*OFFICIAL* Alienware 15 R3 Owner's Lounge

Hello folks, I've ran into trouble with my 15 R3. I can't boot into windows at all, with the diagnosis telling me the BCD file is missing some information, error code 0xc0000034.

I've got a USB stick with Windows 10 64bit installation media, and boot the laptop from it. I have tried running the repair tool, to no avail. I've also been into the command prompt. I've tried:

bootrec /fixMBR (succeeded)
bootrec /fixBoot (succeeded)
bootrec /rebuildMCD - but here it fails to scan any installed windows packages.

So, I try to run bcdedit to remove it manually and then rebuild. But on entering this command:

bootedit /export c:/bcdbackup

It comes back with it failing to find the system device. This worried me some, so I went into diskpart, and chose "list volume".

Here, according to the command prompt, there is only two volumes on the system: my 32GB removable USB, and the 1TB hard drive. The 128GB SSD (where windows is installed) is nowhere to be found.

I'm totally at a loss as to how this happened, and how to fix. Has anyone ran into this trouble, and has any ideas? Thanks all

 

Either your SSD has a hardware failure (less likely) or the SSD partition is corrupted to the extent that it's not showing up on conventional software (more likely).

To fix it, you might have to make a new partition table (MBR or GPT). To do this you can make a bootable "Gparted Live" USB and boot through it just like you did with your windows utility. See if you can access your ssd drive from there.

Sent from my Moto G (4) using Tapatalk

 

Thanks for the reply Aman, will this cause any formatting/loss of data? Also what are the steps to follow should I be able to access the SSD.

 

It will definitely lead to loss of data, as you are essentially formatting the drive.

But, this should be done as a last resort, only if you are unable to access the drive by other means. I have used Gparted in the past to convert my HDD partition table from MBR to GPT. I don't have exact steps for you, but you basically need to do this-
1.Launch GParted live via USB.
2.If any partitions (not your HDD, look for the 128gb one) are mounted (as indicated by a lock or key icon), unmount them.
3.Select Device->Create Partition Table.
4.Click Apply.

Google might help you better with exact steps and videos.



Sent from my Moto G (4) using Tapatalk

 

Thank you. I'll try to find a way around to access the drive, I really don't fancy formatting the whole drive. I don't get how this could even happen, nothing out of the ordinary at all until I boot up yesterday morning and boom BSOD.

 

I've since ran an extended test on Dell's Pre-boot System Assessment, and it passed every single test. But still won't boot. One thing I noticed is that my drives are both detected in there, with the HDD noted as 0-0-1 and the SDD 1-0-9. However, the OS boot path is set to "MBR of Hard Drive 0-0-1". Windows is installed on the SSD, does this mean it's trying to boot from the wrong drive?

 

Download Boot Repair x64 and burn it to flash drive and let it fix it for you. Burn it using rufus in efi mode.

 

You could use WinPE to format patitions and prepare them for windows, newer Windows sometimes will report some filesystem error which can be corrected by simple chkdsk.

 

Edit: Fixed

 

Hello!

Anyone with 7820HK? How it overclocks, handle high temps?

Worth buying over 7700HQ?

Thanks

 

7820HK.

 

Update for you. I got my Unit back some days ago. They changed the radiator. Temps are good now. Fans are working much better. Temps are much better, too. no throttling and the differences are between 5 and 10 degrees again. im happy, that i have choosen the Service.

best regards

 

Thanks, I appreciate your feedback. Did they update your unit's Bios ?

 

how can i check that?

 

Press F2 at boot time, the Bios menu shows its revision.

 

Or use Cpu-Z

 

Version 1.1.6

 

I suppose you don't know wich version you had before. Because some Bios Update fix heating issue by lowering the CPU frequency long before it overheats.

 

New BIOS released today v1.18

http://www.dell.com/support/home/uk...nware-15-laptop&languageCode=en&categoryId=BI


Fixes & Enhancements
1. Security improvement.
2. Graphic performance enhancement.

 

I'm thinking it's the Intel graphics. Looking at XTU, I'm seeing a few changes.

 

Security fixes could be microcode update.

 

Anyone know if the thermal issues have been resolved?
I bought a 15 r3 (kaby lake) from bestbuy (shipped around may) and the thermals aren't great. I did a repaste, which lowered them, but i've still got a differential of 10-15 degrees.

Im wondering if i should return it to bestbuy and get one directly from dell.

Spoke to dell sales person and got this:

 

anyone here tried to buy from the outlet and ship to a PO Box? did it work?

