*OFFICIAL* Alienware 17 R5 Owner's Lounge

how are the temps?

 

Will post pics in 2h. Temps were below 90 degree with lifted back.

Heaven Benchmark with stable 4.3ghz mid 7Xs and GTX 1080 69 degree

 

Spoke to tech support again, they can send an engineer out to replace the heatsinks and cooling system. I questioned the fact that the laptop is new, 7 days old, and surely they have not already designed and produced a NEW heatsink assembly? The tech guy said that he did not know, it could also be a matter of re-fitting due to improper assembly at the factory. I am thinking that if Dell wish to send out an engineer to take the laptop apart they must have faith in their solution?

He also told me that I had 14 days in which to return it, but time is running short so I must decide what to do.

In truth I like the laptop very much and would like to keep it. On the other hand it does get hot and keeps hitting its thermal limits when I play my game (World of Warcraft). It is not evident, not unless you are running some kind of monitoring utility in the background.

Just to re-iterate you need to have both the CPU+GPU active to get the CPU to heat up beyond its limits, even with the fans full on, and on a Mastercooler U3 Plus base with 3 fans on full speed.

***********************

>>> I9 With -100mv stable 4.3ghz during Cinebench. 1317 points

>>> With -100mv and 4.5ghz OC (hwinfo says average 4450mhz during the test) 1397points

Can you please tell us your BIOS settings (OC, fans etc) and also were you running Dell Command Centre (and its settings) or anything similar?

 

@doofus99 @rinneh @Rei Fukai @sisqo_uk @iunlock

Not trying to hijack this thread but just for reference, check my 8950HK temps in my GT75 Titan:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...g-094-review-by-phoenix.816385/#post-10721870

 

Hi everyone. I just got mine. Running aida64 now.
They sent me a black chassis instead of a silver one!
It's not even meant to be available in the UK yet! Not sure whether to keep it.

 

And what screen resolution / screen were these tests run at? ...

 

1080p or FHD as described or written on Phoenix's signature.

 

@Phoenix dont forget to say that you you have LM applied But nice to see what clocks we can get with LM.

here a pic of 15 mins Prime95. lifted back, stock WLP, -100mv

 

I meant the Alienware tests, not the MSI ones. Since we have proven that the CPU overheats only when the GPU is active, we will have to examine the GPU parameters too, such as screen resolution. Of course captn.ko 's laptop runs fine so we need to understand the differences, if any.

 

Yes AW it's solution is yet again a garbage solution Again the second time in a row.

LM, and maybe a heatsink rebalance is the only way (Yet again) to save the AW/DELL face.

Rather have 2/3 pounds of beefy copper within my laptop then a flimsy ultrabook like chassis.

 

this is on your Alienware bro? That's amazing! How did j00 manage to do that when everyone else is complaining about the temps

 

Bit the same as my situation i guess. My AW15R3 came with decent temps, almost no uneven core temps. After a repaste the temps were only a littler better, With kyonaur a lot better but temps started to creep up after 3 months of use. So maybe I should have kept the stock paste and see how long it would last. Tomorrow I will repaste it with Coolermaster MasterGel Nano.

Nanogrease Extreme was too thick for these low pressure heatsinks. The heatsinks itself are great, just the pressure is lacking .

 

you see, I was a die hard Alienware fan and before getting this MSI GT75 Titan I did want to get the new AW 17 R5 if only it they would put 4 RAM slots for a total of 64GB, add more m.2 slots (like MSI did, they have 3 NVMe m.2 slots) and most importantly, fix the darn heatsink but I was disappointed with what I saw. I really miss the good old Alienware days when they were the best. Still love the design of their laptops and keyboard but it has to work

 

Even if he has LM applied (like I also have in my AW) my temps never will stay around 65/70C without breaking a sweat (or ramping up the cpu fan) with a 300+ MHZ overclock. 4.5 GHZ for me my max chokes already at 83C, so it's pretty impressive that his machine extracts that much heat.

