NEW!! Alienware Area-51M LAPTOP!! (to replace alienware 15 and 17)

That's the reason I don't integrate all updates blindly. Only OS update and no ucodes. With spectre microcode enabled my score is 630-650. Disabling it pushes to 696.

 

the new intel ME firmware which they have added on 1.6.1 is another big hit on performance.. @Papusan havent tested with spectre yet.. i just installed 1803, bought a samsung 970 EVO, before i had it installed using AHCI with samsung NVMe driver.. now i just installed using stock RAID on BIOS.. with intel RST driver.. wanted to see if any difference in loading times / temperatures / write speeds

 

https://www.win-raid.com/t29f25-Recommended-AHCI-RAID-and-NVMe-Drivers.html

https://www.win-raid.com/t2f23-Intel-RST-RSTe-Drivers-newest-v-WHQL-v-WHQL.html

 

Yes ive tested multiple versions for drivers for IRST even before with old NVMe SSD.. its just im curious on this HM175Chipset with RAID MODE (NOT RAID) setup for Samsung NVMe SSD.. will test crystalmark and run few hours of assasins creed odyseey

 

I loaded Samsung drivers during Windows 10 install. How hot the drive gets on the controller? For example during ATTO?

 

my old pm951 is a hot mess, it just throttles even on small tasks.. or gaming loads.. i used a NVME heatsink of 3mm +1mm thermal pads on both side which i bought from aliexpress for 6 USD.. worth imo.. max temp 72c.. now i have EVO 970.. not using any heatsink.. max temps 70c so far so good.. im using inbox MS nvme driver.. Ive heard people on some other sites saying the new 3.0 driver reduces performance.. but gives better battery life on laptops.. ill test it in upcoming weeks with version 3 and the old 2.3 version..

 

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/benchmarking-samsung-nvme-ssd-960-evo-m-2

I am on latest version 3. Yes, please, definitely try, I am also interested to see the differences. So far I had no problems with newest version 3.0 but I only have the 970 PRO for a few weeks already.
It would be cool to get more performance as I never use the battery.

 

I use latest MEFW from win-raid which fixes some corruptions of MEI on most PCs wherein MEI was corrupted and programmer was the only way!
I use AHCI drivers fernando suggested. Touchpad testing is done and ready for public use! I'll update the drievr thread for Echo models.

 

thanks.. please do keep me posted, i mean about those UWD drivers on your 15R2 drivers page. Realtek PCIE card reader have new drivers.. also for Thunderbolt UWD.. i was able to overwrite INTEL ME using this command Foldername/biosname.exe /forceit, so it does overwrite any previous INTEL ME, but you have to clear CMOS before runninng this command, i have not tried downgrading, will check soon..

 

I thought /forceit was deprecated!
flash ME with -greset to clean out data init values and provides fresh start.
I don't have Realtek PCIe card, all I have is Realtek SD card reader driver made for v1809. A51M inf files are different and are dangerous for our echo models.

 

actually thats SD card reader on the side.. its named in such way for drivers.. what do you mean dangerous ?

 

Different IDs and firmware rigs the echo models to oblivion.

 

I have a ton of m.2 ssds, both sata and pcie, and generally the generic samsung ones all run hot, and the 9xx line all run great

 

Does anyone know the UK release date or have any experience with previous release dates for the UK in comparison to the US for previous models? Is it normally released on the same day or are there generally differences?

 

i already asked in chat and i was told, the 51m will get released mid February in Europe.

 

Excellent thank you for replying, roll on mid February, hopefully by then we have an idea on the performance and temps.

 

I am very interested in this thread as I think it is time to replace my two (2) AW 17 R5 + GTX 1080 + i98950 , both less than a year old.

As we all know the GPU runs at 180W and the CPU about 20W while gaming, maybe more in some games. Even at this low CPU levels there is a furnace at the back, the keyboard is HOT, and my son (who uses the second one) thinks "it feels unsafe is so hot, shall I stop playing PubG" ?

