I happened to have HWmonitor still running!

So, after that essay I just wrote, here's my question: Can anyone figure this out? My Nvidia is running at a good .85 Volts while gaming, which is perfect. So that can't be the problem.. However, i notice the Intel Core i7 likes to jump around erratically between .745v and 1.206v even while not gaming.. This could be related to the issue, but i'll post the whole screenie of the HWmonitor so you can have as much info as possible.

Here's a link to the pic untill i find a better posting solution..
http://i.imgur.com/bVIzqXC.png

[Dr. Gregory House, M.D.]

I've heard about issues with HT. I haven't had any with it myself but try turning it off?

[Boldheart1994]

Publicado originalmente por DomCobb1:

I've heard about issues with HT. I haven't had any with it myself but try turning it off?

HT?

[Boldheart1994]

Hm, i've never heard of this before. I'll be sure to give it a go after some research, thanks!

[Dr. Gregory House, M.D.]

Publicado originalmente por Boldheart1994:

Hm, i've never heard of this before. I'll be sure to give it a go after some research, thanks!

Sorry for no response (I forgot that I need to manually subscribe to threads now). But as Joh said above, Hyperthreading doubles the ammount of logical threads a processor has. It gives better performance during aplications like rendering and editing videos but it's been known to have issues with games (Especially BF3). Disable it in the BIOS and see if that does anything.