*OFFICIAL* Alienware 13 R3 Owner's Lounge

Believe his temps went from mid to high 80s to mid-high 70s. Also he says he used the line method.

iunlock recommends using spread method
mobius_1 recommends the pea and line method
professional online sources say that the X method provided the best results for their testing
several desktop users like the pea method

 

Pretty much this.
Pea size on cpu and a little spread.
Line method on gpu.
Cheers.

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Yeah, I understand the early TB docks stunk - I know dell discontinued the model they had. Since the WD15 is just a USB-C dock, it's fine. I had it before when I owned the XPS15 last year. I thought it was a quality product, and I only need a 1440P output for my monitor. Plugable's upcoming dock looks ok...

 

Thanks.

 

Is there any disassembly videos for the 13? Just thinking there might be a fair few screws to put back.

 

The 5 from the bottom cover, then 14 to recover the inside cover. (These are all the same size except for the one near the ssd)
Get an ice cube tray for then all.

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Cheers.

 

View attachment 141113 So first impressions:

This thing is amazingly well built. Thats been pretty consistent but when you see it in the flesh, wow! Im coming from a pretty ancient computer thats mostly plastic and this thing is an entirely different league. There isnt a single flaw in it. I was sorta suprised by how heavy it is for its size - and actually really like the weight. It feels like it would survive a tank blast. Trackpads amazing, could be a bit taller but I like the width and the fact it lights up is really cool. Keyboards great! So natural to start typing and so much better than those damn chichlet keyboards. My backspace feels like the other keys, some said theirs felt different?

The screen. Good god the screen. You have to see the screen to believe it. My housemate is now considering getting one because of the screen and hes a lifetime mac enthusiast.

Also impressed by how fast it is, but thats to be expected from coming from a 5 year old work computer. Everything is instant. Not blown away by Windows 10, no idea what im doing with it to be honest. Just about managed to download some programs though.

I ran OCCT for a few mins (no time to run for longer, gotta run back to parents house) and everything seems above board. Cores dont seem wildly out of sync in terms of temps and I think the highest was low 80. Screenshot below.

The only small negative comment is that the fan sounds a bit weird. Its totally silent at idle which is cool, but when the fan spins up it initially sounds like one of the bearings isnt quite right, like a high pitched whine. But settles down after a while into a better sound. Although ive no clue how its meant to sound. But its much much quieter than I was expecting which is a bonus.

Probably not the best to judge what microstuttering is and if its here. No idea what it is and im so used to a slow computer that I probably wouldnt notice. No network issues - its SO MUCH QUICKER at downloading than my old computer.

Man this thing rocks.

View attachment 141113

 

Hello all,

I have been reading this forum, actually all the 201 pages. ;-) I also received my Alienware around 5 Dec. and thought of returning some info back to the community.

Micro stuttering: I did not experience very bad micro stuttering untill I had turned on automatic task bar hide in desk top mode. After I have done that, it became unbearable. Every folder click stuttered and paused. So in case you have it on, turn it off.

Repast: I can litterly run OCCT for 5 seconds after te 1 min. iddle. Then my CPU temp hits 95 degrees. So I am deffinitely going for a repaste. I have order Gelid GC Extreme, and will share prime95 and HWinfo results back to the forum once done.

 

Can somone please try to tilt the computer forward while the fans are running high rpm. Example while in a game or occt? Mine starts to act weird while on rubber feets and I'm trying to understand what might cause it. So I tried tilting it against me like 15-20 degrees while fan where running and the same thing happens... the fans ramps up and down like crazy. I need to know if this is part of the manufacturing of this cooling solution or just a defect on mine. I think it maybe could be a sensor problem... just curious if everyone have this. It practically means that cooling pads with tilt function would be useless...

 

And another question. Does the AW13 have new pads on laptops delivered in December like on the 15 and 17? I have changed mine, but now I am unsure about the thickness problem is on the 13 inch also. In that case I might change to 0.15mm like on the 15 and 17 inch.

 

See this post

 

I'm playing on a laptop stand and as far as I know the fans are running high, but not up and down. However I'm playing using headphones so wouldn't really notice anyway

 

Hey all, new to the forum-
Recently purchased the 13R3 with the i5, OLED, yadda yadda upgrades. Even though I see numerous issues with the i7 and such, i've decided to return mine for the i7 version. I had no issues with the i5 at all. No stuttering, no high temps, nothing wrong at all. I actually love this laptop alot, I just felt that I made a poor choice by purchasing the i5. So now I gotta wait another 3 weeks for the new one to arrive. Just wanted to report that to the forum, and also have a question...

I got the OLED again, but this time I stayed with the 8GB RAM and 256GB hard drive because I want to upgrade the memory and hard drive myself. Has anyone upgraded their ram yet? I was looking at getting the Corsair 32GB @2666Mhz sticks. Does anyone have any experience with those?

