*OFFICIAL* Alienware 17 R2/R3 Benchmark Thread

Hmm, seems like lower performance than what I saw from a single 980M using 344.73 drivers from way back in December. Decreasing performance seems to be a trend for NVIDIA drivers lately. That's so sad. I think they can do better, but it seems like their goal is the exact opposite.

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/5182955/fs/3460775

 

updated my drivers from 345.20 due to it crashing - used the modded INF you provided on the general channel with the desktop drivers. I was trying to run a comparison to find out if the old drivers were still better.

However, seeing as the scores are close that you shared - and your results are from the 4980 and mine are the 4710, I'm not sure its apples to apples fully. The graphic score was only 2.2% better which could be variation in run to run. I'll benchmark some more and see if I can cross that 9k threshold

 

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7462784?

9138 to your 9141 after rebooting and restarting my GPU OC with the latest drivers. . . no throttling this benchmark running 135/400

 

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7471928?
9151 Firestrike score with graphics driver
344.73 - OC'd +135/400 hz

 

How do you get a much higher combined score than I do. I have overclocked my GPU on par with yours and only got to 8556 overall score. Graphics and physics are within a few digits of yours but my combined score is so much lower at 3550.


Tried this about 3 times and im getting a similar combined score everytime. (Driver 352.86)

 

Not too sure. I'd say its the difference in processing power. My machine has been impeccable in regards to throttling - the CPU holds at 3.6-3.65 ghz without issue. I'm running on the lower end i7 4710HQ but overclocking the CPU to 3.757 where it is the most stable point I can find (with the graphics amplifier plugged in, I can obtain 3.8 ghz stable). But again, your CPU is likely throttling during the combined test - where as mine is not.

Graphics score matters most on firestrike. It's not a good demand on CPU and the combined score is not a good indicator. It's best to look at 3DMark11 scores, of which you SHOULD best my top scores. Let me get back to plugged in on my power supply and I'll start my OC and run a fresh bench on 3D Mark, the highest I can obtain ATM is around 11141 which I feel is lower than it should be.

 

Getting 11464 stock on mine for 3dmark11. Haven't tried OCing on that test yet...

 

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/9995653

10648 stock with the 4710 and 980m this was from a fresh reboot with all OC turned off. Turning on OC now to run again

 

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dm11/9995653/3dm11/9938240

Our graphics score here are on par with one another. The physics section shows your 4980 besting my processor deeply

 

Run 3Dmark 11

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/10087604

 

Lower expectations so that their next product will feel revolutionary

 

Run 13K 3dm11

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/10087684

 

The 4980 makes a massive difference in the 3Dmark11 scores compared to the 4710HQ

 

look Graphics Score

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/10087698

 

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dm11/10087684/3dm11/9995807

I did, your graphics score is slightly above mine - CPU is where the advantage comes. Like I said, the difference the 4980 makes is significant

 

My Vbios 980M modifed

 

I was planning on modifying mine. But GPU-z could not export the bios for me to edit in Maxwell tweaker. Did you download a modified vbios already ready to go? and did NVflasher give you any issues to flash?

 

AW17 R2, A05, 980M, 353.30, Win 8.1, stock vBIOS.

Fire Strike 8538

 

Firestrike

Edit 10K http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7875034
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7875034

 

Where did find the vbios? I have been searching to no end for the 4gb 980m version since I can't extract my own.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Current XTU benchmark on the 4710hq. Currently ranked 5th in the community.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Great score you have there. As a new alienware laptop owner I'd like to ask you do you experience throttling? If so how did you manage to fix it?

 

Windows 10, NVidia 353.62, 980M, stock vbios, stock clocks.

Firestrike 3417, slightly slower than my last 8.1 Firestrike.

 

Hello everyone,

I am sorry to bump in your thread, and apologise if this is the wrong place to ask my question but here goes.

I bought an Alienware 17 on the 19th and I got the UPS message telling me it's in China on the 29th, and am now biting my fingers off and having insomnia so much i'm excited and impatient to get it ^^.

