Alienware m18x Woes

Hardware Hub
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Okay here’s the run down.

I have an Alienware m18x to repair that would not turn on. Plugging in the charger would cause a short. Wasn’t the DC jack or the charger, so ended up saying screw it and got another motherboard. Same issue happened with the new motherboard and ended up finding out it was one of the two 980m’s that was causing the issue. Returned the motherboard and got another 980m. System boots and was thinking everything was fine… until I noticed something.

There are 3 fans in the laptop 2 for the 980m’s and one for the CPU. The CPU fan spins but neither GPU fans spin. Test all the fans in the CPU fan header and they all spin up. So not a problem with the fans.

Updated the BIOS to the latest, double checked drivers, flash GPU bios that Dell recommended. No luck still. Decided to use HWinfo to manually make something work and sure enough the GPU fans spun up, but now the CPU fan won’t (found out that there is a limitation with HWinfo when it comes to this laptop). Did more research and the mods / staff over at the Alienware forums FUCKING recommended HWinfo for this issue. I nearly slammed my head on my desk finding out that a company would make you use 3rd party software to try and make their product work.

At this point I’m not sure if there is a minor issue with this motherboard or if its software related.

So here I am now contemplating on what to do next and in need of some ideas, if not nbd I just needed to vent.

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I guess you could try to run a live installation of linux on a USB and start probing things. You might find more then windows would.

I did this for fan control on my ASUS ROG laptop

The key was running the nvidia proprietary drivers but adding the following flags

acpi_rev_override=1 and acpi_osi=Windows 2015

This helped me find an issue and also control my fans by exposing what used to be hidden to the OS

Im not saying this will work however You can also try a windows based solution. NotebookFanCTRL see if it also has the ability to control the fans…

This concerns me can you show me the hardware setup are the fans part of the case and not embedded to the mobo?

Is your power options in windows set to an active plan and not passive?

The reason im telling you to do live linux and also other windows software is because changing the OS will tell us if its hardware or software related

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There’s a lot of things that I forgot to mention honestly, but yes I have tried using linux and a fresh install of windows.

Active plan was set from the get go, but I’ll give notebookfanctrl a go since speedfan crashes on this laptop.

(I’ll try those parameters for linux though) did not use that.

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Then its definitely hardware and the controller. Do you know what kind of controller it is?

Are you running all the bloatware alienware installed by default? One of their pieces of software might interface with their controller

The parameters just fool the efi into thinking windows is running not linux

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Off the top of my head no I forget what the controller is (laptops at my workplace). And I’ve removed alienware control center and anything else that could remotely interfere with what I’m attempting.

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Hmm okay. Well the question is (I have this issue with my Asus) the GPU fan and keyboard backlight are controlled by proprietary software installed by default. The only way I got the fan running is with notebookfanctrl and the keyboards just not backlit … I found out its the atk application that controls that’s.

Its a shame but its possible something on the Alienware software might be the principle interface for the controller they use. I’m not saying this is the only answer.

The other answer is that its hardware. What do the innards look like. How many pins are the fans etc.

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4 pin iirc, tested voltage and everything is fine there.

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Voltage isn’t the only thing a 4 pin sends out. It also sends out a pwm signal which won’t reflect its duty cycle on a standard multimeter. I’m definitely not saying go to this length but I would first see if there is some alienware software that controls the fans and turns them on

Also have you run ddu and reinstalled the nvidia drivers? Perhaps this time use alienware version… These are some of the thoughts I’d take pressing forward

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I’ve done a fresh install of windows so yes, drivers are clean. Though now that I think about it, dell support assist could be screwing me over…

I’ll give an update tomorrow, thanks for bouncing some ideas around.

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No worries. You should keep this post on what’s new or what you’ve done. Unfortunately its one of those issues nobody easily knows about and neither will techs… Its probably something an engineering team would have to sit down and look at…

But yeah try some more things its probably something simple or some piece of software that came with the laptop that you might actually need…

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It was Dell support assist… Oh my brain… This is like a 1 ton weight lifted from my shoulders.

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