 

So i just went home and decided to run some tests.

I just ran a 50min OCCT and these were the temps:


And then i added OCCT+Heaven for another 10 minutes:


And here's the ambient temp:


What do you guys think?

 

If you have core differentials of more than 5 degrees than your repaste wasn't sufficient. If you have used liquid metal try to use some more of it.

 

Amazing temps. Its almost same as @iunlock temps using TG Kryonaut. Looks like you got perfect heat sink and paste.

 

Also, on a side note, did anyone else notice this white thing on the right hinge? Or is it just my unit and its a fault?

 

I just disassembled my 15R3 again yesterday to tweak my LM and get better overall temps. I think that white strip you're seeing is one of the ribbon cables that plug into the motherboard. Mine's tucked away so you can't see it, but I can see how it would be visible if it's floating more upwards toward the surface. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

 

Thanks! I did readjust the hinge because i noticed the screen as not perfectly aligned to the body. I saw the cables that run behind the hinge cover but didn't want to play around with them so i let them be.

 

I have used a forwarding service, but maybe PO box is the same.

You have the option to pay with paypal I think, what you do is notify paypal beforehand to (possibly) back you up if the merchant calls back. Because dell sometimes questions you about non-matching billing.

With this you can ship to a tax-free state.

Is that repasted? If not, then I would just keep it as is.

 

It's repasted with GC extreme.

 

Sounds good then, I would just leave it as is.

 

Hi - new to this sub, but I've been around NBR for a while. I'm getting a new AW 15 R3 today and have a question. My old gamer was a 2015 model year Razer Blade 14 (970m GPU). It has the factory 512Gb m.2 SSD in it, which is a sata-based SSD (I believe Razer has moved to NVMe with later models). My old PC is dead, dead, but the SSD should still be good. I have removed it from the old machine. If it helps answer my question, I have posted a picture of it here:



My question is this: Can anyone tell me if the M.2's used in the Razer for their 2015 models (specifically, the one pictured above <g>) can be used in one of the extra slots in my new AW machine - would be nice to have direct access to all the data on there. I have backups, but direct access would make stuff easier to move over. Sorry if this is a naive question - I know a bit about tech, but my expertise isn't deep enough to help me be sure with this one.

Anyway, looking forwards to setting up and playing with the new machine. Cheers!

 

If its m.2 then you can reuse it. Both SATA and PCIe NVMe are supported in m.2 SSD slot.

 

Got the laptop this afternoon, and after initial setup and restoring cloud backups I was satisfied that the machine (120hz 1920x1080 panel, 7820HK CPU, 1070 GPU, 16gb@2667 DRAM, 1tb ssd + 1tb sata storage) is working well, and the CPU & GPU temps are within reasonable ranges with my games (nothing too challenging for this machine - Skyrim SE and GTAV are the main games at the moment). CPU Temps are staying in the low to mid 70's with an occasional jump to the high 70's.

In any case, I read Dell's online manual for instructions on removing the base cover and proceeded to remove the 1tb sata drive and replace it with an existing 1tb Samsung 850 evo I use for local backups, and also slotted in the m.2 sata I had removed from my defunct Razer. After putting everything back together, the machine booted and everything has been working well.

I have noticed two issues that I'm not sure if I can fix or not:

1) Occasionally upon restart the wifi card seems to malfunction and not connect properly to my router. It seems to take a long time to negotiate a connection, and then connects with no internet connectivity. This has happened twice after a machine restart, and both times I had to go to device manager and disable and then re-enable the device to get it working properly again. I've heard of some similar issues with the Killer brand before, and this seems to be happening on my machine as well. It's a fairly simple work-around, but I worry it's symptomatic of a problem that could get worse over time.

2) I have a set of batch files I wrote some time ago to do an image backup using a command prompt and the command-line tools for imaging that come built into Windows. On this machine, the image backup always fails while trying to prep an image for the EFI partition. I can image without including that, but Windows then complains that the backup won't be able to be used to do a system restore. I tried using the Control Panel GUI for an image backup as well, and that also failed with a similar error. Given that Microsoft is apparently preparing to remove the imaging tools in a future update to Windows 10, I guess I'll just have to go to a 3rd party backup tool for my local backups anyway, but I really liked using my batch files and Windows' built-in software to do it.

Anyway, no serious issues, and I'm delighted with the gaming performance, temps, and general fit and finish of the machine.

