Chosen Solution

Hi, My laptop was heating up a bit too much (temperature above 90’s in normal load, and sometimes shutting down after hitting 100C), so I finally decided to open up my Dell XPS 15 (L502X) and replace the thermal paste. I have few questions: When I opened it up, apart from the thermal paste on the cpu (i7-2630QM) and gpu (Nvidia GT-540 2gb), there were several white pads, and one grey pad. The grey pad was above the motherboard HM67 chip. This is the first time I ever saw a heat sink with thermal pad needed to cool down the motherboard. Or am I missing something? And what are all these small white pads? They seem to be covering different chips on the motherboard. Does anyone know the width of these white pads, and grey pads? Are all of these thermal pads to conduct heat? Or some are meant to block heat? I think the white ones are meant to block heat, but I may be wrong. Anyhow, after replacing the thermal paste (didn’t do anything with the pads, since I wasn’t expecting to see them anyway), the temperature of CPU and motherboard remains in 70’s C, and GPU in 60’s C under normal load (20 browser tabs, and some MS Office work alongside). But the fan works in an annoying manner with bursts of sounds, instead of constant sound. It is rather annoying, and I rather have the fan working the whole time than these annoying bursts (fan on, fan off, fan on, fan off, and goes on like this constantly). Any solution to fix this? I am also considering downgrading to I5-2540M (lower TDP, and dual core), but its not worth it if the fan is going to behave in similar manner.

Shouldn’t be a hardware problem, just an software issue

  1. Click the charging icon in your taskbar (By the clock) [The little power plug]
  2. Click on more power options
  3. Under the power setting you are using (Balanced in my case), click on Change plan settings.
  4. On the change plan settings screen, click Change advanced power settings
  5. Scroll down to Processor Power Management > System Cooling Policy (Expand them both to view the options).
  6. Under System Cooling Policy > Change On Battery & Plugged In to Passive. But after doing this your laptop temps may go up, use some canned air to blow dust out

I had the same problem with my l502x, i resolved the issue with a fresh new windows 10. I use to have windows 7 for a long time and since i have upgraded to windows 10 everithing is normal. Now and then the fan does make some noise, but not for long. It will do ok with a deep clean, i mean take all the dust out and use a bit of profesional oil to put at the base of the fan to make it work smoother. Thats what i did and no problems now. Hope it will work for you to

I see lots of really bad answers here. The best solution would be to open power options > change advanced power settings Processor power management > Max processor state. Set that to 92%. It will stop the CPU using turbo mode which causes more heat. You can also just a lower number like 80% to help further. Another option which is a bit more hands on it to replace the thermal paste and pads. As the years go by it becomes hard and less effective