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

I have 16x2 G.Skills and they work flawlessly....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820232150

 

I find it REALLY annoying that AW don't supply the 17 R3 with screws in place for the M.2 drives!! For what would cost them less than a penny/cent!! I've been searching for the right size screws for HOURS!!

I found one screw in an old laptop battery cover, but it is too long.

Finally I arrived at work and checked some of our trash pile, I found two screws of the right diameter but shorter, hopefully long enough to hold the SSD's in place. The screws were in a failed HP Serial SCSI 72GB 10k drive!

How much hassle would be saved globally if AW just put these two screws in place????

The SSD manufacturer is never going to supply the screws as it has no idea what size holes each manufacturer is going to provide.

 

They always use pretty much the same size. The most kits due comes with screws, unless they sold OEM packaging versions. I think they dont include those because without a card isntalled they cannot tightem them enough. If they come loose over time they could cause some serious damage inside of a laptop.

 

Hi rinneh,

They aren't the same as have been reported on various forums, I've mostly seen 'M2' screws, these aren't 'M.2', rather they are 2mm diameter screws as used on hard drives, power supplies and other PC bits. I've seen images of the AW 17 R2 and they look like 2mm screws.

What I have are more like 1.2mm diameter.

I went to the hardware store, no screws that small. I went to the jewelers, no screws that big. I went to a phone/tablet repair shop, no screws that size.

It would be very easy for AW to put the screws in place and put a sticky label or sellotape over the top to prevent them coming loose. Alternatively the screws could be supplied in a plastic bag placed in the box with the power supply and kettle lead.

 

If you go to your local Dell support agent they should have the screws next to the holes there should be something like 'm2.5x3' that is the size of the screw copy that and tell them that you want a screw like that and they should give you one at least we do it.

 

Hi ScaniaV82299,

Nice idea

Although that wouldn't work for me because as far as I know there isn't a Dell agent in Jersey, Channel Islands. Nearest would be the UK mainland. Others may find your suggestion useful though.

Mine look like they should be 5 x 1.2, I'll check later to see if there are any markings to confirm the size.

 

Previous Aw models had the screws already placed in the machine. Ready for use if you purchased an extra ssd/Hdd later down the road. why save max 1-3 cents on each laptop? I can't understand this.

 

Firebat, I realize this post is old, but wondering if you were able to get this figured out? I have a similar issue, on the web i get "pulse" of bright for a second or two, then goes back. I've shut off adaptive brightness, I've played around a bit but can't figure it out. Only seems to happen on a website with lot of gray, doesn't do it on a different laptop.

 

Turn it off in the intel graphic power settings control panel.

 

Sounds good, I will give it a shot. Waiting for it to come back from Dell right now, had some other issues they were fixing under warranty. Hope it comes back in great shape!

 

Unfortunately no I was never able to fix that issue no matter how many settings I changed. I learned to live with it...at least until I stopped buying alienware's :/. I hope you get it sorted out im curious if there was a fix after all!

 

What screen are you using? Also, is this on battery or on power or both?

 

Derek,
For me, I have the standard screen, 17" ips, and happens on battery power.

It seems to be the worst on fredmranda.com for whatever reason. I sent the computer in a few weeks ago for this problem and a sticky esc key. It was returned and the repair order stated they replaced keyboard and display, when I opened up the box, neither was replaced and they even broke the bezel...I'm expecting it back today, and I'm nervous to open it up...the repair now states they replaced the kb and some plastics. Their follow up and communication leaves a lot to be desired, but that's fairly well documented in the thread!!! I'll post again with the results when I get it.

 

Yeah, so a lot of screens these days utilize a battery saving technology that might very well be the cause of your issue. A lot of the time it is with Sharp brand screens. I have the 4k version which is Sharp, but I'm not sure if the FHD version is or not. Regardless, some systems have the setting to disable it and others do not. Like rinneh said, it's in the power settings in Intel Graphics Properties. Make sure to look on the left side for a Battery option and there should be some options available to disable power saving technology. For the XPS 13, there is no Battery option on the left so those folks are permanently plagued with the issue unless they do a bios fix. I think AW has the option opened up though - at least it does on mine. The 4k model it isn't as bad though because the brightness is already 400 nits.

 

Good news, received it back this afternoon and the KB works well, no sticking esc key and bezel replaced. It still boots up and doesn't appear to have anything wrong. My faith has been restored!

I'll play around with power settings and adaptive brightness...but not going to lose sleep over it any more.

Thanks guys,
SteveG66

 

Good news! I have installed the two 950 PRO SSD's in RAID Zero on my AW 17 R3 and installed a fresh copy of Win10 on it.

I have almost doubled the write rate compared to using a single 950 PRO.

Yesterday in testing from the HDD installed O/S with the RAID as a data drive I did, with over 3,000MB/s read and write of Seq Q32T1.

