*OFFICIAL* Alienware 15 R3 Owner's Lounge

I really really want Aw15 7820HK without g sync.

 

Dell wants to repair my unit (Germany)... is it worth, sending the unit to them, or should i rather repaste myself ?

best regards.

 

@sadkodo I had a Alienware 17R4 before and strong light bleeding. The technician resolved everything for me and was very patient. So I would take advantage of the German support. Could'nt say something bad about it.

 

I'm sorry if this has been answered before. Costco is selling a Skylake 15 R3 with i7 6700, 1060 6GB, 16GB Ram, 1TB HDD and 256GB m.2... for $1099. It has the 60hz IPS 1080P screen and I really like the looks of it. The Costco display says "10 hours 20 minutes" battery life. I'm wondering what real world usage looks like for MS Office, Chrome, etc while I'm out and about. Any ideas?

 

Any opinions on the best place to sell my 15 r3? Was thinking ebay or craigslist but worried i might get scammed on ebay.

Decided to just make a new desktop build and keep gaming at home, not on the go.

 

They wanted to do the same for my unit. But i needed a laptop for my job and they won't provide another one in the meantime. So, what am I supposed to do ? Spend money again in another laptop and wait for my 15R3 having only its Bios updated ?

No thanks. As long as they don't have people qualified enough to do the same job Team LHZ do, i won't send my laptop anywhere.

 

If you're in Germany I know from experience that they will come to you the next business day to fix it. No need to send in your machine.

 

I'm not exactly sure. It probably has the 99Whr battery which means it should be able to last longer than the 68Whr model. I've seen reports usually stating ~7 hours of normal use, maybe a bit longer if you're not watching any videos.

 

It actually has the 68whr... is there any way that battery claim isn't just way over the top?

 

With the 68Whr battery it's way over the top. I have the AW13 which has a 76Whr battery and I get around 4~6 hours depending on the use.

 

Welp there goes that idea. Thanks for your help.

 

In all fairness though, when it comes to battery life in a gaming laptop, you're not gonna get much better than the Alienware. Maybe the Aorus laptop has a better battery life (99Whr I think), but definitely not at the price you're getting the 15" for. The only other option would be to go for an ultrabook if you want long battery life for light tasks throughout the day, but you won't be doing much gaming with an ultrabook. The Dell XPS 15 is kind of a mix between ultrabook and gaming laptop (has a 1050), but also doesn't come cheap.

 

Any reason you guys would like to tell someone why you went with the 15 R3 vs the 17 R4 was it purely a weight and size thing?

 

If you're intending to carry it around then 15 sounds good. But if you want max performance and don't mind carrying a heavy weight then go for AW 17.

 

does anyone here know if there is any bios mod for the gtx 1070? I saw one for clevo and it increase the tdp, thus improving performance way beyond.
check out @thegh0sts score

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/12996188

 

This work for MMX. Not sure for BGA.

 

That's with a TDP boost to 151-170W and a +170/+400 overclock.

Here's the score with the same TDP boost but with stock clocks.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/13030496

Here's the score with an unmodified vBIOS but with a +130 OC on the GPU core.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/11544953

I have a hunch that the TDP boost is increasing the scores but I'll have to do some more tests over the weekend to eliminate the difference in driver versions as the above were tested with different drivers.

But being able to do it is one thing, but whether the components can handle it is another.

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Theoretically it should work provided you have a chip programmer, a 330w PSU, a motherboard with decent power circuitry, and enough cooling to exhaust the heat out.

I have the feeling that an alienware BGA laptop might not meet all the criteria for this to be a viable venture.

The clevo model I have is decent enough to handle it like a champ. Unlike others who choose to bump the TDP to over 200W I keep mine at a reasonable max of 170W as a balance between performance boosts and maxing out the PSU.

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It is confirmed by Prema that the power delivery components on BGA board is not capable of managing the increased GPU power demand if you are lucky and can use mod firmware. It will be fried hardware. It will be Ugly... It will smell.