For the hard drive, I'm thinking the 500GB Samsung 960 EVO. Does anyone have any experience with those too? It seems to have great reviews. The only thing Im curious about is how I will reinstall windows and drivers on this new drive. Does dell/alienware offer a reinstallation disc for customers?

Thanks for any help you guys can give!
-mike

 

I can't replicate this on mine.

For some reason I can't upload pictures but after 10 min of occt

core 1 max 80 min 62 value 67
Core 2 max 79 min 59 value 66
Core 3 max 78 min 63 value 67
Core 4 max 74 min 57 value 62

Theyre alright right?

How do you see the gpu temp?

 

Ahh it has to be on. 30 mins of civ 6 and gpu is sitting at 63. I'm not used to having a quick computer, gaming on this thing is well good!

 

Thanks for the all great info. Could you or anyone kindly please share how to get the 30% off or what discount possible? Much appreciated.

 

Got a message from my roomie saying that the laptop arrived!! Unfortunately I probably won't be able to play with it much any time soon.I'll keep you all updated!

 

Weird... do you have it set to CPU performance in bios? I have and it's happening often. The fans starts, then shuts off, then starts again... over and over again lol.

 

I do not think so no, havent been into the bios yet. It comes out of the box in normal mode or whatever right? That sounds really annoying, when the fans start up mine sounds a bit strange, couldn't handle that pulsing on and off!

 

Just wondering if anyone can shed any light on this slight issue please?

Put in a second ssd (was used as a c drive from another machine) cannot for the life of me format the bugger.

Have tried disk manager, also booted from USB to install Windows, to delete all partitions on it but it will not recognise the ssd.

Any thoughts guys? Cheers.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

I had the reverse issue. Wanted to backup the ssd before first time boot using an adapter on another pc but that was also not possible.

 

Bizarre.
Just managed to delete and format. 476.84gb left from 512. Didn't realise it was around 10% loss. Jesus.

Only thing now is, can't clone my drive using marcium. Seems to not recognise the drive I'm cloning to.... Hmmmm.



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Image it on external source. When done. Just install off it. That's what I did.


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Simple as that eh. Good shout

Haven't got an external at the minute big enough unfortunately.

I'll sort it at a later date. Fancy a 1tb nvme drive but that will have to wait a while.

Got a 256 and a new 512 nvme in at the min, so happy with that whilst I save for that 1tb to replace the 256.

Cheers


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So after some more testing...I can confirm this laptop struggles with external displays. At least mine seems of the lot that struggles. I haven't done much in the way of troubleshooting. Overall, i don't have major issues with productivity or media, but in games, I notice what I guess could be described as "stuttering" - although I'm not sure if this is what folks have referred to as microstuttering because I'm not familiar with it. I just know that when I game on the native OLED display, everything is silky smooth and gorgeous. On external displays, I notice an occasional "hitch" every few seconds.

Today, after gaming using mDP to HDMI cable on a Dell 27" monitor - the game actually froze at some point. It did not give me any crash or error messages, but I CTRL-ALT-ESC'd and had to shut it down. Then it told me Steam had frozen, and I couldn't restart steam. Then I tried to start BF1, and it would not fully boot - so something on the base display driver or firmware level had gone south. I had to full up shut down, and restart the machine. After it came back online - the stuttering appears to have gone? This is weird, but I remember reading other folks saying a restart, with external display connected, seemed to sort the issue, at least temporarily.

Hopefully Dell is aware of this and is working on a fix. Further, I'm going to manually install the latest Intel drivers from their website. I notice by default, windows has this on 4483 (last 4 of the driver number), meanwhile, you can get 4542 from Intel's website (non-beta). In other machines, I've noticed this helps solve some display issues. The way I understand it, this machine uses the GTX1060 for rendering, but still passes the video stream through the Intel HD530 correct? I'm assuming the Intel iGPU also handles the external displays?

 

Hi team, does anyone elses keyboard go red (the lights) when they start a game?

 

Also, is there any way to disable the little blinking red light above the screen, that sporadically goes effing mad? Its god damn annoying

 

Think disabling tobi tracking in task bar does the trick. Or set it to log in only.

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Thats the tobii eye tracking. Right click on the tobii eye tracking icon in system tray and disable.

 

That's an optimus problem. I had the same problem with my R2. The Display is connected to your iGPU through the port. White-listing games in the Nvidia control panel helped some games. The problem went away when I got the AGA because the AGA disables optimus and connects right to the dGPU.

 

Hi all,

New 13 R3 owner here, have had it for about a week now and i wanted to ask for a little help. I was clicking through the various options in the intel HD graphics control panel app and was careful not to change any of the settings and i was never prompted to save anything. However, after i closed the Intel graphics control panel app, all of my icons and various apps had a pink tint to them (accent color selected was pink).

I go back into the intel control panel and click over to color and advanced and see that the Hue line moved over to the right, so i hit the restore defaults button. After that everything reverted back to the what i believe to be the original dark bluish/purpleish accent color. i'm not quite sure how it changed in the first place but i also noticed my overall theme might have change.

