*OFFICIAL* Alienware 17 R4 Owner's Lounge

Maybe it just happened because Summer also came along. The unit is so sensitive to temps I wouldn't be surprised it's because of a rise in amb temp

On a different note, I feel like a dumbass... I just noticed I left a thermal pad with the plastic still on cooling a pair of VRAM...

Let's see how it handles now...

I mean, this was bound to happen. I already opened the bloody thing to repaste it about 20 times!

 

This definitely motivates me to OC higher, still haven't tried yet. nice scores

 

How far down is your Toshiba's drive remaining life now?

 

you can find it on youtube ownordisown channel. yes, i'm using vBIOS 86.04.5B.00.8F.

where have you been? u went missing for quite some time

 

Hmm having an odd issue with the battery losing charge ocassionally even when plugged in.

 

under intense gaming, the battery will drain because of the excessive GPU power load, happen usually around 190-200W on certain games. this also happen even though your CPU is not OC, which is really strange given that the power supply is a massive 330W brick.

 

Ah, as long as it's a "normal" issue and not a defect on my unit, I guess I can deal with it.

 

Even though it is normal behaviour for GTX1080 AW17R4, this kind of thing shouldn't happen in the first place. There is more than enough power supplied from the 330W massive power brick, however when the GPU is drawing more than 190-200W, it seems as if the power brick cannot supply enough juice to the power hungry GTX1080. This can only show that the motherboard design with regards to the power delivery circuit on the GPU side is poor, not allowing it to draw high amount of current from the external power supply.

 

This is normal. It's a "feature" called Battery Boost that Alienware has had for a while. I've found that some games seem to trigger it more often than others. I've found it helps to either lower/fix the framerate or lower the graphics settings slightly.

See this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/alienware-17-r4-battery-drain-under-load.807147/

 

Hello all,


I'm new to these forums, so please forgive me if I'm posting this in the wrong place. About a month ago I purchased a 17 R4 with the 7820HK and GTX1080. Since the first time I ran a resource-intensive game, I've been having performance issues. Basically, after a few minutes of playing with no problems, I experience stuttering/freezing every ~10-15 seconds, for a duration of ~1 second. Additionally, the CPU seems to run at extremely high temperatures, sometimes as high as 95-100°C. I did some research around these forums and found that this is likely to be a problem with thermal pads, and possibly thermal paste, per this post:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...gtx1080-in-game-random-stutter-freeze.804499/

I am prepared to discuss this subject in much greater detail, but the main reason I'm posting this is I would like to get in contact with @iunlock from Team LHz, as I have several questions I would like to ask and I am interested in re-paste and re-pad services. However, I cannot send direct messages because my account is new. If anybody could help me to get in contact with @iunlock I would greatly appreciate it.


Thank you for your time.

 

I have two, one is 95% the other is 97%

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Yeah! Summer and real life (work and two young kids) took over!

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Get new SSDs from Alienware.

What temps are you getting on them?

Alienware was getting picky when I asked for a new SSD. So I just showed them Toshiba's own spec sheet for that particular SSD and how 85C is its max op temp.
Mine was reaching and surpassing that in seconds, even in Dell's crummy ePSA tests

 

PM sent.

::iunlock::

 

Is anyone familiar with any more cooling bases like this one from Silverstone?
One that is the right width for the 17 R4
If it had a USB3 or USBC hub that would be lovely

I'm looking for something more portable than my Zalman NC2000NT which, by the way, is a killer choice for this and other huge laptops

 

Up to 90C on the one that shipped with my unit. I'll do that when I get my replacement

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FYI I just watched the video and read your page. I decided to test if this is also the cause of my stutter and it is! I've got to reopen to remove the PCH mod anyway so will try your fixes.

Btw you said in the video that a guy called ZeroX or something had a link to the old vbios, since I wanna fix my current unit but not want to do all this twice, did you have a link so I can just use this for now? thanks a lot!