I was worried I wouldn't like the panel after using the Razer's 3200x1800 touchscreen, but I like the matte finish, and the games seem sharper running at the panel's native resolution which, of course, I could never do with the Razer. The colors are not quite as vibrant as on the Razer, but I don't think that's going to bother me much.

Finally, one complaint and one compliment for Alienware:

Complaint: I liked using the Razer's Synapse software to build a profile that I could easily switch on and off for gaming that disabled the keyboard's Windows key. There doesn't seem to be an equally snazzy way of doing this on the AW machine and that seems like an omission that should be corrected. I know you can turn off the Windows key with the registry, or use macros and a 3rd party key-mapper, but I've done those things before and consider those solutions to be much less handy than a nicely integrated OEM solution like Synapse. I know lots of people hate on Synapse, but I enjoyed that aspect of it a lot.

Compliment: One of my biggest complaints about using the Razer was that I never learned how to rest my hands on the machine for typing without accidentally registering unwanted activity on the touchpad. I fooled for hours with the touchpad settings and palm rejection, but nothing ever worked for me, so I eventually just kept the thing permanently disabled since I rarely use a touchpad anyway. On the Alienware machine, I was delighted to find a built-in setting to have the touchpad automatically enable/disable itself based on whether a USB mouse was available. That's the perfect answer for me, and it works like a charm! Good going, Alienware. A simple solution for a problem that vexed me on two different Razers.

 

For that use the latest driver from killer after complete uninstall using Revo.
See this thread and tweak your killer card. Killer vs. Intel network cards performance

 

I've been doing some temperature measurements today, and thought I'd share the results of my last gaming session - the temps seem good to me, but if something seems off, please let me know.

This machine is a new AW15" R3 spec'ed as follows:

CPU: 7820HK
GPU: 1070
Panel: 1920x1080 FHD G-Sync (TN panel, 120hz)
Memory: 2x8GB 2666Mhz
Storage (some added by me after delivery):
Drive #1 - Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB (931 GB) [Formerly used as external backup drive]
Drive #2 - SAMSUNG MZNTE512HMJH-00000 512GB (476 GB) [System drive from previous laptop]
Drive #3 - NVMe THNSN51T02DUK NV 1TB (953 GB) [Boot drive]
Wifi: Killer Wireless 1535

OS is Windows 10 Pro, fully patched
Drivers for Wifi and GPU are the most current available from Killer's and NVidia's websites.
Machine firmware is the current latest from Dell's support website

I have not yet attempted any thermal improvements to this machine. It is factory-fresh.

I've been experimenting with using the BIOS Performance settings for overclocking the CPU and running the fans constantly at high speed. The system is stable in that configuration, and benchmarks are fairly impressive, but I did see some high CPU temps (99C for very short bursts) and a short period of thermal throttling during stress testing (3DMark Fire Strike stress test - 20 reps with 97% or more framerate consistency to achieve a "PASS" - 3 of 4 runs did pass at 98% or more consistency, with one run failing at 96.8% consistency).

For the temperatures shown below during actual gaming, however, all BIOS Performance settings were disabled (the factory setting). My procedure was to boot the machine from a cooled-off resting state, run HWInfo64 and immediately launch my game, which was GTA Online. Settings for GTA Online were first optimized using GeForce Experience, and then reduced from optimal by sliding the performance slider about 4 stops to the left, which results in medium-high settings. I've played GTA for thousands of hours and I've never been able to discern the difference visually between medium-high and near-maximum graphics settings, so I play with the settings reduced just a bit since it makes a significant difference in framerates and, I believe, system temperatures during play. The screen resolution was 1920x1080, and I used Borderless Window as the window-type, which disables the game's 60fps framerate lock.

For this session, I deactivated G-Sync. In-game framerates never dropped below 100fps according to the Steam in-game overlay for FPS. I would say the average framerate during this session was around 110fps. For those familiar with GTA Online, I used an "Invite Only" session, which guaranteed I would be the only person in the session, and that my machine would be the session host.

I played very actively for just under 45 minutes (1 game day in the game), exited the game, and immediately took screen clips of the HWInfo64 window sections for CPU and GPU sensors.

The clips don't include the column headers, so to remind anyone not familiar with the column headers in HWInfo, they are, from left to right, "Sensor", "Current", "Minimum", "Maximum" and "Average". The averages should be very close to accurate, since I started the game immediately after starting HWInfo and took the screen clips immediately after exiting the game.

