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

The trouble to use the correct gpu is already gone for ages.

 

For those who know how things are done, Yeah. But many still struggle with this crap. Interpret it as you will... Regardless, Optimus is only usable for those who use the laptop on battery power for regular use without gaming. Still to many disadvantages with this junk... And that you can't use external G-sync monitor because of crippled Optimus is quite brilliant... Although you should have a more powerful graphics card for this, G-sync is still something many wished they could use. Not only on the internal but also on a external screen.

 

Not really. If using Nvidia CUVID to decode you get additional HW accelerated video enhancements like noise reduction and edge enhancement. Without those I doubt you'll notice much difference.

If you're looking for highest quality video playback I'd recommend looking up using MPC-HC with madVR.

 

I routinely run MadVR on my 17r3 with 980/4gb. Depending on the quality/resolution of the source material and the settings used, the difference will range from slightly better all the way to dramatically better. My rough estimate is that the 980m is capable of running MadVR to 75% capacity on DVD res, and 50% capacity on FHD.

Because certain MadVR routines require realtime pre-render uprezzing, the discreet Vram capacity makes a difference--I am stuck with 4gb and I have to back off certain settings with FHD source material because of this. However, MadVR is capable os so much quality compensation that a ~300% uprezz of a DVD to a FHD monitor (or 500% to a UHD display) looks very very good.

If MadVR works with the AGA, there ought to be some fairly eye-popping improvements invideo quality. Of course, it's another two grand invested--so I'll wait until someone else goes first.

 

I probably should have responded with a "maybe" rather than "not really". As you rightly point out, *if* the AGA can be used with madVR it would certainly let you crank up the enhancement quality compared to the mobile dGPU. Might be a good question for the AGA owner's thread.

 

Everything is digital now. There's nothing other than the LCD panel that should affect the image quality of pre-rendered digital content, unless you're doing something wrong.

If you want to apply filtering algorithms to video in order to artificially improve its appearance, try VLC Media Player. It has tons of advanced filters.

 

Hunter, nothing is "pre-rendered". I think everybody here understands that "everything is digital now", and you didn't bother to do a search, did you?

Out of mercy for you, I'll tell you that we're NOT talking about a "black-box" "video improver", but a sophisticated render engine that uses the GPU both as a hardware renderer and a co-proc for software routines.

And this is the first time that I've seen VLC player cited as a good example of anything but an alternative to WMP.

 

What are you on about? The person that started the conversation was talking about wanting an external GPU to enhance the quality of movie playback. Movies are stored digitally, and are decoded at time of playback into pixels via a standards-mandated algorithm according to their format (codec). It's the same set of pixels every time, no matter which software or hardware does it, unless you're talking about post-processing algorithms that artificially manipulate the decoded pixel data.

*shrug* It's got over 30 video filters built in, and supports Direct3D pixel shaders. Did you even bother doing any research?

 

I think I agree with your theory, I'd rather watch a movie as the director intended rather than applying post processing to the image. I'm of a similar theory with music.

 

Post-processing is OK, but it doesn't seem to be a silver bullet.

I should also respond to the original poster of this discussion mentioning watching movies on a TV: most modern HDTVs have lots of post-processing capabilities built-in, so there's a lot you can do on that end without having to worry about fancy stuff on the PC.

 

The thing is that you'll never watch it exactly as the director did because even Bluray is a lossy compressed deliverable rather than studio master stored in a lossless format. There have also been some pretty ropey transfers from film sources, for example.

OTOH, most Bluray is very good but some people have been raised on very low quality compressed material (SD, rips, etc) and viewing on consumer televisions with in-built processing enabled by default that removes elements of the original material such as grain. To those people even uncompressed DPX master frames would probably look subjectively worse than heavily processed compressed frames that had degrain / smoothing applied.

To each their own. Personally, I think processing tools like madVR are great for improving low resolution source material which can also be misused to make actors look like wax figures if that's what you're in to.

 

Ah, I didn't realise Bluray was lossy, I thought it was lossless. In that case I suppose there could be an argument for some post processing to make it better, although I don't know how achievable that is - I imagine if it's messed with too much then it would look worse (and doesn't Bluray look stunning anyway as is?!). Certainly for SD material that's being upscaled to 1080p then a bit of post processing is gonna help. I've got a 1080p Sony Bravia TV from 2013 (KDL-42W653A), and I turn off all post processing aids apart from when watching SD content where I let the TV do it's 'Reality Creation' on it (- calibrated it for colour using a colourimeter too - I recommend doing that is more important than post processing).

 

In game (only HON - Heroes of Newerth) my alienware r2 m17 lags (screen goes darker for 5 sec every 3-4 minutes) and changes keyboard color auto + switches it off, why is that? I cant figure that out. All other games work just fine, like witcher 3 etc.

Any ideas on what should i do? HELP

 

Power problems?