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This is the thread you might wanna follow
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...gtx1080-in-game-random-stutter-freeze.804499/

This is the thread with the vBIOS downgrade by @Zer0K
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/alienware-17r4-1080-overclocked-vbios-issue.802964/

Let us know how it goes

 

Fixing the stuttering can be a pain in the ass. Think I did 4 rounds of rechecking the pads and testing gameplay to finally get rid of it. Pretty much had to add .5 extra thickness to nearly every spot.

I'm also noticing this other issue, though small. My brightness settings don't seem to save. Every time I restart/shut down the brightness goes back to a default 50%. I've tried changing it through advanced settings in the power options menu but it just resets that to 50% upon reboot also.

 

yes i agree with you indeed. i myself did at least 3 rounds of rechecking, each and every time i was doubtful and convinced i did it right the previous time, only to find new gaps i missed. it's no easy task and definately not for the faint hearted.

for your brightness issue, have u tried clean install your gtx 1080 driver and also your intel GPU driver?

 

I've been thinking about this. I believe the chances are close to none.
I believe the core differential problem is not related to tripod design or anything like that. If you don't put any thermal pads you'll see the heatsink stays flush and level with the CPU. Of course, if you are generous on the thermal pads maybe you won't get great contact on the CPU but anyone who knows how to measure and fit thermal pads won't have this problem.

The issue is, once you assure propper contact with the heatsink and the CPUs chokes and VRMs these components, which get really really hot, will have to cool themselves THRU the CPU heatsink.
They only have access to one heatpipe and it's pretty far from the point of contact so I believe that's what's causing the diferential.
If you look at the heatsink you'll see how far the heat has to travel. The south side of the CPU is being cooled much faster than the north side, which has to handle with all the power circuitry and aditional heat.
Once the heatpipes come into play, heat is much more dispersed.

I circled in yellow. It even looks like the heatsink was completely ready to get an aditional heatpipe which would probably help immensely with this issue.



TL,DR:
North side of CPU heatsink can handle the heat from the power circuitry but cant move it fast enough, resulting on possible core diferential issues, specially when the user ensures the best contact between the heatsink and VRMs with new pads.

That's just my theory though.

On another note, I've been thinking about downgrading the vBIOS to the old one just because of temps.
I'm not getting freezing anymore but my CPU and GPU hover at around 88C and 85C while playing for more than a hour. This hot portuguese summer really wrecks havoc on gaming laptops. A friend of mine has a tiny Lenovo and it also can't handle the heat.
What are the performance differences between that vBIOS and the OC one? I'm running stock clocks on the GTX 1080

 

it really does sound like your summer is hot as hell. I live at the equator and i pretty much experience summer all year round. but i operate my laptop in an air conditioned room, at around 22-23C and even if my air conditioning is off, the room ambient temperature is around 26-28C. Outside temperature during afternoon averages around 32-35C.

As for the performance difference between the two vbios, truth be told, very minimal. probably around 2-3fps difference. if it helps, you can perform an undervolt on the GPU using afterburner frequency curve. Seriously, 85C on GPU is really unheard of in a properly cooled AW17R4.

 

Those heatpipes on the GTX1080 models are actually underutilized during CPU OC full load. at 4.1GHz, PL1&2 100W OCCT, try putting your fingers on the heatpipes directly above the CPU. Despite the CPU temperature reading showing 70-80C, you will be surprised at what your finger is telling you. Spoiler, it's far from burning your fingers. In fact it's so cool (or warm) you will have doubts if it's doing anything to cool the 100W CPU.

Even under full gaming load, say BF1 for an hour CPU OC 4.1GHz, GPU OC 1.9GHz, place your hand behind the vents. The air coming out is just warm at best. The same can't be said for my past gaming laptops. MSI GT72, Alienware M17xR2, they all blast out hot air during gaming.

If alienware were to use vapor chamber, coupled with those copper heatpipes, get rid of the tripod design, this might just be the best cooling system in a laptop.