Once I had installed Win10 I connected to the Internet and a load of drivers and software came down automatically, I didn't need most of the app/driver downloads (over 1GB in all) I did yesterday.

 

Looks like a 30% drop in 4k reads though. Not sure it's better to sacrifice that just for better sequential writes.

 

Here's what I was getting from the HDD, hence why I don't think these belong in a high end notebook like the AW 17 R3!!




Hi Derek712,

I will be doing astrophotography processing which involves compressing potentially hundreds of images into one, so for me sequential reads and writes are a big advantage over 4k R/W.

Here's my best score with a single drive on port [EDIT from here] #2, the slower of the two, disk #1 to follow.

 

Wow, that's a lot lower than mine. I wonder why. Maybe because you have both bays occupied?

 

Hi Derek712,

Sorry, wrong image! That was the SSD in slot #2, here's the SSD in slot #1





vs RAID Zero

 

So how fast does RAID zero go with 4 threads? This fast

 

Holy moly....very nice!

Powered by: Quad Core Exynos + 6820HK

 

Here are some of my speeds on a single m.2 950 Pro on my other AW17R3....this is without any software, both Intel nor Magician.

 

Is it the proprietary G/A port for the graphics amplifier, which ruin for full performance on NVMe drive in slot 2?

 

Hi iunlock,

It's a pity the Samsung driver doesn't work on RAID, I gave it a try but it didn't recognise the drive.

I think both of my slots have reconfigured to 2x PCI 3.0, that is what it shows in the Intel GUI anyway.

I removed the HDD and disabled the on-board NIC and BT (which I don't need) in BIOS, in the hope it might reassign more PCI lanes to the SSD's, but it doesn't seem to have done so. I guess 2x in RAID is an AW preset.

Another pity is there's not enough settings available in BIOS to force more lanes, as both SSD's are restricted to 80% of their read rating by the PCI bandwidth. RAID zero at 2x bandwidth is 3940MB but two 950 PRO in RAID zero should reach 5000MB read bandwidth. Not that I'm complaining with nearly the full 3000MB seq write achieved!

 

The lanes are hardwired. This is not controlled by software.

 

Hi rinneh,

Well that's strange because when I tried RAID with the HDD in place and NIC+BT enabled it configured both ports as x2 according to Crystal info. Now I have no HDD or NIC+BT its configured one port at 2x and one at 4x, so software is changing the number of lanes there.

 

THats indeed strange. Or they did hardwire both at 4x but there ar eno lanes available from the CPU controller.

 

Hi rinneh,

When using Crystal info on the two non RAID disks one showed as 2x / 4x and the other showed as 4x / 4x.

That ether means 2x read / 4x write, or 2x negotiated / 4x maximum, not sure as I've not looked into it. If it's 4x write then it can go to 4x if there are enough PCI lanes free, I'm not sure why it would show that (4x 'something' on slot #2) if it was hard wired for 2x only? This is why I tried disabling PCI devices that I didn't need.

 

Ah dang... well at least we're able to get 3000mb speeds....I wonder if the new AW refresh will have two or maybe even 4 ports at 4x speeds

Powered by: Quad Core Exynos + 6820HK

 

Then must Dellienware eliminate their proprietary G/A port . But is Dell interested to do this?

 

If they have to charge 500 bucks like Razer for a USB-C enclosure, I'm not sure anyone would be interested in seeing that.

 

Does anyone else hear their fans click just as they turn on and stop? It almost sounds like they are not ramping up but just jumping to on/off.

It's like *click* hear fans on for a few seconds to a minute *click* they are back off.

 

Hi altecX,

Mine don't. They sound too quiet sometimes, causing me to check the temperatures. I'm going to set up fan profiles to avoid that.

http://alienwareusersupport.weebly.com/unofficial-aw-fan-control.html

 

I asked about this a couple months ago and some people did. I ended up doing an RMA anyways and the new one doesn't do it nearly as bad.

 

Yes, when I do things that generate heat in the CPU/GPU, I hear what almost sounds like a short plastic-on-plastic tick/scrape followed by fan whirring. Hopefully that doesn't mean I'm in for a short fan life.

I don't remember if the original 17 R3 that I exchanged for my current one worked the same way. Probably it never got hot enough to spin the fans up anyway, since the GPU was bad.

 

Mine sounds like a metallic sound when it ramps up. Seems like it is coming from the right side as it sits on your lap.

 

Guys......pulse width modulation....

Its normal with PWM fans to have a higher pitched whirring sounds and even click like sounds
< Demonstrated here.

 

Hello, JerseyBoy, I am thinking of buying a second 950 pro 256GB and going to raid 0. Can you explain in detail how you set up yours? Would be much appreciated!