Looking at cooling system there is simply not enough flow of air and not enough heatsink mass to cool all the ICs on the motherboard. This is verified by my own disassembling of both AW17s multiple times and replacing pads and thermal grease and by taking temperatures with digital, probe thermometer, while the laptop was running, open at the bottom and on its side. I have managed to keep CPU and GPU from burning, but there is not much I can do about all the peripheral ICs that are cooled very indirectly and eventually cook. Both my laptops will throttle while CPU and GPU are at about 80C. It's not the CPU or the GPU that both have a ton of copper over them but the other ICs (VRMs) that are tiny and are cooled almost accidentally!

If you pull out the AW17R5's heatsink you will see all those thermal pads literally falling off and you think how can a cooling solution for a $3,500 laptop be so haphazard? My Clevos are exact;ly the same by the way, there is a lot of emphasis on the CPU/GPU with a large copper plate over, but the VRMs and VRAMs are nasty slap on jobs. Unfortunately looking at the Area 51m opened up we see the same haphazard and half-assed design with strips of thermal pads literally falling off the heatsink and I wonder how can such a sloppy design* ever achieve satisfactory results in a system where every mW of heat removed counts?

*Imagine the assembly line with half trained and half awake workers try to put such a delicate thing together and make sure that all thermal pads are making good contact...

PS The fact that heatsinks come pre-fitted with thermal pads and thermal "stamps" for CPU and GPU clearly indicates that this is a system designed to be mass produced and not to perform well.

 

Its already out. www.alienware.de. And price is super okay. In US with my config(9700K, 2080RTX, 32GB,512+1TB,Backpack,3y-Warranty+) -> 4,588.98$ ~ 4011€ and here 4276€.

Maybe i get a little discount order by phone? (its my 5th Alienware.... xD) delivery in 21 working days!

 

If you want a system that is not designed to be mass produced, you have to build your own desktop. It is just that simple, short of that you are stuck with the options presented to you by the manufacturers. The good news, is that you are allowed to open up and improve the cooling with new paste/pads etc

 

Have they come out and say Frank Anzor was wrong about repasting would void your warranty? He was pretty adamant about pointing that out in videos on the area 51m. Not that I think any Dell repair tech would care or notice unless it was liquid metal.

 

The 960 evo and pro run hot too unfortunately and show drive wear fairly quickly. Not too happy eith those nvme sticks.

 

Can you elaborate what you mean about drive wear fairly quickly in regards to the 960 Pros?

I haven't seen any performance drop in regards to wear after 14-15 months of use. (Magician reports both drives are 'Good' with ~4TB of writes on the 512GB drive and 10.7TB of writes on the 1TB drive)

@Ultra Male, are you on 30-40TB of wear? Anything to report?

 

Still the same as day one:

Samsung 960 Pro Performance after 31 TB of writes

But rinneh is write, they overheat very quickly, like if I start copying multiple GBs of data from one drive to the other, temps reach north of 70C quickly despite me having thermal pads on the SSDs which results in 50% performance loss. In synthetic benchmarks and day to day usage though, you never experience this, only when doing constant writes for prolonged periods of time.

 

@jclausius Read my edit bro

 

Yes. That is why I only mentioned wear only.

In regards to heat, I can only report 45-50C under heavy usage, but I'm under different circumstances since I'm in a SFF ITX case. One month in I added a small fan that would continuously blow outside air directly onto them to cool them off.

Where on your MSI are they located? Is there any way to get some air to them? For example, if underneath, would a cooling pad like @Papusan uses help get some air onto them? I've seen some others add those little copper heat sinks to some of these M.2 drives, but I don't know if there's any extra space in your lappy that makes that feasible.

Maybe, if you still go with the Area51m, when you transfer them perhaps you can do some investigation to see if you can get some copper onto them or perhaps see if there's some more air flow to help with cooling.

 

I can only comment on the 256GB versions. BUt i had 3 in my posession. All running around 70~75 while playing heavy games in the AW15R3 or when doing large data transfers. My first one had 4% drive wear in 6 months. The second and third have 2 and 3% in 7 months.

