Dell G15 Overheating or Fans Screaming? Try the Free Fixes First

Start here — costs nothing

Five free fixes to try before you spend a penny

Work through these in order. Between them they sort a genuinely large share of “my G15 is overheating” complaints — and none of them costs anything.

• 1. Hard, flat surface only. The G15 pulls most of its cool air through the underside. On a bed, sofa, carpet or your lap, that intake is smothered and temperatures climb within minutes. A desk or even a hardback book makes a measurable difference. It sounds too simple to matter; it’s the single most common cause we see.
• 2. Clear the vents of dust. Power off, unplug, and use a can of compressed air in short bursts through the rear and side vents and the underside intake grille. If a grey mat of dust puffs out, you’ve found a big part of your problem. This matches Dell’s own published overheating guidance — dust on the fans and heatsink fins is the first thing they tell owners to rule out.
• 3. Use Game Shift (G-mode). Press Fn + F9 (the key with the little ‘G’) to toggle Game Shift, which runs the fans at maximum during demanding games. It’s loud by design, but that’s the cooling headroom Dell built in — many owners never discover it exists.
• 4. Update the BIOS. Dell has shipped fan-curve and thermal-behaviour changes for G15 models in BIOS updates. Put your Service Tag into dell.com/support and install any pending BIOS and thermal-related updates. Plug the charger in first and don’t interrupt it.
• 5. Check your thermal profile. In the Dell power/thermal software your G15 shipped with (Dell Power Manager on some models, the command-centre app on others), make sure you’re not stuck in a “Quiet” profile while gaming — it deliberately holds fan speed down and lets temperatures rise. “Ultra Performance” or “Performance” prioritises cooling.

One thing you’ll see recommended in enthusiast forums is undervolting — reducing the voltage fed to the processor to cut heat. It genuinely works for some people, but it’s a tinkerer’s technique with stability trade-offs, and it’s not something we recommend or offer as a service. If your G15 needs undervolting just to behave, the real problem is almost always the one in the next section.

The honest answer

The two-to-four-year truth: it usually needs a fan de-dust and repaste

If you’ve done the free fixes and your G15 still hits very high temperatures with the fans flat out, the honest answer — and the consensus across Dell’s community threads and every credible teardown guide — is that it needs a professional thermal service: the machine opened up, both fans and the full heatsink assembly properly de-dusted, the old paste cleaned off the CPU and GPU dies, fresh quality thermal compound applied, and everything reassembled and tested under a sustained gaming load.

We’d love to tell you it’s a quick blast of air. On a gaming chassis it isn’t. The G15’s heatpipe assembly sits under other components, the dies are bare silicon that’s easy to chip if you rush, and getting the mounting pressure right on reassembly matters as much as the paste itself. It’s a bench job with the right tools and a test afterwards — not a five-minute favour. Done properly, owners typically get their machine back running dramatically cooler and quieter, back to behaving the way it did when it was new.

Two honest caveats, because we’d rather you hear them now:

• A repaste fixes heat-transfer problems, not silicon problems. If your G15 has an actual failed graphics chip or board-level fault, no amount of paste helps — and we don’t do board-level GPU repair. We’ll tell you straight if that’s what the diagnosis points to, rather than selling you a thermal service that won’t fix it.
• A dying fan is a parts job. If a fan bearing is grinding or a fan has failed outright, it needs replacing, not cleaning. We’ll quote that separately and clearly before doing anything.

Keep or replace?

When a thermal service is worth it — and when it isn’t

A thermal service makes obvious sense on a G15 that’s otherwise healthy: two to four years old, plays the games you want, just running hot and loud. You’re restoring a machine with life left in it for a fraction of replacement cost.

It makes less sense when the overheating is one problem among several — a battery on its way out, a damaged hinge, a graphics chip that’s artifacting even when cool — or when the machine no longer plays what you actually want to play at settings you can live with. Stacking repairs into an ageing budget gaming laptop can quietly cost more than it’s worth, and we’ll tell you when you’re at that point rather than take the booking.

If you do decide to replace, two honest routes:

• If the gaming days are over and the G15 was really doing schoolwork, browsing and office jobs, a refurbished business-grade Dell Latitude from £510 (fitted with a Samsung 990 PRO SSD, fully set up with your data moved over, 12-month return-to-base warranty) is quieter, cooler and tougher than any budget gaming chassis — see our refurbished Dell laptops.
• If you still want to game, we can spec and order a current Dell gaming machine for you as Dell resellers since 2001, and set it up properly — sensible thermal profile from day one included. Just ask.

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