Question Fan and/or thermal issues and crashing on XPS 8940

T0wns

Commendable
Feb 11, 2021
16
0
1,510
I have a Dell XPS 8940 (i5-10400, RTX 2060, 16GB), and recently it’s been having some issues with the fans reviving up and then turning back off repeatedly while running demanding tasks. It’s been hard to tell,but I think it’s the GPU fans because of the nature of the tasks (VR, occasional crypto mining) and how it’s not happening during more processor-heavy tasks (Modded Minecraft), however I’ve experimented with Afterburner to absolutely no success. Whatever is happening is overriding Afterburner.

There is also, more notably, crashing, typically while playing Minecraft, where the PC’s visuals shut down and the fans crank up to max speed. All my RGB peripherals are frozen in the state they were when the PC was on. The only way to fix this is to pull the plug, so as you can imagine, it’s not the best for my data. When it was under warranty, I contacted Dell, and they remoted into my PC, took a look at the crash logs, and said “This is a software issue,” when the logs said the opposite (but were almost equally unhelpful), but it’s Dell, so I don’t know what I was expecting. Can anyone help me out?
 

T0wns

Commendable
Feb 11, 2021
16
0
1,510
what rgb peripherals?
check cpu/gpu temp? what psu is on that dell?
how full is the ssd
The peripherals are not important, I don’t know why I mentioned them (this has been happening before I got them). It’s kinda hard to check the temperature when it’s crashing (but as far as the fans revving, I haven’t seen any discernible patterns). It has either a 360W or 500W PSU, but I believe it’s the latter. Really hoping it isn’t the PSU, because it’s just out of warranty, and all of Dell’s crap is proprietary, which means I’d have to replace the case, cooling, and motherboard in addition, which is a 600 dollar replacement if you want to get proper stuff. The boot SSD always has 20GB free, and in one situation where it ran out of storage completely, all it did was crash Minecraft and run slow.