Here are the specs :

17.3 inch FHD (1920 x 1080)~17.3 inch FHD (1920 x 1080) IPS-Panel Anti-Glare 300-nits

NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) GTX 980M with 4GB GDDR5 1SR

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 4980HQ~Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 4980HQ Processor (Quad-Core, 6MB Cache, up to 4.0GHz w/ Turbo Boost)

16GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600MHz (2x8GB) 1SR

512GB M.2 SSD + 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s~512GB M.2 SSD + 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 1SR

And of course, the reason for my message :

Power Supply : Alienware 180W AC Adapter1SR

I was reading this thread and got to page 35~ where the discussion was about the power supply, and they have successfully scared the **** out of me !

I would like to say that I have immense respect for everybody here that took the time to do all those tests for anyone to see and of course for everyone's passion about their laptops.

Now, my question is : For someone who just wants to play the Witcher 3, and older games with a nice FPS and Superb graphics (The No.1 reason I bought the laptop ^^) and isn't going to OC (Mainly because he knows nothing of it). I guess in short it's for casual gaming, do I need to take the fight to Dell and get a 240W AC ? Or will the 180W be enough for my needs ?

Edit : Another question : I see many threads (Dating from 2013) that say that I need to stick to Dell's driver for my GPU, and that Nvidia GeForce Experience doesen't work well with Alienware, or that I have to mod my .INF file, is that still the case ?

Edit 2 : When I receive my Alienware 17, hopefully in 2-3 days I will install
Futuremark 3DMark 11 v1.0.132 and post my results here, hopefully you guys can tell me what you think of the results.

Edit 3 : Well I am now up to speed, read all 88 Pages of the Thread ^^' (Waiting for this laptop is killing me xD) And I may have something to contribute to the conversation.

On the link below after you've selected " "Drivers and Downloads" you can see there is a new Bios not mentioned here. The A05.
Since I just bought my laptop I think I may recieve this Bios Version. Anyone has any experience with it ?

Link : http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/alienware-17-r2/drivers/advanced

Then again, since all I want to do is play some games and not benchmark/ O/C, perhaps the 180W will be enough for me and the Bios version will be adequate.


Anyway thanks for reading !

 

A00 bios for the coolest temps.

You NEED a 240 PSU to fully use your cpu and gpu, other wise you will not have enough power, even before over clocking your power will be short.

The Nvidia stock game ready drivers directly from Nvidia are fine. 353.3 current drivers are working well. 345.2 is still probably the best drivers available for the 980m, but it will require some tinkering to get the desktop drivers to work.

 

Ok thanks for the reply reptile ! Will give Dell a phonecall when the AW arrives then.

 

@Thurkar I tagged you because I thought you might want to know. I just downloaded 3DMark and I did a firestrike benchmark. Everything is stock except I undervolted the CPU by 51.8 mV's. Here is the link: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7975112?
Here is the screenshot:

This is on BIOS A05 and 180W PSU. I checked similar machines and ASUS G751JY scored 8367 according to laptopmag ( http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/asus-g751jy). I think my score is on the par with asus. By the way do any of you guys experience throttling on 240W PSU and A00 BIOS?

 

I think everyone to a certain extent has some throttling with the machine, and any machines with soldered intel CPU's for that matter, so it's definitely not an issue that is only inherent to this machine, it has just been exacerbated by the exclusion of the 240 watt power supply which should have shipped with the system in the first place. The throttling though is not something you would readily notice though during gameplay and is mostly only apparent through benchmarks.

 

@Splintah Having you and orancanoren (in another thread) confirm that gameplay is (relatively) unaffected by the throttling really put my mind at ease and I am now once again super happy about my purchase and can't wait to get it, thanks for that !

@orancanoren Thank you so much for sharing, that is indeed a respectable score, I am curious to see if the 240W will change anything there ! About the Throttling on 240W as Splintah said it appears that everybody experience a certain amount of throttle and no one seems to have been able to get rid of it entirely.

