Dell XPS Crashing Issues

[Eleathiell]

Hey guys, im currently running Diablo 3 on a Dell XPS 15 L502X, i frequently experience game crashes, and i am forced to turn my PC off by the power button, i thought i had pinpointed it to crash in certain areas of the game, but i was proved wrong, i have tried every solution blizzard have suggested and nothing, reinstalled with the disk, completely got rid of the beta, running it as administrator etc...


Aswell as this, i experience insane lagg at times, considering i have a Nvidia GT540m 2gb dedicated and am having to run everything on low with Low FX ticked, AA off and set the max foreground and background FPS to 40, and still get shockingly low frames at times, anywho, heres the speccs of my computer:
Intel Core i5-2540m CPU @ 2.60Ghz (Can overclock to 3.40Ghz i believe, have never overclocked though since it gets pretty hot by itself anyway)
This being said, i have tried to install a temperature monitor, and the nvidia monitor seems to give me a bluescreen all the time, which is garbage...
6GB Ram
Intel HD Graphics
Nvidia GeForce GT540m 2GB Dedicated (Game always runs on the Nvidia card and not the HD graphics)
System Rating of 5.2, Computer is fully updated etc, with latest drivers for my GT540m
Already tried to make a ticket to blizz and they just directed me to a support link, which ive already been on and tried everything


Hope you guys can be of help, sorry for the essay haha^^

[Armor_Biff]

Have you tried disabling the foreground FPS setting ? Because I heard its buggy.

[Eleathiell]

Yep, started out with no limits on the FPS, then got told that limiting it to 40 should improve the FPS

[Tilitoon]

Sounds like an overheating issue or something like that. Do you experience artifacts on screen while playing or only BSOD and crashes ? Are your fans spinning like crazy ? You should use a good temperature monitor like HWMonitor or RealTemp.

Meanwhile, my experience with the frame limiter option has been bad, it seems buggy. The best way to limit the framerate is to activate v-sync. If you have less than 60 fps you will be capped to 30 though. Also, what make you think you are running on the dedicated video card, if you have optimus it may cause problems and run on HD graphics instead.

[Eleathiell]

Ive tried to install the Nvidia monitor, and i just get a BSOD whenever i try to start it, so it doesnt allow me to even check my temperature, just installed HWMonitor and got a ton of temperatures, are there any specific areas i should be looking at? the graphics card? battery? processor? Also, i only tend to get the BSOD for the nvidia monitor, but occasionally whilst playing diablo, and how do you mean by artifacts? If you mean graphics that arent meant to be there, then nope^^

Well, whenever i started diablo i chose "run with processor - High Performance Nvidia processor (Default)", but i just looked up how to check the whole optimus thing, and it said to change the preffered graphics processor on the Nvidia control panel to Nvidia, but it was at that already so im not sure if that will make any difference, ill give it a try as soon as i can log on-_-

[Tilitoon]

just installed HWMonitor and got a ton of temperatures, are there any specific areas i should be looking at? the graphics card? battery? processor?

CPU (shouldn't be higher than 75 degrees while playing the game)
GPU (shouldn't be higher than 85 degrees while playing the game)

As a side note, I had a Dell XPS M1730 and the GPU died because of overheating. This was a common issue on these models. They released a BIOS update later on that allowed the fans to spin at the proper level, and thus reducing the temperature by almost 10 degrees. Laptop coolers aren't a bad idea either.

I'll wait to see the temps before jumping to a conclusion, but if you already reinstalled the game and did pretty much everything Blizzard told you to, it may well be a hardware problem.

[Eleathiell]

Prepare to be shocked haha, both of them were reaching around 95-99 degrees celsius at its maximum
My CPU is at 84 degrees just on idle with no games open an just this internet page open right now, and the GPU is on 65-69 degrees (If i have these the correct, im abit of an amateur at computers) the Nvidia card is at 65-69 degrees on idle and the i5 processor is the 84 degrees on idle, both are 95-99 though whilst diablo is open

[Tilitoon]

Too hot... what is happening is your CPU is throttling, meaning that when it reaches a certain temperature, it downclocks itself to self protect your system from bursting into flames (ok maybe not that dramatic but stil...). So yea, you are currently murdering your components. Not sure how comfortable you are with computers but you would need to first update the BIOS, then take your laptop apart and remove dust, then remove the heatsinks, apply new thermal paste and use a laptop cooler. Otherwise if it's still on warranty you can return it because there is something wrong with it.

[Eleathiell]

Yeah its 21 days left of the warranty, so ill take it back and ask them to sort it out, would they be willing to give me a refund? If so i would probably end up switching to a Macbook Pro, sounds like it is fixable and seems to be the problem, however even if that is the problem, sometimes when i am playing Diablo it crashes after 10 minutes of play? and surely it doesnt heat up that quickly and cause such damage, because it seems to be random if / when it crashes, i have checked and i now know that it always crashes on the Cathedral Level 4 in act one, since ive tried to get through it 3 times and it crashes^^

[droppin]

I have some problems like that, but it happens seemingly randomly. This afternoon d3 was working fine, but when I came back at like 7ish my fans were blowing like crazy. No idea what changed but sometimes my card cranks up for no reason other times it's silent.