*OFFICIAL* Alienware 15 R3 Owner's Lounge

This thread is a place to discuss all things related to your new Alienware 15 and share information your experience with fellow owners, or a place that prospective owners can read and ask quick questions.

 

About to receive mine by today. Gonna insert one 2280 and one 2242, repaste, reinstall OS, and hackintosh.

 

Check this video out. This will belp bring temps down for New AW 15 with 6820HK 1070GTX



Credits to OWNORDISOWN for this helpful tip.

 

I think aw umar said that there's a defect in early batch machines, dunno if they fixed that or not.

 

Spoiler: You think so?

 

Guess we need to wait and see more temps from people. Go go go @Mobius 1, you should buy one to test.
Seriously though I fear the cooling system on the 15 is borked. Though indeed there have been a couple of AW sources that confirmed and issue with the paste on a batch of the first shipments.
Guess we shall wait and see.

 

How much thermal paste do we need for a repaste of the AW15?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

According to Dell you should use about 4 tubes of paste per die. Maybe a 1 gallon bucket to be safe

 

Unit incoming next week. Probably gonna repaste it, and add copper shims. Heard alot of the 15 having really high temps. I'm gonna need all the cooling I can get if I'm going to OC the 6820.

 

Is there any way to use the tactx buttons as media keys?

 

That's a lot. That's for the CPU and GPU together or just one of them on the AW15R3? I thought one tube should be enough?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

also received mine this week, overheating under heavy stress

 

I just want to post again that according to a Chinese site 45w kaby lake should hit retail in mid December. Thus we should expect to see it in the laptops by Jan.

Currently you can not have the top end CPU option with the top end monitor option (gsync). Do we think that when kaby lake releases we will be able to buy the high end kaby lake cpu with the gysnc monitor.

Also maybe they are going to keep the paste bad until they switch to kaby lake. Then they can claim that kaby lake has lower thermals as to drive sales.

 

Do you have the 6820hk or 6700?

 

I'm no expert but I think this guy is messing with you. Which isn't very helpful when you asked a serious question. I too would like to know...

 

6820hk

 

There seems to be a new BIOS in the making (beta version is available), which updates the fan behaviour and seems to solve the problem.

 

Since I'm getting mine this week, what are the best tools to check temps, framerate, etc? I will do those tests.

 

My less than 24 hour old 15" with 1070 and 4K died on me :\



As a side note, the 2 2280 slots are both NVMe now and are able to be raided! I bought 2x 512GB Intel 600p ssd's and will RAID0 them and use that as my Boot drive then get a 2.5" SSD as my storage.

 

Damn that is scary! Dell QA down the drain

 

It seems that one 1gm tube should be enough. Also remember to keep some thermal pads. You might have to replace the ones present when you open the system up.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

That's disappointing.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

That can happen , sorry for you, but a good point is that you'll have a unit that should ship with the latest bios and fewer early manufacturing quirks . No one will have a perfect 0% defective rate, sh#t happens.

 

I know nothing is perfect. Just sucks I waited a month for the laptop then now have to wait another 2-3 weeks. They can compensate me for my time at the least. I still have to wait and see what they do. They started the replacement process.

 

Laptop enroute. This double talk I keep hearing from alienware is so ****ty. "they have fixed the problem they deny having".
I know most people here are concerned with thermals but for me the biggest issue is the noise. Repasting would help in this right?

 

I would think your biggest issue would be hoping to have a product that functions for longer than 24 hours. For that your going to need a repaste or for dell to actually fix things that is says are not broken.

 

I will say though, I did play Rocket Arena for about 15 min on mine and it was fine. GPU never went over 62C and the computer was not getting hot or anything. This was also on 4K and no screen bleed.

Except now the motherboard is bad LOL

 

Anyone know how long are Dell quotes received from chatting with them are valid?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Lot's of people are using it with the stock thermal paste without it going bad in 24 hours

 

Yes, my laptop ran well with the stock thermal compound I changed it 4 days after receiving it to make sure that there were no big problems.

repasting directly your computer I don't recommend, always wait a little to see if the computer performs correctly and is not defective.

 

crazy. i ordered exact same. but i cancelled in favour for the aw13. have you heard anything in to what could of caused it?

 

There were literally 3 re-paste guides on the front page at the time of post. And hundreds over the course of a few years; someone like the poster with over 100 posts should know how to browse the forums for their answer. Or Google. So I chose snarky but meant no offense.

A newbie to the forum like you, I would give the real answer

I was told 24 hours.... but they give you an email of the chat log; and they price match, so I assume they would have to honor it if you have the log.