 

The price of buying A-LIEnware I guess.

I do know that Khenglish confirmed that the P870DM-G can handle it with ease.

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This made me LOL thank you.

 

Hi, can you manually switch to iGPU with reboot on G Sync enabled models?

 

No.

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Just thought i should chime in. I have the alienware 15 r3. My config is an i7-7700hq, gtx 1070 and standard 60 fps IPS screen for battery life so i also got the 99whr battery. I am horrified at dell for the choices of hardware you get in the UK and for the restrictions they impose on the laptop. I have managed to get 10 hours of use out of the battery (screen at 9%, wifi, doing programming, ms office, light browsing). You can get more battery, there are 2 things you can do and 1 thing dell should do to improve it though. The first thing i did was optimise windows, go through all the settings, services and so on. Second thing i did was use throttlestop, hwinfo (for fan control) and possibly intel extreme tuning utility. You'd want to set a profile for battery and when plugged in. For the best battery life, undervolt the CPU and IGP, set them to lowest multipliers/clocks and tick the options like power saver and tweak all the advanced options. I have my i7 using 3W or less using the laptop as a normal everyday portable when not gaming or doing CPU intensive tasks, that leaves 7W for everything else to obtain a 10 hour battery life with 99whr battery. I also set a custom fan profile because for some reason dell's bios kept the fan spinning all the time. I set my fans to turn on at 50C CPU. Dont forget to set windows 10 battery saver to activate from 100% battery. Im also using a low power SSD like the recent crucial mx300 series. I still do have the hard drive it came with but i place everything i need to use when not plugged in into the SSD.

There are some things that really bug me about the laptop, I didnt realise it doesnt have an SD card slot as i work with a lot of ARM based boards and they all have microSDs. The VBIOS doesnt allow voltage tweaking, if the TDP was raised and voltage tweaking allowed, you could undervolt the GPU and achieve better speeds by keeping the temps low which reduces TDP use and lets you have higher clocks to some extent. I've seen power use change significantly with temperature for big chips like GPUs and tilera CPUs just because the temperature changed by 10C under the same CPU usage. Dell also made an idiotproof solution to disable the onboard nvidia GPU if you use the AGA. I use the AGA because i want to have more GPUs to address, which is very useful for programming. When i make my software or even games i will be sure to note that the alienware is a suboptimal solution for using GPU accelerated programs. If dell doesnt disable the onboard GPU when using the AGA it will also make it hot swappable too because PCIe is hot swappable, though hot swappability is dictated by electrical and not data.

 

AGA simply is like a external motherboard with only PCIe Slots, USB, and AGA port as well.

 

nope, the AGA isnt like an external motherboard, its like an extension or a PCIe card to put it in the correct terms. It is more cost effective if the whole thing is just directly just PCIe data, lessens the chips and hardware you'll need for it whereas thunderbolt is more expensive because of its capability to daisy chain so it needs more chips and hardware on the board of the product.

My issue is that in order to use the PCIe slot on the AGA it will disable the onboard nvidia GPU. I mean what if i wanted to use a 10G NIC instead? This is the issue i'm having with the AGA, dell doesnt give us the option to use both the onboard GPU and GPU on the AGA at the same time. I mean what if you wanted to play a game that uses physx for instance? or do professional work that does GPU rendering, programming or even AI. This disabling is done on purpose. There are sufficient lanes for everything to be used at the same time.

 

So, have any of you seen this warning message come up? Seems as though this system is laptop is built with a sensor that may cause overheating if monitored *gasp*
Does anyone have any insight onto which one it is exactly and if it really does have an impact on the readings?

 

Disable aka don't monitor this sensor. EC will interfere with speakers etc. Recommended to be disabled.

 

Oh I know I obviously disabled that one but still; it's interesting

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You can get around it, by enabling PCH thermal device, HPET and EC support in hwinfo preferences. Be sure to quit the app and then open it to refresh the sensors.

