*OFFICIAL* Alienware 17 R2/R3 Owner's Lounge

Thanks for all the help. I'll do it this weekend. I did find the system info and it confirmed to be R2 with all the right spec that I purchased.
BTW, it is a beautiful machine. BestBuy sells it some $300 less than the Dell custom built. I have emailed Dell for the 240W PSU.

 

I'm sending it into their depot for repairs. I'm told 5-7 business days. It's gotten worse since then and there was no way to ignore it anymore. Was like a flashlight all along the edges.

Will be a long possibly 7 days now. Back to the desktop for now.

 

Just to be sure I do not screw up my grandson's games (he installed a lot on the 1TB c: drive already). WIN8 is now in c: drive as well. If I back up the OS and install it in D: which is the SSD, and do not touch the c: drive files, will the games file be intact? and also will there be 2 OS installation, one in SSD and one in HDD?

 

If you don't touch the C: drive, nothing will happen to your files. You'll just have two windows installations and everything will be ok. Just make sure when you boot the computer you select the installation that is on the SSD or you'll boot into the one that is slow on the mechanical drive.

 

so i got my new machine, been 1 hour running and no gaming as of yet, i feel the panel where the power button is a bit hot, is it normal ? what kinda test i need to run

 

And you might

Yes it is normal, they all get warm around the mid upper part of the keyboard the reason is the materials used, a combination of aluminum and carbon fiber to give the chasis a rigid and durable frame as well as making it lighter...somehow, anyways I had the laptop for a couple of weeks already and although the warmth of the keyboard bother me at first it really doesn't get hot even while gaming hard or running benchmarks or stress test, good news is the temperatures of the internals remain pretty cool which is in my opinion the most important aspect of any gaming laptop. I ran prime95, XTU, unigene, 3dmark and all test gave positive results in terms of the cooling capabilities of the laptop. The average temps I see on mine while stressing or gaming are cpu:70-78 sometimes touching 80-83 on some cores for a second, gpu: 60-67 no matter what I haent seen the gpu go over 67. This temps are great for a gaming laptop. So that being said it is normal and don't worry about it too much.

 

some insight please how can i run these test and get advise from you guys if everything is normal and i dont have a abnormal laptop just to be sure

 

Download some software like HWiNFO64 or something and read the temps from it at idle, then read them from immediately after gaming or some benchmarks. Post here and we'll see.

 

this is while not gaming

 

im downloading 3d mark demo to do the test, hope im downloading the right one for benchmark, never done 1 before

 

Those are normal temps, I like using intel XTU to monitor the cpu temps cause it gives you a graph with the temps during the corse of X amount of minutes so you can see the average temps, download firestrike benchmark and unigene heaven to further test, also let the laptop sit at idle for 5 min before looking at those idle temps make sure nothing is running

 

This is after benchmark test


http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/6459649

 

Download intel XTU to see the average temps and post it, that seems like a normal score and normal temps

 

Also don't forget that you should always use Balanced power plan for obtaining maximum performance and keeping down CPU temps.

You will receive a 240w PSU this week so keep A00 BIOS and stay away from A02.

 

btw during gaming should i change it to high performance?

 

this using xtu while idle

 

No, that's a good point. As red pyramid said keep it on balanced, it performs better while keeping temps under control, my guess is the control fan and bios setup is ment for that balanced profile

 

No, doing that could push your CPU temps next to 100°C in some case.

 

I did benchmark using XTU

 

It seems normal, I would run XTU and monitor while you game for about 30 min and check the average temps. Like I said that looks normal

 

thanks lot, one more thing, on bottom left of the keyboard intermittently getting a tick sound, i wonder what is that, mechanical sound which is normal or what im not sure, it was not there awhile then still hearing intermittently, will try to upload a video not sure if can be heard in video

 

It's the CPU fan starting

 

Is it a short rattle sound? Very brief?

 

no its kinda like tick tick
tested in bios and i dont have that, now it only comes when its in bad mood i guess

 

Is the fan, it took me a couple days to figure out what that was until I set my ear right on that spot and opened a game and it was the fan starting up. What bios do you have btw?