While my Crucials have only 1% after 3 and 4 years.

 

Where does one see drive wear? Is this in Magician? If so, I'll report what I'm showing (again after putting them in the machine Oct' 2017).

 

i think hwinfo also shows drive wear

Gesendet von meinem SM-G950F mit Tapatalk

 

I use the hwinfo sensor section to check the drive health. But i thought magician could show it as well.

 

Thanks. I can live with the numbers I'm seeing. They're both still 100% remaining life after the writes I listed above. Bottom portion is the Sensor Status

Spoiler: Bigger Image

 

For accuracy and more info. Use CrystalDiskInfo. And always download the Portable

Edit. Features on right side https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/crystaldiskinfo-main-menu/

 

I can't see any Images but only placeholders!

NVMe drive wear out spare NAND cells faster when temps shoot out to 70C+. You can switch to standard MSFT NVMe drive to throttle the speeds if you wish. Its like Toshiba NVMe XG3/5 SSDs running at 100C with 20% wear level after a week!

 

Yeah im using the generic NVME driver for that reason. It still gets hot. Doesnt help that the AW15R3/R4 models have separate compartments for each drive without airflow. Doesnt help they are TLC nand chips as well. They already dont last.

 

Gonna check it out!

 

Hmmm i wonder if this is because I used the smaller capacity versions.

 

Dunno. Do you recall how much had been written to your 256GB drives? Maybe that could be used in a comparison.

Regardless, these are all things to consider when populating drives on an Area51m

 

If they arent isolated from the airflow, they might do better. Its really an AW15R3R4/AW17R4/R5 issue in this case.

 

This is why I run games from my 2.5" SSD rather than my 960s (500gb each), which sucks because it makes a decent difference on load times for some of the bigger games. When I'm at home, with the laptop on my laptop cooling pad, I don't have this problem since the pad makes a big difference on temperatures.

I also added the heat sinks to mine which did help a bit as well.

 

Loading games is a read operation. Write operations are what wear down the NAND cells unless I am mistaken.....

 

I was commenting mostly on the temperatures which I assume comes from prolonged reading during gaming. Both of my 960's show 100% life in HWInfo after almost a year of being used, is there a better software for monitoring drive life?

 

Sorry I can't answer your question about SSD health, but a comment - reads don't really heat up a drive as much as writing to it.

For example on the Samsung 960s, when you copy from SSD to SSD, you can see the the temps go up on the driving doing the writing, while the read drive maintains relatively same temps.

 

I do know that I see a 10C difference on my 960 when I’m gaming on my 2.5” vs my 960 that’s the only reference I can give. And it also heats up my PCH more if I’m gaming from my 960.

When I game from my 960 I see 75C temps like @rinneh was saying earlier, when I game from my 2.5" SSD, I see around 65C max. If I'm on my cooling pad it never gets above 60C on the 960 or my PCH.

 

Heat itself also degrades nand cells unfortunately.

 

If possible, look at spare cells row in SMART values in HWINFO or Crystaldisk Info both of which have native NVMe support.
I agree with @jclausius Reads don't cause heat buildup unless you're doing mixed IOs involving more writes the drives gets seriously hot even if you put it in the fridge or freezer. Maybe try M.2 NVMe heatsink from Gelid,Advancing gene or EK WB.

 

I was referencing the temps on the Samsung SSD itself, not on the PCH or anything else in a computer or laptop. My guess is that when you're gaming, there are plenty of both reads and writes for the drive. If you really want to know, there are other / better tools, but for a free, built-in one, you can use Windows Resource Monitor, you should be able to have it graph out reads vs. writes on the SSD, but you may need to configure a longer snapshot timeframe to see what is going on with the drive while gaming.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...4-owners-lounge.797457/page-476#post-10502817

See also... http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/toshiba-512-gb-nvme-drive-temperature.804048/

Less writes. But as long there is almost no airflow around the ssd's they will run hot. It's a reason you can't put a 9900K in Apple designed notebooks.