 

Regarding video: Uncompressed 1080p video would require a massive amount of storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncompressed_video

 

NO, using win 10, all the latest drivers. Like i mentioned all other games work fine, just this one is making me nuts with that lag, its older, maybe something to do with OpenGL or something, i have tried all i could, but couldn't fix it.

 

Wow, yes, 2.99Gbit/s for 1080p 24bit video, which is the same as 374MB/s! They do also talk about lossless compression techniques in that wiki too, where they say a factor of 3 was achieved in some instances for the compression, but in the above example that would only cut it down to about 125MB/s - guess lossless compression is not really used on the consumer level, too much space required like you said.

EDIT: my mistake, looking at the wrong exampe in the wiki: actually 1080p 24fps is in the region of 370-494GB/hour. If you used that lossless compression to reduce by a factor of 3 that would still be over 100GB/hour - still not really practical for consumers.

 

The screen going dark sounds like you're losing power or something though.

 

well, it feels like little power loss @ that moment when screen goes dark, but how to prevent it ffs

 

Is your power supply bad?

Have you checked all of the power connections between the outlet and the laptop (there are 3 of them: outlet<->cable, cable<->brick, brick<->laptop)?

Are your fans clean and running properly?

 

I bought my laptop 1 month ago, brand new, and as i mentioned before, i can play witcher 3 non stop all day and nothing like that happens, it happens only with specific game, only 1. My power supply is perfect.

 

Now imagine a facility working on a blockbuster movie having to ingest and transcode camera RAW to 4K or 6K uncompressed plates for compositing and grading purposes. 4096x2160 @ 16fp 24fps is 1.27GB/s. But of course the movie is going to be stereo (3D) so that number instantly doubles and HFR would double the result yet again. Puts my home NAS capacity concerns into perspective!

Personally, I'll be happy once I have content in 10bit HEVC and a rec. 2020 panel to display it on. Doubt I'll be able to pick up compression artifacts at decent bitrates, especially at 2160p with reasonable viewing distance.

 

Is it an old game? Can you set it to OGL or D3D in the options? If so, try D3D. Also, you could see if there's a windowed mode and try that, some older games have buggy full screen modes, IME.

It does sound like it could be a hardware issue, but I'd expect to perhaps see something in Windows event logs at the times the problem occurred. Have you looked there?

 

As for the keyboard color, it may be due to the game having an AlienFX profile. You can disable that by disabling 3rd Party Access to AlienFX.
That said, are you trying to play the game on the discrete GPU or the iGPU?

 

Just taken delivery of my Outlet 17 R3 and already have a technician booked to come replace the HSF assembly and trackpad. It looks as though it's take a little ding on the left side judging by the small dent on the left bottom side of the screen, and the right bottom of the screen bezel wasn't seated properly (popped back into place with a little pressure). Unfortunately, the ding appears to have damaged the left-side fan which makes a pretty nasty grinding noise when it spins up. The track pad refused to light up out of the box, even after BIOS upgrade, BIOS reset, setting trackpad illumination to On in the BIOS and uninstalling, registry cleaning and re-installing latest Alienware FX and upgrading Alienware FX firmware. Support rep offered a refund 15% off a new system, but that wouldn't get me anywhere close to the price I paid on the Outlet for the current spec (including 10% discount and 8% cashback). Not a great start, but let's see how we get on after the relevant hardware has been replaced.

 

If you got the equipment specs you wanted then by all means stick with this machine--the outlet deals cannot be beat.

I suspect this first visit from the Dell Tech will not be the last. A little patience and you will get away with paying less than half what I paid!

 

It's not a deal breaker on a refurb machine, although I would have hoped Alienware system builders (assuming they're different to standard Dell system builders) would do a little more QA on the systems before they ship them out, especially since they're returned stock. I mean, the trackpad not illuminating is a pretty obvious fault when you're surrounded by identical systems with the trackpad illuminated by default. At least the system isn't down and I can play around with it whilst I await repair!

 

Congrats on the new rig...it should have come with a premium 1 year warranty yes? If so, exercise the lights out of that and get the whole rig replaced to where it would be practically a new machine.

What specs did you get?

Powered by: Quad Core Exynos + 6820HK

 

Yes, premium 1yr warranty included. My plan is to look over the tech's shoulder when he replaces the HSF / TP so that I can assess whether the previous owner might've messed around with the system internally and what sort of state it's in. The mb hw rev is a00 and the BIOS it shipped with was 1.2.4 so not sure if it was ever updated which might signal that the previous owner wasn't a tinkerer / OC'er, or that the mb was replaced with RMA stock and no one bothered to update the BIOS before it left manufacturing. If the mb was replaced it might also explain the fan (bad reassembly?) and TP (not reconnected properly?). You can tell I like to speculate on the past life of my Outlet purchases (this isn't my first).

Picked up an i7-6700hq, 8GB RAM, 970m 3GB, 256GB PCIe NVMe SSD, 1TB 7200rpm, 1080p (300nits). I mainly wanted something to play games like L4D2 and XCOM so the spec should be more than adequate. I actually installed Bioshock Infinite and was pleasantly surprised by how well it ran with everything cranked up.