 

@Thurkar well I don't really care THAT much about throttling now. I played shadow of mordor, dying light, sniper elite 3 and these games didn't get affected by throttling to stock clocks. By the way my machine did way more throttling when I first got it but somehow it doesn't throttle that much now. I didn't use thtottlestop or intel XTU. Sometimes my CPU frequency dropped to 2.6 GHz from 3.4 GHz and then it recovered to 3.4 GHz after a few mins. But as I said it did not impact gameplay. The reason I bought this laptop was to play games and I'm not really an enthusiast. I'd like to OC the GPU a bit though to improve my FPS in games and I've seen people OC'ing their gtx 980m in alienware 17r2. The thing that bothers me now is the temps. My CPU eventually goes up to 90 degrees C although a dell rep told me those temps are from CPU's core. A05 reads the core temps so that is not an accurate information. Right now I'm waiting for 240W PSU to get a cooler and a more stable machine. Here is a skydiver benchmark result of mine: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7986099

 

Hey man thanks for the skydiver benchmark and the information, i'm glad the throttling isn't annoying more than that, and isn't affecting your gaming.

I too only bought this laptop to play games, I don't really run CPU heavy programs, but to tell you the truth I am now going to go for the 3 or 4 year warranty, because no matter what they say, on the long term I can't imagine that these temperatures are good for the CPU, so if a problem does happen, i'll just call Dell and have a tech come to my house and change the motherboard. I really think that although this laptop has issues, the fact that you can have someone come to your house and fix it, and that all the parts are under warranty, I think that makes it worth.

Since you brought up the FPS, i'm going to quote below a post where you can see FPS tests between the 180W and 240W PSU, there are significant improvement seen, so hopefully you will be happy with the result too ! Can't wait to get mine and compare my benchmark results with yours, hopefully it will be the same.

 

I aggree with you on the temps and going for 3-4 years warranty is a good call IMO. BTW it's good to be communicating with someone who is at the same condition as yours (new AW laptop) I think FPS won't change very much when I get the 240W PSU, the performance is great even now! I was able to run dying light with an fps around 45-60 which I find great (ultra, view distance a little bit over half) but I prefer constant 60 fps over ultra graphics so I changed some of the settings which don't change the graphics much and now I can play the game constantly 60 fps (sometimes drops to 52-55 and then recovers to 60).

 

Yeah it's real nice to have someone in the same situation, that way we can ask each other to compare results rather than having to rely on old tests done with different settings etc..

It's true that even though it's one of the recent Top laptops, It's still a laptop. Being able to tune a few graphic settings down a bit and play at 60 FPS is still very nice imo. I imagine that to get ALL settings maxed out and have 60 FPS you'd need a Desktop for the job and sacrifice the mobility... Which really isn't an option for me atm. Can't wait for UPS to move it's ass and get it here .

 

This is very odd. I downgraded my BIOS to A00 to see what happens with the 180W adapter and I scored 8115 on firestrike: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/7992364
although HWiNFO reports my CPU throttled to 800 MHz during the test which was expected. The temps are great when compared to hybrid BIOS versions.

 

Well the throttle as you said was expected without the 240W PSU, however I was under the impression that the CPU wasn't supposed to throttle until the Temps are too high and you say temps are great... Maybe without the hybrid bios the GPU forced the CPU to throttle ? In your previous test you scored a 8225 but it seems like not much of a difference to me.

Did you notice any new behavior with your fans ? Everybody is always talking about how the fan table in Bios A00 is better, i'm curious about it.

 

The fans really are better on BIOS A00. They kick in quickly. On the other hand on other versions they don't even start spinning until CPU reaches very high temps. I checked intel XTU and it reported thermal throttling as well as other types of throttlings on A00. 240W PSU is a must with A00. I was very surprised when I saw a score above 8000 on firestrike and I don't know how that is possible. I tried playing games on A00 and it was bad I had an fps drop of 20 in shadow of mordor and dying light. BTW I had an adrenaline rush while loading BIOS A00 because the computer freezed. I opened the back of laptop and disconnected the battery. After that I reconnected the battery and tried booting the pc and it did boot up. Anyways now I'm back on A05 because of the gaming performance. I ran another firestrike test after the BIOS update and I scored 8219 but CPU throttled to 1.xx GHz so I tried another benchmark with Throttlestop on and this time minimum CPU frequency was 3.2 GHz (average 3.4x GHz) while maintaining ok temps (max 88 deg C). I undervolted the CPU by 59.6 mV's. Undervolting seems to help a lot.