At least you haven't hit PROCHOT. And we have to factor it that you're on stock paste. Temps seem a little unbalanced, but with a rebalance/repasted with LM I think you have a winner

 

I tried Kyronaut and it was very bad man, the temps started rising after 3 days not months. But Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut is on a whole new level. I've had it on the GT73 which decreased the temps by 10C so I also had my GT75 ordered with it. I suggest you try Kryonaut if you're ok with Liquid Metal

 

yeah its my aw17 still not perfect due to a dead pixel. Call the service tomorrow to swap the panel.

will repaste it as soon as possible with LM. Still downloading BF1 to stress the alienware a bit. Lifting the back of the notebook and a bit undervolting. Thats all i have done

 

Been looking 17 R5 UHD with i7-8750h but I am concerned about fan noise. Anyone have same configuration? How was noise in i7-7700hq model?
I would not use gpu much as I don't play games. Probably would go with cheapest (1060 gtx) option.
I work on laptop and mostly at night.. use it as desktop replacement since I travel every several months.

 

You forgot this is an Unified heatsink, bruh. The Cpu heat will be spread everywhere. Put on max load on Gpu and you will see bright R ed numbers in Hwinfo64

 

not realy... Furmark+p95 is stupid witch hunting for me.

15mins Bf1, 1440p, Max Details. Min800mhz is idle clock. Stable 4.3ghz ingame.

 

I'm not trying to bash or anything, but 15 min BF says nothing compared to an hour or an hour and a half.

15 minutes is the warm-up excercise I give my heatsink so I can get to crunching numbers when the whole system has been put under load. Only then you'll find out how your system will hold up in real world scenarios (like gaming a whole day with friends or something like that).

Also is your avarage 4.2 not 4.3. your max is 4.3, but overall I'm curious about it when locked @4.3 In game for a minimum of an half hour. My 4.4/4.5Ghz cinebench was done at 26C room temperature. And the heatsink could still dissipate 80+ watts of heat easily. Your system with the new heatsink (LM'ed) should handle it easy.

 

Sure. All i want to say is that the cooling System of the R5 is not as bad as everyone says

And as i said... there is idle time in my screenshot too. Thats why the average is 4.2

 

Q1: how do you check for dead pixels?

Q2: what is your Turbo Boost Power Max and Turbo Short Boost Power Max? Defaults are 45W and 90W. I have set mine to the max I can without hitting temps, ie 65W and 90W. It spends all of its time at 65W during tests and 3.5GHz.

I think I may just have the answer of what's wrong with mine and will ask them to come fix it. I noticed that without any tests running, pretty no CPU %, the CPU jumps from 40C to 80C as you can see from the attached chart. From my experience with electronics this means there is no heatsink! In other words there is no proper interface between the chip die and its heatsink and the slightest provocation (ie a tiny % more use) and the temps spike because they have nowhere to go! A properly mounted heatsink, as well as the die itself, have temperature inertia, which as you can see from the chart seems to be completely missing...

 

attached pic

 

i check my panel with https://www.eizo.de/monitortest/

 

For me it lasted about 2 or 3 months. Within 1 weeks my temps has been going up from 80c under full load to 85c.

I never owned one of the pre-echo models but I always found the build quality of the MX15 impressive. But at this time not many laptops fit my needs. The AW15R3 barely, its a tad heavy unfortunately but it runs well for me. Not that demanding anymore in terms of CPU power. Not rendering a lot anymore and the AGA is a nice addition. When I use the AGA at my desk the CPU fans hardly turn on and the temps are impressive. Also nice to use as a dock. I like how the new MSI GS laptop looks but its a tad too flimsy for my taste.

 

Could you try Aida64 as the guide. Yes, I am agree none should run Furmark + P95.

Btw. I can see Dell still haven't fixed the awful high PCH temps. This only from your short 15 min test.

 

they're not bad indeed ! the biggest problem was that, in order for it not be bad, it has to have a little love and finesse, while they've already finessed your wallet. the problem is not that if you tweak it, you can have some excellent thermals for the laptop they made, it is the fact that it is a keyboard, screen, battery, a good aligned heatsink, and overall build quality while being put toghether by the AW m@nkeys. (sorry to name them like that, but that's what they sometimes deserve...) lottery that's what pisses people off. back in the day AW was marketed as for the Enthousiast Gamer while being more used by the Enthousiast. nowadays AW only seems to have eye for the mainstrain gamers by putting LGA machines toghether, while there are company's who still produce LGA machines (and AW used "LGA sockets" and MXM sockets heavily in the past.) effectively abandoning their original fanbase. that's what happed.