 

Like this?

 

I have the A01

 

No that sound i know its the fan

 

Is the ball bearing on the fun when it starts up, I get the same sound. You should downgrade to the A00 your idle temps and all temps in general will be lowered, I tested it with the A01 it idles at 55-60 with A00 it idles at 45-50 it's much better, you can download it from the dell support site under drivers for the alienware 17

 

just ordered the 850 Evo 500gb m.2 ssd and a copy of windows 7. So excited! I can't wait.
sadly, I have to wait 3-5 business days even with amazon prime because shipping to a PO Box.

On a side note, a little sad I couldn't get the touch screen. If only there were a matte version.
Playing ffxiv, I foresee having touch screen for my hotbar being a potentially useful complement to the gamepad.

first world problems...

 

Hey I'm looking to get a m.2 ssd can you post a link of the 850 you ordered? Im also po box so the laptop took a while to come, I hate waiting for things!!

 

Just did that and here with xtu while idle

 

well that's lower than before, it should go lower than that perhaps is warm were you are, make sure the rear exhaust vents are clear. Overall it looks like your system is fine, normal temps and good performance on the benchmarks

 

Definitely made difference, monitoring it and its not going more than 55

 

On xtu click on the wrench and add the 4 cores to the monitoring so you can actually see the temps better

 

Sweet, got it

 

So it seems like the tick sound coming from the HDD, as when nothing is copying on it there is no sound, but when i start copying the damn sound starts again

 

Remove the HDD and leave the SSD only in and see if that fixes it.

 

quick question, im trying to run GTA 4 and in game its detecting my intel graphic and not nvidia, im running it via Steam

 

Try to right click on the nvidia tray icon and go to the control panel and from there you can select the aplicat ion and tell it to always run with the nvidia display adapter I think that should work

 

Do what franky j said but also keep in mind that sometimes the game doesn't detect the nvidia GPU even though its actually being rendered by the nvidia GPU.

Basically the way these laptops works is:

Nvidia GPU does the rendering passes it on to the Intel GPU which passes it on to the monitor. Some games just detect the GPU that the monitor is plugged into, which is the Intel one. Good example is Eve Online (though I believe they fixed this in the latest patch). Eve Online constantly says that the GPU is Intel HD Graphics etc etc, but in reality the game is being rendered on the nvidia card.

 

yeah that one selected, default device Nvidia high performance

 

ah, I purchased off amazon.
It seems they're sold out on the 500gb right now. They only had two left when I made my purchase.
250gb is still available though.

 

so I got my laptop, I jsut did a quick physical examination of it. It looks good. I'm a little ticked off as it looks like whatever tool they used to put the bottom panel on it apparently scratched/left a smudge mark on the underside area beside the panel. They must have snapped it into place with a tool that scratched it or something. It won't buff out. I'll upload the picture of the 3 marks later.



Soo I decided to take out the old HDD and

whoever put the screws in the panel and screwed the harddrive caddyplate in WAY overtightened them. To get them out I had to strip some screws. Not pleased about that at all.


I think I have the speaker problem with this one. The speakers sound muffled compared to my other R2.

Edit:

Speakers FIXED, they have a VERY crappy default EQ on them I guess. They sound good now, thank god.

 

hey good to hear u received your laptop

 

Yep! Now I'm just undervolting it and stress testing it. I passed the intel stress test at 15 mins but crashed when I had it in 3dMark11 So I'm trying -75 mV now.
-50 mV had no problems obviously but I hope I can get at least -75mV

 

Test also out with 3DMark Sky Diver instead of 3DMark 11 .. Harder test of all hardware in this test. Use also Wprime 1024.

 

Skydiver is the next test I planned to run.

 

Yea optimus makes it so that the frames from the nvidia GPU are copied to the Intel GPU and displayed on the screen from how I understand it

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Do me a favour: Can you run wprime 1024m on your laptop and tell me what your score was?

Mine is 239 and it should be lower.