 

The firestrike score sure is weird but ... in a good way ? I don't know ^^' It truly is a shame about the Fans only working properly with the A00..

About the adrenaline rush I totally understand what you mean it really would be painful to finally get the laptop and brick the motherboard first day in . Personally I decided to wait until I get it and see if I feel somehow cheated, or that I didn't get what I paid for.

If it gives me all I want with the A05 and the 180W PSU then i'm just going to leave it as it is and enjoy it. All I want really is to enjoy a few games on ultra settings. However, in say 6 month - a year from now, when (or if ? ) new games will be more demanding then I'll be really happy to have all your and everyone here's advice on what I need to do. (Probably spill some coffee on it and get a replacement hahaha )

 

I have a newbie question.

I have seen people reporting great results with the i7 4980HQ tuned with XTU.

I have just received my Alienware 17 R2 with that processor.

Would XTU work ?

I know ThrottleStop don't: BSOD on start of the program !

Thanks !

 

xtu and throttlestop 8.0 both work with the 4980HQ. Depends on what you are after doing with them on which to use.

 

Well, I tried XTU and it did work and got a score of 996... But as long as I don't get the 240W PS, I'm severly limited in games where I hsve to revert back to stock clocks.

BTW, does anyone knows if the 330W PS from the Alienware 18 would function on the Alienware 17 R2 ?

 

Hey there, do you mind explaining what do you mean by "severly limited" ? I'm really curious about it since i'm getting mine soon. I mean in actual gaming experience. Lag ? FPS drops ? In what games ?

Also concerning your 330W question, I searched the benchmark thread and found this :

(Clicking on the blue arrow next to "hendav said:" takes you to the post if you're curious about the conversation)

Edit : We are on the benchmark thread.. My bad it's 7:30AM .

 

well, a little increase in processor current from 95 to 105 and clocks at 41,40,39,39 and I couldn't even complete Catzilla 1.3....

 

Well I am not very familiar with the software, but after a quick check it seems the 1.4 is available and it added compatibility to Nvidia 980, so I guess the 980M should be included, perhaps you could try again after an update ? On the website's result pages I see other Alienware owners' scores with the same config.

I don't know much about this, so I don't quite understand what an increase in processor current and changement in clocks translate in actual gaming. I am guessing you are more concerned about benchmarks and that your gaming experience is still very satisfying correct ?

 

Yeah, gaming is still fine and I think that's the better laptop I ever had. Even over the Alienware 18 I have with i7 4900MQ and twin GTX780. It's silent, quick and reliable when not overclocked. I guess I want to extract a little bit more for utter personal satisfaction, a 10% would be fine. I'll either request a 330 watts PS from Alienware or buy one myself. Since the 330 would fit both laptops, I could use anyone at work when I have to provide my tools, I'm a independent contractor...

 

I completely agree with you there, you are entitled to have all your hardware work without being held back by throttling when you use it professionaly or for CPU intensive programs, especially with the extra cost you paid for the 4980 ! I hope Dell won't play dumb and will send you the 330W PSU directly. Let us know what happens !

 

Well, it didn't take a long chat with the Alienware tech: 45 seconds ! They're sending a 240 PS. I asked for a 330 but since it's not certified on the 17 R2, they can't send one. Oh well, they are available on the Bay or elsewhere for a $100 USD. I guess I'll buy one in the next future. For now, the tech mentioned that there are 2 HD slots in the laptop and the Intel RAID driver seems to support that. I have s one TB lying around and I'll play with it during the week-end...

 

Well that's excellent news ! Hopefully the 240W will provide all the power you need, but if not as you said you can get it on ebay^^.

 

After looking it up, only on HDD BUT 4 slots from ma.2 SSD's ! I'm gonna build a RAID 0 array of 256 GB SSD Ma.2 ! It's scream like a banchee !

 

how do you switch between integrated Intel GC and NVidia on 17 R2 ? Instaled OSD twice and Fn-F7 to no avail

 

Hi,
on AW R2 2015, switch is auto by Optimus, when you need it.
(afaik).

ps: there is no switch icon on F7 key, then no Fn F7 !