 

When I game at home I have AC and it's OK. But I don't have a gaming laptop to game at home

What I really enjoy is getting together with 4 or 5 friends in the same house, on the same table and play some games online. It's awesome when we make a whole CS GO team or a squad in PUBG.
Teamspeak? What the hell is that, I can just shout to my friend in front of me.

But where we usually meet has a broken AC at the moment. Couple that with 4 more gaming PCs spewing out hot air and 33ºC nights and it's a very tough environment for gaming laptops indeed.

That's why I love the winter! Overclock season I call it

 

YOu can tweak the fan speed after custom BIOS editing. The AW cooling system is excellent but they prefer longevity of HSF than cooling at optimal fan speed. I can say the fans speeds are capped at 75-80% of rated fan speed according to UEFI BIOS dump.

 

Cool 100w Cpu? I'm sure you will never see your cpu will pull 100w Cpu Package Power If so, could you show me a screenie with Cinbench run and Hwinfo64 in the background?

 

Stock fan profile not a chance, with HWINFO fan or max fan speed the temps could be good.

 

Yes you are right even with pl 1&2 set to 100W, I've never seen it pull 100W especially with an undervolt of - 100mV. The max is about 90W or so. But I don't see the need for the cpu to draw that kind of power because it can maintain full 4.1GHz oc under full occt load.

 

100w Cpu Package Power is equal +4.8 or more likely 4.9GHz all cores in Cinbench R15 multi threaded bench. Aka a normal workflow for computer users. I haven't seen 7820 push that clocks in Cinbench R15

 

I hardly think 7820 can push that kind of clock speed. Being able to match desktop stock speed 7700k is already amazing enough on a laptop form factor, for a bga

 

And I'm not sure that 4.8 or 4.9 is considered "normal workflow" either. I get that you hate BGA, but for a strictly gaming or normal college/office workflow I'd say that the stock boost of 3.9 or a mild overclock to 4.2 is plenty for the majority of average users.

 

Exactly. Others can see examples provided below. BGA options are not 100W TDP and will have difficulty reaching 100W even with their maximum overclock. As Brother @Papusan indicated, even 6700K and 7700K does not reach 100W until like 4.7 or 4.8GHz.

Those are merely limits, not static values. If you set them to 75W it will stop the CPU at 75W and power limit throttle when it reaches that point. If you set it to 200W, the CPU will be able to use as much power as it needs until it reaches 200W and then power throttle. So, feel free to set PL1 and PL2 as high as you wish. If you set it higher than what the CPU is capable of, the CPU will have the ability to use all it needs until it reaches its functional limit. There is no harm in this, even though Dell, MSI and some other manufacturers may think otherwise. Some of them use cancer BIOS code to limit power to an arbitrary value and setting power limits higher than their secret cripple threshold will accomplish nothing.

 

Seems very accurate. I didn't even notice the seemingly missing heat pipe, but now that you pointed it out it seems pretty obvious. I'm tempted to source a similar shaped piped and add it myself.

No 3rd party fan upgrades or heat pipes to be had it seems?

 

the "missing" heatpipe is intentional. It's due to the much smaller heatpipe used for the GTX 1070 model. The GTX1080 model gets the full sized heatpipe with no room to spare

 

Hmm.. that would explain me not noticing on my board then since I have the 1080.

 

Well said. I've pushed the 7820HK to the upper 90W's so it is possible, just not practical.

9 out of 10 units (AW 17R4 and 15R3) so far have been able to hold 4.6ghz OC just fine with proper tuning. This is data from the many that have gone across my work bench.

I run at 46x daily for rendering and gaming.

The crippling of the hardware does indeed come from the cancerous bios, aside to the lottery factor.

::iunlock::

 

Yep definitely an improvement. Only tried it last night with destiny 2 running at 4K and at 3 GHz on CPU though. Not gunna worry too much now until I get my new 7820HK

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Did you have to use new paste and new pads each time you reopened it?

