Best Alienware model for cooling and longevity

I've been a long time buyer of alienware from the m11x, m17x, to the AW R1. All of which lasted me 3+ years each of gaming.

I have been satisfied. However the new thin and light line up with the hot running 8750H CPU has put me off with respect to Alienware.

The m15 is a huge let down to me.

In your opinions, what is the best Alienware model to date that can still be bought online?

Not looking for incredible graphic performance but something that will stay cool and give me another 3-5 years of gaming!

 

This is a no brainer.

Area 51m. No grey area here at all.


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The Area 51m still shows signs of not handling the high CPU temps from the data I've seen.

I'm looking for CPU temps to be 75-80 under full load.

 

You asked about Alienware and that’s the best they have to offer for cooling.
If that’s not good enough you should look elsewhere


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Area 51m with 8700k seems to be a good fit though, shame its not offered as a chip from Dell, you have to buy the 8700k yourself I guess?

 

Get the biggest ass alienware that exists with the weakest specs you can.

Like a 17 r5 w/ and i5 and a 1050 ti ... that will run ice cold.

 

Pretty sure the base model on their website has the i7 8700k?

 

Non k unless it's been updated

 

Alienware Area-51M with i7-9700K & RTX 2080.

9700K runs nice compared to 9900K. Or do what some people are doing...get the i7-8700 and replace it with a 8700K. Although to be honest a i7-8700 + RTX 2080 is already gonna get you very good performance in games.

 

Well i have a 17r3 with the intel 6700 and 970m gpu and also a 17r4 with the intel 7700 and nvidia 1070. The R3 is 2 years old now and i havent had no issues yet other then windows 10 acting stupid sometimes. My R4 has been even better since it has the 1070 and has better sound and to me the keyboard is better. I did do a repaste on both machines a year into owning both of these and so far nothing major has happend. just windows 10 sometimes decides to act up.

 

using a 17 r4 here with 6700hq and 1070, not an overclockable chip i know, but it runs rather cool because of that

 

That will be hard with any laptop out of the box. Intel CPU;s run very hot nowadays. If it runs under 90c stock then I think you should be happy.

 

Your kidding right? 51m here with 9900k and 2080, no overclock. If i'm running Division 2 or BF 5 temps are 80 / 87 max! and for the GPU 70 / 75 with max fan profile. Other games on balanced profile that are less demanding stay even cooler!
Thats with stock paste, so there's still some improvement to be made.

For these high end component in such a case, thats deeply impressive.

 

He is not kidding. Try running 100% CPU + GPU load and it will throttle due to overheating. If all you ever wanna do is play games, then it's ok. I would still like to see the actual graphs of CPU/GPU clocks in those games. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some throttling related drops. I've been lurking in the Area 51m thread from the beginning and am still not convinced about the thermals. It's not better than the m15 for sure.

 

so 95% of the people that buy a gaming laptop?

 

Well, me, my wife and a few of my colleagues use ours for work more than gaming. Some do heavy rendering, others like to bench. I'm just a casual gamer, but bad thermals would break the deal for me. My AW 13 R3 is undervolted, repasted and stays below 70C under full load. Still, I'm furious about the way Dell cuts corners on cooling. AW 13 R3, m15, and Area51m are all in the same boat. Without multiple tweaks and mods you are running the risk of killing your machine too soon. In fact there's been a few reports in the Area 51m thread already, laptops just dying during normal use. I'll keep watching for now...

 

Here's the review from notebookcheck - https://www.notebookcheck.net/Alienware-Area-51m-i9-9900K-RTX-2080-Laptop-Review.414667.0.html

As you can see, the Area 51m is unable to run @100% CPU load (stock clocks, CPU only load, GPU is idle) more than 30 sec without hitting 100C and throttling. Quote from notebookcheck: "We're a bit disappointed that the Alienware is unable to sustain 4.7 GHz or higher when at 100 percent CPU utilization."

 

Based on the images they seemed to have received a review unit which has been used ny others. Big chance that the paste is all messed up and NBC never checks this.

 

My stock Dell unit with 9700k/2080 can't do 100% GPU/CPU without throttling within 30 seconds. Then again, I haven't used a laptop, even a low power dual core with integrated graphics, in the last 5 years that doesn't have this. Thermal throttling or power throttling occurs when reaching 100/100% usage.

Before the recent bios and Vbios updates, I would get power throttling when doing a slight undervolt, which handled thermal throttling. Then the updates came out and allowed us to use more power. Even with the undervolt, after about 3-5 minutes, I would eventually have moments of thermal throttling. It would spike, throttle, settle, and be ok for a bit of time. To completely eliminate throttling during benchmarks, I just used ThrottleStop to do the undervolt and lower the turbos by 100mhz per core. That stopped it from breaking 95C. 200 mhz per core kept the CPU in the 70s and 80s! Overall, very impressed.

So if you are going to be video processing, decoding, tasks that utilize 100% or close to it, with a tiny bit of undervolting and turbo throttling you have a very stable machine. During games and EVERY OTHER USAGE, this is basically totally unnecessary.

Overall I was very happy with the A51m's cooling, coming from several other notebooks that struggle FAR WORSE. I've used 17 R4, 13 R3, m17x R1, MSI GS65, Lenovo Legion Y740 17", and multiple business class notebooks and put them through the ringer. The A51m was by far the most impressive and able to cool itself adequately.

 

I see mixed results, some without throttling, some with very mild. Hard to say whats up.

I think a good repaste will help a lot. They still use the crappy paste unfortunately.