 

You're right. all the big names have abandoned AW with only a few spending some free free freee time on a AW system, and more time tweaking a MSI, Clevo/Sager. and you know what, it's okay. AW it's flame has started to fade and other brands are slowly taking over. they used to be able to run hybrid bios, or run out of spec graphics cards by only modding the bios, Heatsink and some inf files. nowadays everything is locked down, with no space for tweaking (as long as it is within their limits). this is and will be my last AW, and me also will make the switch back to LGA. it was a bumpy ride, but not one that i would like to take again.

if i could, and the 4930MX could still pack a punch, i would switch back to the 17 ranger, and get the 4930MX and a 1070m and mod it. the ranger was the last one that still was tweakable, but those days are long goneee

 

Great test, thank you. Except it always displays 3 menu areas on the screen and I cannot test what's happening below those areas! All the screens, white, black, green, red and blue have three areas obscured by those buttons and menus, small as they may be...

I am itching to re-paste my CPU heatsink as I am almost convinced that it is not making proper contact. Do you think I should attempt it or call the technician in? I have done it many times on the two Clevos and it was very easy (other than trying to remove dried up paste from tiny SMD bits around the CPU/GPU with a toothpick)...

 

I eventually will, although I think they'll be pretty similar and still recommend that those who repaste their systems take note of their specific tolerance levels to get the optimal results.

6 Core gaming laptops.... amazing times....

 

I agree... a lot of the mainstream brands have to offer something stellar to keep the true enthusiasts interested, otherwise they will and some are on the way out.

The problem is with corporate greed, ignorance, ego and what they, "THINK" that they know that is best for the consumers. In reality, I'll put my chips on any of the vets in this game over the engineers/designers that, "think" they know what is best at these companies. The track record of gaming laptops being utter crap with thermal issues is way more than enough to prove this point.

You question any engineer and they'll get defensive, because most of them think that they have it all figured out. I deal with them daily due to my line of work... it's annoying lol.

On the bright side, with the 6 core laptops coming to light, it's an exciting time for portable goodness.

 

did a few more tests yesterday and logged the core clocks. Maybe some of you have an idea what Setting (xtu,TS) is missing/causing the behavior. I don't use TS at the moment

Settings XTU: 4300Mhz allcore, -120mv undervolt, 250w short and longterm. XTU is not able to set the duration time for the boost. It stays at 28s.

Scenario1 Cinebench: Clock is constant at 4300mhz all the time. Temps ok

Scenario2 BF1 4300mhz: single core drop from 4300 to 800 for a second and jump back to 4300. happens every few seconds on different cores.At 4500mhz its more often and at 4000mhz never. CPU temps below 90 degree so its no thermal throttling. I would also exclude Powerlimit throttling because CineBench with more Load is running fine...

any ideas? Read something about BD PROCHOT option in TS. Will that fix it?

 

Thats some weird behaviour. Might be the PCH which is getting too hot. With the AW15R1 this was an issue for some users. AW15R2 and R3 did not have this problem (yet have to see my PCH go over 70c even) but from what I saw the PCH gets way more hot with Coffee Lake CPU's.

 

Turn speedshift on and set it between 87 and 100. Set the power profile to high performance. In the bios I recommend to set the PowerLimits both to 0 and in throttlestop set them at least at 120 watt for both. Disable PROCHOT in TS.

Alternatively you can turn off the Spectre protection, but that could only have impact on your cb scores.

Factor in mind that when gaming the heatsink is not only cooling the CPU but also the GPU. When benching in CB for example only the cpu reaches around 80 to 100 watts (depending on voltage and load). While in gaming it usually half.

 

I have been doing more tests. I have been using the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility which was installed on my system by Dell Alienware tech support.

