Pentium M 740 1.7Ghz won't speedstep

[elliotm]

While installing a few items the notebook abruptly shutdown. Nothing in Event Viewer, no warnings, just shut down. An indication of overheating, but the room tempurature wasn't warm. (afterthough: I was running disk intensive operations at the time...) Disturbed, I follow through with installing MS .Net 2.0 and Notebook Hardware Control, this being a Centrino chipset.

I find the processor won't go beyond 800Mhz(x6 multiplier and about 0.9 volts) without heating exponentially and throttling the cpu back to 800Mhz, while cpu temp stays hot.

Alienware tech decides to have me download from their website some stresstest app and run two instances of it to test whether the machine will crash under high cpu load and says to call him back after about half an hour. All the while I see the cpu stuck at 800Mhz and running hot (96C).

This doesn't solve anything.

Meantime, the machine isn't overheating to the point of shutting down.

So I uninstall the Notebook Hardware Control app and .Net per chance they may be offsetting the overheating to shutdown.

No apparent influence and CPU Z still showing stuck at 800Mhz.

I've noticed on another Centrino I owned that it ran at full throttle (the fan, at least) whenever it was booting up or I was hanging around in the BIOS settings.

So I try it out on this new machine.

Aha! After hanging around in BIOS for a while, power cuts out, screen goes blank and it will not power back up until some moments pass.

Incidentally, I noticed a setting in the BIOS' Power Settings menu titled Long Battery Life Mode with no description as to what it does. Could this be the culprit limiting the cpu to 800Mhz? It's set to Enabled. I Disable it.

Nope. Doesn't seem to affect performance while under WinXP, normal or safe mode. Could there be a software driver loaded during boot-up? After all, WinXP came pre-installed.

I'm going to run some benchmarks and compare this 1.7 with a 1.4 I have from a couple years back.

This is looking very, very fishy. Should I consider getting legal with this, or is there a class action lawsuit revving up I can join?

But first, if there's someone out there who can help me get this thing running properly(b/c apparently alienware tech support can't) please do let me know.

 

[nomagic]

Is there any way to open the notebook and check the CPU without voiding the warranty? 96C is so high that you can cook an egg on the processor. Could it be that the heatsink not making good contact with the CPU? Overheating CPU is generally caused by improper cooling.

 

[stevty2889]

It definatly sounds like the heatsink isn't making proper contact, 96C is waaaaaaay to hot. If it's under waranty, they are going to have to do something about it.

 

[elliotm]

I would like to check out the innards myself, alas that would indeed require removing their "warranty void if removed" sticker.

Maybe I can take a hot hair dryer to the sticked and watch it easily slide off?

After searching around a bit on Alienware I find lots of horror stories. While I'd imagine this is true of any company, the tech support representative didn't seem to want to acknowledge it's possible to get stat reading from the chipset with simple utilities. I am not encouraged by this.

EDIT: Oh, and the benchmarks definitely prove CPU Z is not lying. The 1.7Ghz is indeed staying underclocked and performing much worse than my two year old 1.4Ghz.

2nd EDIT: After speaking with their tech support, they agree it's a cpu/heatink issue. I was extremely nice and patient hoping not to incite them to the ill treatment I've read about. So, the notebook is to be sent back to alienware for repair.
I truly wonder how quality control would miss something so important. Indeed, now the notebook has to be sent back and must be missed for some weeks.
Actually, this belongs to a friend of mine, and I'm not sure what course he'd like to take, at this point.
Regardless, haveing a spanking new notebook with a huge issue like this quite the disappointment. But then, that's life.
Thank all for who bothered to read/post. ;D