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for this project i would strongly not recommend you to use high performance thermal pads, especially 11 and above. those are extremely flaky and totally not reusable. it would be fine if it's on the same system with same heatsink, but if you changing heatsink or motherboard, stay away from those. once they compress they will not go back to shape.

what happened to your system? i never heard you complained about stuttering issue in the many months you owned the laptop. bear in mind this issue affects both 6820HK and 7820HK

 

Yeah it was there only after I did the PCH mod a month ago and since then I been really busy and not on the laptop much. Seemed to get worse after that and thought it was to do with my SSD temps at first until I saw your post with proved it was actually VRel...

So I'll buy 6w/mK arctic thermal pads then of 0.5, 1 and 1.5 thickness and no fujipoly pads...

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How did LM slip onto the board on XPS 15? Was the heatsink not flat?

 

Dell to cross into mid-range gaming segment in 2018

Aaron Lee, Taipei; Joseph Tsai, DIGITIMES [Friday 25 August 2017]

Dell is reportedly planning to release new Light Gaming series products under its Alienware gaming brand in 2018 to expand its market reach to the mid-range sector, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.

Dell's move is expected to directly affect the sector's current players including Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International (MSI) and Acer, and heat up competition between notebook ODMs for related orders, the sources noted.

The sources revealed that Dell has begun its request-for-quotation (RFQ) process for these gaming PCs, but the US-based vendor so far has not decided on the suppliers as the new product series' specifications and prices will be significantly different from Alienware's existing product portfolio, and the vendor is now still making adjustments to create a clear boundary between the two.

Compal Electronics is currently supplying 60-70% of Dell's notebook demand in 2017 and the major manufacturer of Alienware brand products, while the remaining orders are shared between Pegatron Technology and Wistron. The three makers have already begun making preparations for possible orders from Dell for the new gaming products, the sources pointed out.

Alienware's cheapest 13-inch gaming notebooks carry price tags starting from US$1,099.99 and the Light Gaming series may be in a price range of US$799-899, the sources noted.

Since Dell had previously released its Inspiron 5000 and 7000 series for the gaming segment, with a price range of US$649.99-749.99, the sources also believe the new Light Gaming series could have some negative impactson the sales of these Inspiron products.

 

MSI mid range? They run better than "High End" Alienware... 799-899 though is a reasonable price.

 

MSI has low and mid range products too. The GE and GS series, for example. Their GT series is direct competition for Alienware based on hardware specs and price (not talking build quality)

 

Definitely a money play, since they will be dumbing down the Alienware name even more with the "light gaming" junk like the Inspirons. Nothing wrong with offering that to the people that don't want anything better. I gave a bit of latitude (no pun intended) to the Inspiron gaming line because they were so cheap and geared toward very casual gamers. It's really a shame to see the Alienware brand going the opposite direction of awesome since 2012. Would be better if they left the junkier stuff under the Dell brand. But, they don't really have anything that genuinely qualifies as "high end" right now. I guess it's all irrelevant at this point.

 

I travel with it a lot and probably put too much on ado it just squished out and ran. New one is now repasted with kyronaut :O

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So, I removed the stock ssd and put in the Samsung 960 evo. Checked bios, and it shows up there. Toss in my usb win10 drive, boot to setup, the 960 isn’t showing up.

Suggestions? This is my R4 17.3”.

 

The disk probability needs to be initialized.

When you get to the first screen in Windows Setup press Shift+F10. In the command window type diskpart. Hit enter. This will start the Disk Partioning utility. Type list disk and hit enter. If you see it listed choose it by typing select disk followed by the number identifying it. Hit enter. You will see a message confirming it was selected. Type clean and hit enter. Decide if you want GPT or MBR. Type convert GPT (or MBR if you prefer that) and hit enter. Close the command window and continue with Windows Setup. The disk should be visible at this point.

 

I changed sata options from raid 0 to achi and it worked. Listed it and installed just fine.

 

So nice to be on a clean install lol.