I believe my problem is a badly fitted heatsink from the factory. It seems to be unable to provide any sort of thermal inertia to the CPU. I do not believe that this is by design. I attach a chart where you can see the CPU strolling idly at say 5% but the temps spike to 100C and then down to 40C and back up again - and I repeat all the while the CPU % is very low at 5% or less. This indicates to me a CPU running almost without a heatsink - there seems to be no "thermal volume" to absorb the heat from the CPU quickly. You can achieve the same result by removing most of the paste between CPU and heatsink for example. So this is what I think is happening.

 

will try this today thank you. one thing: Power Limits are greyed out in the Bios. iam not able to change them.

That make the 800mhz core jumping even more strange. Cinebench steady 4300mhz, Bf1 Jumping clock...

 

Yes and no. Yes because cinebench is a pretty heavy load on the cpu compared to BF1 which in itself is pretty heavy already. And no because it could potentially be heat related.

But if your cpu can stay steady on 4.3 with an undrrvolt, you can rule out the "bad silicon" option.

Even if it cannot handle it now with some love and finesse you can have a beast of a machine.

 

yes I know, even at the moment the ,,normal user,, would not notice the 800mhz jumps as they are not affecting the FPS (I didn't noticed FPS drops in BF1).

But I know they are there and I want to fix that LM is the next step but first dell has to swap my broken pixel panel. When the R5 is finaly perfect I start to optimize the cooling.

PS: I tried 4300mhz with -150mv... Still running in BF1 and Cinebench don't want to go to far with the uv

 

I can understand you brother. I also had them, but I did notice some heave frame drops so I had to stop it. And even with high performance mode and TS I couldn't contain it. After 3 heatsinks and kryonaught it went away. After a month using kryonaught I thought F* it F* EVERYTHING I'M OUTTA HERE IMMA LM YOU @SS and so I did. After a grueling 20 min repaste booted the laptop and never heard my fans again @4.2Ghz all cores.

Long story short: NO RAGRETS BRAH

 

so after LM repaste you never had 800mhz drops again?

 

After a kryonaught repaste and heatsink rebalance it got away. But I still wasn't satisfied with my temps, so I proceeded with the LM repaste and since then I really started to make use of my laptop how it was intended to be.

 

could it be temp related? Even if my temps are not critical?´
I mean... there must be a reason for the drops... changing the toothpaste and resit the heatsink and the drop are magically away?

 

It could be very well brother but not necessarily.

In my case the core imbalance was a real red flag to me that something down there wasn't quite right.

Luckily it was a easy fix.

If you play BF1 log it with HWinfo and TS. Do not forget to turn on log limit reason in TS settings. Maybe the logs can tell you a more clear story.

 

Even with the drops the i9 8950HK is cleary faster than my LM i7 [email protected] in bf1

 

Yes but that's due the 2 extra cores that can be used by denuvo, so you have more cpu power for drawing frames in comparison to a 4 core. In some games your cpu may scale very well depending on the engine and game. But some games won't benefit the extra 2 cores due most games still being released with a dx11 and dx12 as option to enable.

Multitasking/virtual machines etc is where you definitely will Excell past our hotheaded 7820HK. But gaming is mostly some games will some won't.

 

As long as the cpu can hold the GPU at Full load everthing is fine

if someone is interested: a comparison AW17r5 QHD TN vs AW17r4 1080p IPS








@Rei Fukai in my BF1 Screenshot we can see that BDProchot is triggered. So there was 800mhz throttling, even if I did not see it. Could a too hot NVME SSD trigger BD Prochot and throttle the cpu?

 

is the r5 on the right?

 

left you can see the QHD TN with the bad viewing angles. But if you sit in front of the panels the QHD is realy good. Maybe its a bit over saturated but its not calibrated yet

 

yes it looks good. is there a screen bleeding on your screen?
what about the bios on r5 alienware? tobii eye tracking.speaker.baterry
is there a new one ?

Sent from my CPH1723 using Tapatalk

 

the r5 screen is very nice ! colours are very warm.

it could be the SSD but i suspect it's the PCH. the PCH is like a southbridge, so if it becomes to hot, it throttles the cpu to give it less instructions. check the temps of your pch. i'm starting to become curious about the motherboard/bios difference between our laptops. i think it's (almost) the same.

Edit: you can alternitevely turn off BD PROHCOT in Throttlestop.