 

Agreed that active cooling around an M.2 NVMe will be needed, but still sticking by what I saw in my NVMe drives that more heat was generated on a drive during WRITE cycles than on the other drive doing READs. But again, without adequate cooling in either case, the heat will build up which may be causing throttle or other issues.

That is why I had asked Ultra Male about the placement of the drives within the laptop or perhaps getting a fan on the keyboard or something to move air on that side of the system board (if top side mounted) or using a laptop cooler (drives mounted from below) would help.

 

The temps measured using a probe or ir temp gun of the air coming out of the vents is not an accurate representation of the actual temps of the die(s) of the chips.

80C's are too high of temps after a repaste as it should not be anywhere near there on the gpu especially.

It has been the same old story for all laptops where they are massed produced with below average thermal pads and thermal grease.

100%. There exists a large amount of people who buy gaming laptops that would be better off with just building a desktop for many reasons.

The nice thing about AW here is that they are expecting people to open up their systems to make it their own, whereas even other mainstream companies have warranty / void stickers on the inside so for what it's worth... Hey kudos to AW for promoting and not being jerks about it like other ODM's.

To be clear, repasting does not void the warranty. 100%. I think what Frank said was just a mix up, but what he was actually alluding to was that they do offer specific thermal grease that they would like for people to use with this system but .... keywords "would like for people to use..."

Like with most things, the company has the right to deny warranty if they can prove that the LM for example was the cause of the failure etc... it's fair game... people who are not familiar with working under the hood and just carelessly dives into it should be denied their warranty IF it can be proved that the LM leaked all over causing a short, which is not that hard to prove.

Warranty wise, nothing has changed here. AW/Dell is the most friendliest when it comes to backing up their warranty and that's a fact.

Hmm that's odd, because I use 960/970 EVO's, 960/970 PRO's, SM961-981's, and PM961-981's currently and have zero issue with the heat.

In fact, they (Samung) run the coolest out of the many that I have tested and own.

Same here. Zero issues and I transfer large files all the time.

Correct. It is the WRITES that does the wear and tear....

 

Good to hear. It's been well over a decade since I had an alienware laptop so I can't speak for the customer support aspect. Regardless of what Frank said I was planning on repasting as it is. Unless the temps are really good out of the box I'll go with something more tried and true. Dell can tell me they have really good thermal compound. . .but until they sell it in a tube for me to buy like any of the other big name brands I'll assume they're using toothpaste.

Plus I do like to joke theh probably never be able to tell anyway.

 

When it comes to CS it's a two edged sword with Dell, but they get the job done. As far as getting your issues addressed and attend to it's A+, but getting connected with overseas reps can be annoying at times. Ask to always speak to a US based rep if possible and choose S.America reps over india. If for some reason they send a 3rd party tech out to service your machine, watch him like a hawk and have your phone out to take pictures and video record if you have to. As far as their 3rd party techs go the grade there is an F as they don't know what they are doing and there are numerous accounts of complaints where the so called not-so-knowledgeable techs screwed up their systems. It's almost better to choose the lesser of two evils and just send your system out to the depot to get it addressed as much as that hurts to say, because at least there the luck of the draw of getting someone who has serviced an AW system more often is greater than dispatched 3rd party techs. The choice is up to you though.

If you search the forums you'll see crazy stuff like with them donkey not-so-techs (again third party, it's not Dell Dell) using a flat head screw driver to scrap off the thermal paste on the copper heat plate. It's nuts. The sad truth is that most people who get their machines serviced are likely not too tech savvy so them poor lads (customers) are putting their trust into these clowns and never end up knowing to what extent how halfxxx the job was that was actually done.

To be fair, I think the issue largely exists because the 3rd party techs that get dispatched out don't have proper training and we're dealing with a large company here so although some things are understandable, the lack of training is inexcusable, especially when they are working on systems that cost thousands.

You seem to have a good grip on things so you'll be fine. Looking forward to your results when you get to it.