 

Not all want to buy a G/A. Then I think they would rather have had the full benefit of all SSD's in their laptop. We will later see the performance numbers from Dell's proprietary G / A vs the graphics amplifiers solution from Nvidia are equally good.

 

Most people wouldn't even notice the speed difference with the ssd to be honest, outside of synthetic benchmarks. If I had to guess, there's not going to be much difference performance difference between the G/A vs the USB-C, just a little more ease of use.

 

You said most people would not even notice the speed difference with the SSD to be honest. There is one thing. Another thing is that they want that the performance should have been <the maximum of the tech>. When you buy a car that goes 200mph, you expect that this is possible... Not that the speed is capped at 188. Not all people know that one of the 2 NVMe ssd have capped performance... You remember all the noise with Gtx970 and crippled vram? Not all noticed the loss in performance... But many buyers of 970 became angry because they did not get what they paid for and returned the card.

 

Hi STARION6,

The best way I've found (and I've tried a few because I was curious!) is:

1) Set up the two disks as RAID 0 in BIOS, press F10
2) Back into the BIOS, Create the Volume in BIOS with 16k Stripe, F10.
3) Boot to the OS on the HDD
4) Use Macrium Reflect to copy only the first 3 Partitions to the RAID Volume using drag and drop, don't leave any free space on the volume. (this omits the two recovery partitions)
5) Remove the HDD, boot to the RAID
6) Check Restore Points are disabled
7) Check Partitions are aligned using the tool listed on this page http://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmanager/how-to-get-best-performance-from-ssd.html
8) Complete the SSD tweaks in this article http://www.thessdreview.com/ssd-guides/optimization-guides/the-ssd-optimization-guide-2/

Rather than reformat the HDD I am keeping the O/S on it, that way if either of my SSD's fail I can put that disk back in and use Macrium Reflect to rebuild the RAID once I have a replacement SSD. There is still a huge amount of space on the HDD to store backups and archive off photos, documents, etc.

I found that the NVidea GPU was sharing the PCI Port 6 with one of the SSD's, so out of curiosity I disabled the GPU in Device Manager to see if I hit better benchmarks on the RAID 0, I did and here are the results (this is with 4 threads). Contrary to what soulvengeance has posted, the write times are nearly double that of a single SSD despite one of the SSD's being set to 2x PCI instead of 4x. Even the Q32T4 4k speeds are significantly ahead of a single SSD. A BIOS update in the future might change it so that both SSD's run at 4x. There are many cases where much faster write speeds are beneficial, downloading on fibre at gigabit speed, processing photo and video, and more. If you're working with files of several MB or more that are stored on the SSD then you will notice the difference in how fast they open, move, are processed, etc.

 

The 970 was bullcrap. It performed wonderfully as advertised and has 4gb ram. Just 500mb is running at a lower speed. But it didnt affect performance. A similar architecture was used in the 660ti.

 

The main problem is that Nvidia not told about this. They had to make a fix in the their drivers because of this. When you buy a car with 400HK but 50HK of these going on and off in a race, then you have been cheated. What if you had bought a very expencive Titan graphics card with 10.5GB functioning VRAM of 12, while the remaining 1.5GB had gone for half speed. Is this OK for you? Some are very satisfied with less, while others will have the full package

 

People paid 30% less for it than a full 980 but received a card that only performed 10% less. Pretty good deal to me?

 

Thank you JerseyBoy! I will give it a try as soon as I get my second 950 pro. How do you like your new 17 R3? There is a new review in NotebookCheck rating the 17 R3 at 87% and number 3 in their top ten gaming laptops. I really like mine and enjoy it every single day!

 

Hi STARION6,

I'm liking it a lot

Yesterday I installed Office 2016, Visio 2016 and Project 2016 as we have a deal through work where we get the full versions for £9.95 each! My employer has a huge Microsoft licence and Microsoft have their Home Use Program to offer the deal for big clients.

I also installed all of the Canon EOS 750D software. No issues there.

I've ordered some cooling parts for the SSD's to help prevent thermal throttling, I'll let everyone know what I've done once I've had a chance to try a few options and pick the best one.

Is your OS on the HDD or SSD? If it's not on the HDD you would need to move it to one with Macrium Reflect before creating the RAID set.

 

Don't take my word for it on RAID zero, there are plenty of reviews out there on 950 PRO in RAID zero, here's one where they proved the benefit in multiple tests.

"Throughout our testing, we saw compelling performance from both of our dual drive 950 Pro arrays. There really is no question in our minds; a bootable PCIe array makes for the ultimate operating system disk."

http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/7553/samsung-950-pro-pcie-gen-3x4-nvme-ssd-raid-report/index.html

 

Glad you are liking it a lot! Despite so much criticism I feel Dell has done a great job with the re-design of the 17 R3. I almost went with the Asus G752, glad I did not!

I took out the HDD and replaced it with a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo, but I still have it and can put back in to set up Raid.