 

Yeah its about 24-48 hours for quotes. So I think if I get some time tonight that I will try repasting my setup. I have the plastic pry tools and will be using IC Diamond.

 

Found a video on Reddit from someone with the 120Hz screen on the AW15:


The screen quality seems really good, but he has a flickering issue when gaming (with Overwatch at least). Seems driver related I think.

Another comment here from someone else with a 120Hz panel: https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/59dunr/has_anyone_gotten_the_120hz_panel_yet/

 

Why IC Diamond over Gelid?
Gelid Extreme, runs cooler and wont scratch the die.
Just curious?

 

- NOT SURE about this info early 1.0.6 testers report very promising results .

ICD => superficial scratches to die, but has better viscosity and lasts longer.
Gelid => run very very slightly cooler.

Regarding the 120hz flickering does he have latest drivers, because initial dell driver did NOT support Gsync...

 

The problem is solved by reverting to the previous driver from alienware. Maybe the panel has pwm.

 

As a long term user of ICD I can say that you won't scratch the die when letting the TIM soak up the alcohol/arctic cleaner before wiping it off gently with a cotton pad.

What I've been aware of is that most ICD users put to little alcohol/arctic cleaner on the TIM and immediately start (literally) scrubbing the hell of it, while ICD is still sticky....

 

Yea I used the IC Diamond 24 Carat on my main build, I only repasted once when I changed motherboards. I used arctic cleaner and had no issues getting the paste off. I have had the same paste in there for 6 years.

 

http://www.bilibili.com/mobile/video/av6834616.html
Chinese alert
Comparison among 15FHD 15UHD and 17UHD

 

Yes, in Alienfx you can customize those keys to macros you set up. I did mine to the volume buttons, after i keyed it in, it did say like c or 3 for the button, but when you press it, it changed the volume.

 

The new BIOS 1.06 apparently increases the Stock clock ,6820HK, temperatures in the 15R3

 

His 6820HK Core's 0 / 2 are running about 10c hotter than the others, that's not good, and is putting his CPU in thermal throttling too soon.

Please check your own 6820HK for "hot" cores, and if they are 10c+ hotter than the other cores, you should return your laptop for another - the max differential between cores should be 5c, most CPU's have a 0c-5c differential.

Warning: Some i7-6820HKs have Uneven Core Temps
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/warning-some-i7-6820hks-have-uneven-core-temps.797477/

 

Somoene can tell us which is the 15FHD UHD and 17uhd per minute ? Right/left ?

 

Just got my 120hz 15R3 last night, this panel is GLORIOUS!

 

Congrats

Can you please check if that 120hz panel can be tuned for other refresh rates than 120hz?

Like 60hz, 75hz, 100hz, and points in between. It's easy to set up an Nvidia Custom resolution, just make one with a different refresh, keeping everything else the same, kinda looks like this:



We've heard it can't be OC'd faster than 120hz, but so far no one has confirmed that we can reduce the refresh to match slower running games / apps - ones that have an average FPS less than 120 FPS to match the 120hz refresh.

Thanks!

 

Sure, i'll give it a go on my lunch break

 

Gsync will match the refresh rate to the fps of the game...

 

Feeling bad for all of you that jumped on this new AW model.. seems like nothing but various issues.. the whole CPU overheating fiasco is out of hand. It's sad when Azor talks about zero throttling under any situation and it's the complete opposite. Surprised that he still has a job. Or rather allowed these new products to be sold like this. And the BIOS update simply ups the fan speeds from ridiculously loud.. to ridiculously louder is not a fix.

 

As I mentioned in the comments, his settings were still set to overclock. Check the Crysis 3 screenshot at 3 minutes. The clock speed is set to minimum of 3.6GHz and max of 3.9GHz. Even in the other screenshots (where he's cut out the speeds) you can see the CPU package is drawing more watts than it does at stock.

For as much as that guy has been providing a lot of info, a lot of the time he doesn't really know what he's doing or what he's talking about...

Are you able to check what panel the screen is? HWiNFO should be able to tell you.

There are a couple of issues, but the same is true for most brands at the moment. The zero throttling thing does seem to be true for the vast majority of people; yes, it's running hot, but it's not throttling for most people. On top of that, mostly seems to be due to bad thermal paste from the factory. Not sure why you think the general manager should be fired for that. As for the fan noise, I haven't seen anyone complain about it being too loud. In fact, for the most part people praise the fan noise; 'just a gentle woosh' is what most people seem to describe it as.

 

Hey Sandman, can u tell us the model name of your display panel from HWiNFO and AIDA64?
Please, Upload a screenshot from HWiNFO and AIDA64 for the panel name.
I can verify if it has PWM.
Thanks.