 

Sounds great. Wow, we're definitely cut from the same piece of cloth as that's exactly how I look at things...you're frame of thinking is spot on IMO...I have extreme OCD as well. Lol...



Powered by: Quad Core Exynos + 6820HK

 

Anyone tried latest 980m drivers yet? Version 365.10

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/nvidia-geforce-driver-v365-10-findings-fixes.791172/

 

Thanks! Just what I was looking for
I'll pass. I'm currently on 364.72 and though they've been problematic for many, been perfect for me so far.

 

I'm running 365.10 on a 970m and it's been fine so far, albeit with light gaming and nothing to compare against performance wise.

 

Does anyone know if the Samsung 950 Pro works with the AW17R2 (specs in signature)... I'd like to order one if it is compatible.. Is there a thread on how to install it & get it working properly? Curious what read/write speeds can be expected?

 

Using 365.10 on 980m 8GB but haven't really done much 3D stuff with it yet.

 

Here's an update / run down of my first and so far less than stellar experience with Alienware Support.

Weds: Case opened with hotline support, parts ordered and on-site technician booked for Fri.
Thurs: Email confirming technician visit on Fri, technician to confirm ETA with phone call between 800-1000hrs on Fri.
Fri 1000: No call from technician. Call hotline and request status. Parts are delivered and engineer is booked to attend.
Fri 1200: Still no call. Call hotline and request status. Advised that technician is booked today and request for them to call customer will be made.
Fri 1400: Still no call. Call hotline and request status. Advised that technician is definitely booked to attend between 1200-1700, request for technician to contact customer will be escalated.
Fri 1600: Still no call. Call hotline and request status. No new status updates. Advised to email hotline case owner after 1700 if technician fails to attend as they will be on-shift for the next few hours.
Fri 1700: Email case owner explaining that technician failed to attend, complaining about poor communication of on-site technician and requesting confirmation of when technician will actually attend.
Fri 1940: Email response from case owner notifying that case is being escalated. No further information provided.

Luckily the system isn't down or else I'd be kicking up all sorts of ****. Still, not inspiring a lot of confidence so far!

 

Wonder how long it's will be for a gtx1080m in a mobile Alienware?

Hoping I can play 4K games at decent frame now. Oled display would be nice also!

Hope Alienware refresh soon.

 

New Killer Networking 1.1.59.1701 drivers available on the OEM site: http://www.killernetworking.com/support/driver-downloads

Release notes are here: http://www.killernetworking.com/support/ReleaseNotes/Killer_1.1.59.1701_Release_Notes.pdf


Also, Samsung Magician 4.9.6 has been released: http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/downloads.html

 

4k? I highly doubt that. A desktop 1080 is a tad faster than a 980ti. The 980ti is not enough for 4k also. I think the 1080m will perform around that level at the most.

 

Are there any FW updates for the PM951? Is the "Samsung NVMe Driver Installer" compatible or only for the 950 Pro?

 

No idea, I don't have either of those drives.

 

No firmware updates as far as I know, the 950 NVMe driver works perfectly with both the PM951 and the SM951 as I have both...

 

Hi fellas, , a question, Alienware 17 R3 uses Intel Thunderbolt Technology? for what?

Thks

 

Full 4k video, single cable docking, external graphics, peer to peer networking etc. You can think of it as the ring in Lord of The Rings. One port to rule them all

 

Update: I mentioned in my last email to AW support on Friday that the engineer would have to go to a different address on Monday as I'd be working from the office.

Monday AM: Call from on-site technician notifying of attendance later in the day at the original address. Explained I would be at work with the laptop today a couple of miles away. They said the callout would need to be rebooked. Call AW hotline and explain situation, ask for them to book the on-site technician to my work address. They said technician will attend Tues at my work address.
Tues AM: Notification from AW support that technician will attend Weds.

The communication and flexibility in booking the (I assume third party) on-site technicians is rather painful.

 

Remember what I said about patience--I'm pretty sure you're saving a thousand bucks here.

 

Update:
Weds 900: Onsite tech calls to confirm appt.
Weds 1100: Onsite tech arrives, carries out fan and trackpad replacement. No anti-static straps in sight which I found interesting. Tested afterwards and all good, signed off work and tech left.

Finally time to give this thing a workout.

 

I've done tons of electronics/computer work for decades without anti-static straps, and have never had anything get ESD damage. I do try to touch grounded metal frequently and avoid brushing against carpet/fabric while working, however.

I would expect a professional to take better precautions though.

 

Worked in IT for 15yrs, never used straps and never had a side effect from not using them. I find them a relic from the early 90's and the 80's that are just no longer needed. heck I've worked on home machines on the carpet or on my bed's blanket and still never had issues, nor have I head of a case of static actually killing something in the last.. who knows how long.