First, the CPU clips:



Next, the GPU clips:



These seem like good bordering on excellent gaming temps to me - am I right in assuming that these kinds of temps are unlikely to produce any long-term problems with reliability? I'm a little anxious about temperatures, since I believe high gaming temperatures were likely a strong contributing factor to the premature failure (26 months) of my previous gaming machine, which was a 2015 Razer Blade 14" model with the 970m graphics chipset.

Thanks for reading. I'm really enjoying setting up and getting familiar with this machine.

 

Considering you're not UnderVolting your CPU and it's stock thermal past, you're unit looks like a potentially good one without any core temps diff.
But those CPU temps are too high for OCing.

UnderVolt and you 'll stand in the Max 70-75°C for CPU.
Repast with a good thermal past and OC will be fine.

 

New firmware is available for those who want to test it

 

To be honest, I'm not really very interested in overclocking. The reason I bought the model with the unlocked CPU was because I wasn't sure if you needed an unlocked processor to do undervolting, which I thought might be of interest since I had read so many reports of temperature problems with these machines (and my previous experience with Razer).

I am fairly tech savvy, but not into overclocking per se, and although I've read carefully through the thoroughly-documented post elsewhere on this forum about how to repaste correctly, I would not attempt to do such a thing myself - just not confident in my abilities to pry everything loose without breaking a connector or tearing loose a cable from a terminator or dropping a tiny screw somewhere where I can't retrieve it. I'm a bit of a klutz when it comes to stuff like that, and know my own limits.

Just for grins, after reading your reply I used Intel XTU to undervolt my CPU by 100 millivolts (-.100 V on the Core Voltage Offset slider), and ran a 10-minute OCCT stress test. Here are my HWInfo CPU Temps - I reset HWInfo at 1 minute into the test so that the averages would be more reflective of the CPU's thermals over the course of the test. Screen clip was taken about 15 seconds after the test terminated:

10-minute OCCT stress test, temperature averages for the last 9 minutes of the test (note that the minimums are low because the temperatures dropped after the test very quickly, before I could get the screen shot. Minimums during the test were in the mid to high 50's).



These look good to me. I'm going to keep using this undervolt and do more actual gaming over the next few days. I'll try to be disciplined and keep accurate screenshots of my temps during gaming, and post back up with more data on this stock machine. So far, I'm feeling satisfied it will more than meet my needs while not pushing any temperatures that would threaten component reliability.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for your suggestion.

 

You will start OC'ing in the future to get more FPS or for more power instead of upgrading the PC.

 

@TJCacher Hmmm look at the lines Power Limit Exceeded : Yes. This means Your CPU reduced its frequency to stand under its 45W power limit.
Try a custom OC in Bios and just increase Both Power Limit to 100000 mW. And run your test again without and with UV.

 

Has anyone tried to replace their screen? I'm thinking about switching my 4K screen down to a 1080p one. I might even try using a 120hz Gsync display, but i'm not sure if they use the same connector as the 4K screen. I know the Gsync won't work, i'm just going for the 120hz.

 

Tried on the 17. The 120hz will work, but you need to stay in optimus mode. the screen blacks out if you go into performance mode.

 

Do you know of any reason not to use Optimus? From what i found the only reason i don't use it is to use fast sync in the nvidia control panel, otherwise it seems to keep things cooler and using less power.

 

No idea. I've read performance mode might get you more (marginal) FPS, haven't tested. Otherwise optimus seems better for everyday use.

 

How did you find the panel to replace your original with? Did you just find one with the right size/connector, or did you look for a specific model?

 

Found the specific model they use for this machine and bought it off ebay.

The QHD and UHD screen use the same connector. If you have FHD screen you need to buy the 40 pin cable from Dell.

I went back to my original screen because I don't like the 120hz TN colors at all.

 

Hello every one. I recently bought Alienware 15R3 (i7-6700HQ gtx 1060) and the heating issue is a major concern. I will be re-applying thermal compound but I was wondering is it possible to swap the Heat Sink of 1070 with the 1060 both made for Alienware. Since 1070's have more heatpipe for cooling than 1060 does. Will it help ?

 

I have an Alienware 15 R3 Kaby Lake.

I tried out the 1.19 BIOS they have on the site. All seemed fine until the processor overheated and crashed the system as soon as I played a game (World of Warcraft, in this instance). Temps went up as high as 99C, Event viewer was reporting thermal throttling. Rolling the BIOS back to 1.08 put the temps back to the normal 79-85ish under gaming load.

I may still contact tech support, but at least it operated under normal temps now (though it's sitting at 50C as I write this in Chrome, seems high).

So, bummer that.