[UPDATE] - the over heating issue has been fixed. I spoke with Dell about it earlier in the week & the believed the issue to be with the motherboard. Dell dispatched a technician a couple of days after my conversation with them & replaced the motherboard, heat sink & fans. I had the technician apply Arctic Silver thermal paste to the board & any other areas that used the stock thermal paste, as suggested by several dell forums & my local computer store (Dell thermal paste is terrible). Dell did this for me at no cost & without Dell support warranty. I’m on day 3 since the repair & the laptop seems to be running fine. I have stress test the laptop & still comes back with throttling of 13% due to heat, but am no longer getting drops to 0.8ghz when the laptop is reaching high temps. Temps seem to be holding around the 80 to 100 degree mark now.   I have also had the hybrid power feature start working once this board with changed. Previously I would not have my battery power be used while plugged into the adapter, while high performance gaming, however after the board change, this has started happening. Support told me that this was due to hybrid power mode that’s default on this laptop.  i have invested some money into a cooling pad for my laptop to prevent the laptop from throttling, will update this post when it arrives to let anyone of if this has any meaningful effect on the laptop.  final thoughts;  I have come to the opinion that the Alienware m15 R2 is a flawed laptop with temperature issues that can wreck your motherboard & GPU/CPU fans. This may be due to a design flaw, thermal paste used, the upgrade to my graphics card & screen or a combination of all the above.  I hope that my post helps someone with similar issues & acts as a guide for them to get the issue resolved without costing them much more than the already expensive laptop already has. 
Hello, I am having an overheating issue with my m15 R2 laptop. I purchased this about a year and a half ago. Recently have encountered overheating issues while playing Warhammer 2 Total War. When the laptop overheats, it causes the processor to reduce its GHz down to 0.8, which in turn lags the game I am currently playing for several minutes. This will keep happening in short intervals, unless I close the game or tab out of the game for a while. Processor temperatures have gone to as high as 101 degrees Celsius & caused this issue, while other times it has triggered as low as 80 as shown in my photos. So far I have tried lowering the in-game graphics to the lowest settings (should not need to as I meet the recommended specs by a lot), Manually changed my frame rate to lock at 60fps using Nvidia control panel, using different performance modes on alienware command center (fans never go faster as the laptop heats up, only speeds up when changing to a mode and slows down shortly after), updated bios drivers (all my drivers are current now), used HWinfo to help control fan speed (fan speed would not stay at full power and acted much like alienware command center), changed power management settings to performance, changed Nvidia control panel settings to performance and even opened my laptop and cleaned the fans of any dust on their blades, but am still having overheating issues when playing this game. I have read a lot about this issue over the past week and have kept reading these laptops have a massive issue with heat dispersion. This is pretty concerning, as I have paid $4,000 for a gaming laptop that cannot handle the heat its components create. If anyone has any ideas on how I could fix this issue or someone from support would like to get involved to help, please feel free to comment your ideas. Thanks. [IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE]
m15 R2, overheating issue, Warhammer 2