 

Hi guys

Want to see if anyone else is having a problem with the secondary 1TB 7200 RPM HGST HDD:

For a little over one week now, 1 out of 2 boot-ups lead to the HDD not being recognised. If I reboot, it shows up. I hear what I believe to be the HDD needle making what sounds like a lifting sound one or twice at boot up. Dell's software doesn't indicate any issues (short test). Not getting any read errors and no corrupted files.

Haven't contacted Dell yet as the problem is intermittent and difficult to reproduce and doesn't display errors. Not sure how this will go with them... Also, is it possible it's not the HDD and maybe worse, the MB?

 

The issue might be a loose Sata connection between the HDD and the motherboard. Have you tried reconnecting reconnecting the sata cables to your HDD?

You can access the HDD directly by removing the back lid. Remember to remove the battery cable before touching any other cables. Make sure your Sata cable is not loose or anything.

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So I just bought a 15R3 from alienware. Thinking surely they have the heat issue fixed by now. I was playing mafia 3 and my temps were at 100-105c on 2 cores and the other 2 cores were 85-95c. I'm guessing bad paste job again and I need to repaste it.

 

Hi There
I have Alienware M17x R2 Intel i7 740QM with AMD HD5800M series GPU. Thinking of tweaking it with Intel i7 940XM and AMD HD8970M
Just want to confirm the compatibility of these two parts.

Thanks

 

Welcome to the forum.
Rather ask in the correct sub-forum m17x-r1-r2-owners-lounge (for your machine).

 

Probably bad paste job and possibly bad heat sink. Whats your 15r3s manufacture date?

 

**** me. Saw a little bug crawling around on my display so I went to wipe it off... Turns out little **** was inside the layer before the panel and I squashed him in place. Now it looks like I got a dead pixel there. ****ing hell.

 

This thread might help in dismantle and reassembly of your display after "insect remains" removal..
http://forum.notebookreview.com/index.php?threads/800153/


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Got a new 15r3 7820hk and 1070 today, and after setting it up and starting to play some games, the screen suddenly warped and the laptop froze, only time I've seen a screen like this before is on a desktop without the correct GPU drivers installed. After a reboot the screen flickered repeatedly but I could load the geforce experience app, so I tried to reinstall the GPU drivers, it prompted me to restart but black screen after reboot till I rebooted again, and now I'm back to the same flickering/distorted screen as before. There's the orange exclamation mark next to the 1070 in device manager. Tried uninstalling device and rebooting but no luck. Anything else I can try or is the GPU dead?

 

I've heard of computers having bugs...But this is ridiculous!!!

 

Don't know if this is useful, but try pressing FN+F7 to switch to the intel card and see if you still get flickering or not. I'm guessing if you dont then maybe the Nvidia card is having issues.

 

Its the Gsync model so that does nothing

 

aaa

Ah...did not know it was G-sync. My bad.

 

No worries, all the evidence points towards the GPU being f#cked. Rather annoying tbh, I've had issues with all of my 15R3's bar the first one. Much as I liked my last AW this is beyond a hassle, considering switching brands.

 

I feel ya man. I love AW too, but having to dismantle my system 3 times to fix the temps despite paying almost 3K for it is unforgivable IMO.

 

Thank you. I'll fix the bug thing while I do my repaste when grizzly comes in the mail.


I got a new problem now. Windows updated last night and ever since then the left side fan will not shut up. Its constantly on where at idle it would turn off completely. Very annoying.

 

Have you checked CPU fan cable?

 

I haven't opened this machine up quite yet but the problem has resolved itself after several reboots. Temps were showing up fine all around and nothing was showing usage on task manager. Strange. I really don't like how weird windows 10 can be at times.

 

Yes their EC firmware acts strangely sometimes.

 

Go to bios and load recommended settings, maybe that will help.