Can one of you let me know if the out of the box setup is the Alienware theme found in the Themes selection screen? If so, is the default accent color the dark blue almost purple color found at the very bottom row of the accent color selection screen in settings? i'm trying to get everything setup the way it was originally.

Thanks!

 

I have mine and it's gorgeous.
Although, sadly, my battery seems be one of the ones that has 5% wear out of the box and I'm wondering if that will be in issue. Once I get some games installed I'll post temperatures.

 

How are you seeing that you have 5% wear?

 

I was using HWMonitor and it reported 5% wear (and the maximum charge was being reported as 5% than the designed capacity). I'm hoping that use will cause it to re-calibrate and that's an error but we'll see.

 

Hey,

Welcome and congratulations !
i7 is the way to go. Especially if you're considering keeping it for some time.

As for the:
RAM - went with https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01BNJL8I4/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Had an issue with the initial order - the system wouldn't boot up. Replacement worked perfectly fine.

SSD - personally, I picked a more budget-friendly alternative https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01L80DH1Y/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

For the re-installation needs:
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/alienware-13-laptop/drivers?rvps=y

OS image:
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/OSISO/WT64A

 

Boom !

The new battery is in [@ 2% W.L.]. Stress-testing for the next few days to see how it would settle down.

First disassembly took about 15-20 mins [Was definitely taking my time with the components. Oh and about those back panel lock-in pins. Be very careful !! They seem to be extremely fragile. I almost cracked one off]. All in all, as few have already mentioned - very nicely putt together system.

p.s. At the time of returning the old battery to a tech - the cell capacity degraded down by 23% [from Dec 7 to 29]

 

Or straight to AW testing utility [F12 on boot]

 

Huh, I didn't know about that... And it also shows that the battery is only 95% healthy...
But that's not the end of the world even if it doesn't improve as long as it doesn't get worse.

 

Just keep an eye on it. My old one took 23% hit within 2.5 week period [!]

 

Have you tried just changing to any of Win Default Themes ?
This should fix your icons' background coloration [ I assume you're talking about the desktop icons]

 

Having my cousin test the laptop before bringing it out to me. Things checked so far: No light bleed on the IPS. Speakers, fans and build solid.

But when I asked him to use OCCT to stress test for 15 minutes on the CPU Linpack with 25% memory, it hit a temp cap of 88° or something. What am I doing wrong? Am I looking at a 'must repaste'? I'm a newbie learning by reading and trial and error along the way. Help from you experienced guys would be great. Thanks

 

Hey thanks! Appreciate the links

 

That's what I'm worried about...
Luckily I know to watch for that and can always get a replacement battery, or machine if there are other issues, and am forewarned. Has anyone else had an experience like that or did you seem to get a random bad battery?

 

Interesting enough if you adjust the hue in the advanced color section if the intel hd panel color, then it changes all of the selectable accent colors in windows setting, including all theme colors.

I've reset everything, but i just wanted to know if Alienware is the default theme from the factory and if so, if the dark blue/purple like color is what is selected by default as the accent color in settings for the alienware theme (dark blue at the bottom of the list of colors in the setting screen)

 

Hey all here to report the results of some light testing! I ran these tests pretty much straight out of the box, the only thing I did was download some software and games before. I didn't go into BIOS and didn't change any settings.
I may do a full review later, but so far the build quality, speakers, screen, keyboard (No backspace clicking), etc. have all been very decent so far! There is some stuttering when you click the battery icon like others have mentioned, but it hasnt really bothered me yet. I'm hoping it doesnt affect gaming, but we'll see.

So here's what everyone wants:

OCCT for one hour:

Temps are a little on the higher side but I'm glad it's not hitting 90 degrees!

Full HWinfo64 after the 1 hour test:


Battery wear (? I'm not really how to interpret this. Used two different programs. Battery was around 57% when I took this screenshot):


Let me know if you guys have any more questions! I plan on doing some more stress testing soon, but for now I'm gonna try and game on this thing!

Question, am I getting power throttled? How can I find that out?

Edit: Seems like Microsoft Edge is a little stuttery, but downloaded Firefox and everything is working fine

 

You don't have any wear, your battery is designed for 76000 mWh and is going to charge until it hits 76000 mWh (in other words it has 0% wear). So you should, hopefully, be good and I'm slightly jealous of your perfect battery.

In other news someone got an i7-7700HQ to benchmark and it's only a 2% - 6% bump in performance.

 

Did you change any max temp cap on OCCT before the test or did you just load it up and start a 1hr test?

 

Oh forgot to mention that I tested it pretty much straight out of the box. The only thing I did was install some games and software but that's about it. Didn't mess with BIOS or any settings

 

Will try the regular Cpu: OCCT test again and see if I get different results. Running for 30 minutes instead of 15 (if the fans don't kick in in time).

Your temps look very good indeed!