7900GS Recall or Replacement Thread - Page 2  

I agree with you 100% overclocking anything, esspecially in a laptop is just asking for trouble. I have never once messed with any of my settings on my e1705 however. The card went bad simply by standard gaming use. I treat my laptop like a baby because I know I can't afford another one and accidental or normal wear and tear were not covered in my 1 yr warranty. My laptop looks nearly as good as it did the day I bought it. I don't even use the keyboard and touchpad I use a bluetooth keyboard and a bluetooth mouse so I only even touch the thing to shut it off and put cd's in and out. a few times I've used it on my lap but i mean rarely... and when it's on my desk i keep it raised off the table so there's air getting underneather it.

The card just gave out it's always ran crazy hot, you always would have to have it lifted off the surface of a table or it would get so hot it hurts to touch the bottom of it. In my honest opinion, the 7900gs is not a card capable of a single heat pipe design. It's obvious dell tried to save a few bucks by cutting corners and not giving all the 7900 series cards the dual heat pipes, i truly belive that single heat pipe is the reason why this card is having so many problems, mine started going bad during a gaming session, I got the BSOD and felt under my comp and it was burning hot. I think that it was just the final straw for the poor card. The thing was cooking in there for over a year and it couldn't take it any more.

I really think thats why all these laptops are suddenly going bad now a lot at the same time. we;re the hardcore gamers who use the GPU the most, you'll see casual gamers come next in a few months no doubt. this problem will only get worse the linger it goes.

A good rule of thumb with computer compnents is, heat can reduce the life of a component by more than half and these card failures prove it. It shows that dells laptop design for these computers was not sound and they should take responsibility and fix them. It's not like they can't afford it...

Ya yesterday I bought a fx2500 for 125 bucks shipped so hopefully I wont have any trouble installing it.

I just put in the FX2500M I got off ebay for 125 shipped, the heat pipe was bent a tad and a couple of the fins were squished together but i go it bent back to close enough and pulled apart the fins, it will work fine though.

But ya I put it in and it works great, games run faster and I love it. and you cannot beat the price on these. It's the same thing as a 7900GTX, those sell for 300-400 bucks! The only thing better for a laptop without going and buying a brand new gaming rig is a 7950 which are wayyy expensive. but they also make a FX3500M which is the same as the 7950 and costs less but are harder to find.

The install was pretty easy, there is a absolutly fantastic guide for it at this link:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Case-St...00.4187.0.html

and here is dells guides as well, for the 9400 but is the same as the e1705 pretty much, the e1705 guides are only the few things that are different from the 9400, all the in depth stuff is in the 9400 guides. here's the link.

http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...n/sm/index.htm

One thing though, you really should take apart the back plate on the video card and add some thermal grease to the memory on the card. They use a tape and it's thick and the plate doesn't push down on the memory well enough without the tape on there, so what I did was I added some thermal grease inbetween the plate and the thermal tape just to increase the heat disapation to the plate. I also did the same thing for the chipset. The CPU had regular thermal grease on it, I took it off and put some new stuff on there. That combined with the extra heat pipe on the fx2500 has made a difference. I used to run up to 77c and now I ussually stay below 70c for my GPU. The CPU still gets up to 70 though but it'll be ok. The cool thing is you can replace that as well.

I love the dell 9400/e1705 series laptops, I really do they are fabulous laptops. What I DON'T love is the fact that Dell now knows that it unfortunatly (probably without knowing) used the 7900gs and gave it only 1 heat pipe. It obviously needs two, the cards are cooking in there. Now that the cards are dying left and right they should step up to the plate and issue a voluntary recall to replace these cards with one that isn't prone to failure due to prolonged exposure to unsafe high temperatures, warranty or not, or at least extend the warranrty as pertaining to laptops with the 7900GS for an extra 2 years or something without charge.

The fact that they know this and still charge us $408 for the same faulty card just baffles me. This seriously makes me very very uneasy about ever buying a dell again... This isn't a question of warrantys or not buying the extended warranty or whatever it's a question of ethics, the right thing to do is admit that thier cards are not designed properly for that system and replace them when they go bad or issue a volutary recall. at the cary least we should be given a very low price for a replacement part...

Your missing the point lol, I shouldn't HAVE to buy a extended warranty to be treated right lol... man... When I buy something, I expect it to be free of inherent design flaws. When you go buy a new car and they find out that a portion of them have for instance a failing starter, they issue a recall, all cars with this get it fixed under warranty or not because this was an unacceptable inherent design flaw.

The 7900GS has an inherent design flaw that should be fixed, and just because they are waiting till everyone's 1yr warranties are over before admitting it doesn't mean we should not get ours fixed. Understand?

lol, I guess you're all either college kids and your mommies and daddies give you all the money you want.

Truth us I bought this laptop off a friend , well i traded him a new X60 tablet I got for a good deal. anyways, he didn't get the warranty.

and it doesn't matter how much it costs dell to do the recall they f-ed up, they should pay whatever it costs to fix it. It's not an isolated random problem. thats what warranties are for. This is a huge chunck of people all having the SAME problem. THEY BUILT A COMPUTER WITH A HIGH LIKELYHOOD OF FAILURE!!!! Hello??? does this not get into your little brains?

I suppose you're all dell fanboys is that what this is? w/e... I know I'm right. when a company puts aout a product with a component prone to fail through no fault of the user then it deserves a voluntary recall. REGUARDLESS if I bought the extra warranty. Am I any less of a vauled customer because I didn't buy the warranty? I don't think so.

Anyways, I'm done talking about this, I got enough of a reason to never buy a dell in the future or recommend them to anyone where I work...

goodbye, thx to those with something usefull to say other then "shoulda bought the warranty man don't you got an extra 3 hundred bucks laying around geeze!"

Maybe my friend had to eat that month, or his CC max didn't allow it. Point is, he bought a laptop that was predestined to fail. period.