*OFFICIAL* Alienware Area-51M R1 Owner's Lounge

are available again, maybe they are updating the site

 

Just got this thing, what a beast! It looks and feels so good! Its tiny and not very heavy.

Do you recommend I install windows fresh?

 

Did some more testing. Bought some IC graphite pads for CPU and GPU.
For the CPU its a big fail, idle temps are fine but when using the CPU or stress testing the CPU throttles like hell. For the GPU its more then fine, even a small drop on idle! Think this has to do with the pressure of the heatsink.

I had a little bit of Thermal Grizzly left, enough for the CPU, so temps are back to normal now again. Maybe next repaste liquid metal? Kinda scared for it because its a laptop and what if something spills when carrying it around.

 

So for the ones that aren't aware, I'm one of the victims of the infamous Burned Area 51M users.
Wanted to give a quick update:

So they came and retrieved my laptop on Tuesday. Yesterday it arrived in germany where they check for the problem.
Moments ago I got a call from Dell Tech support telling me the following:
My system is REALLY bad, something that could cause this, shouldn't have been able to pass our quality check, especially since their Alienware quality checks are the toughest they have.
So for them it was quickly decided that I would get a brand new Alienware Area 51M. One with the exact same specs, and if not available, a better one.
So since this is so bad, they have to send this to engineering, to figure out what really went wrong, and how and if this can/cannot be picked up by quality check before shipment.

I asked them for further details about the exact issue if possible, when they are able to figure it out. And guy said he couldn't promise it, but that he will relay the message to the engineering department, to send me a mail, Because I asked it to potentially change my behavior of using the laptop, in order to avoid this issue, if this was by the slim chance not caused by me drawign a short start, but this being a flaw in the system that is triggered by a specific rare scenario of actions (Combination of actions, Consecutive of actions, Concurrent actions).

I hope that I simply drew a short straw, and that this will never happen again, the guy also said, that this is a really rare occasion, and keeping in mind that I didn't even push my system. Sure I did add a 970 Pro and a 860 Evo to it. But there are people with an i9 (I had an i7), a mechanical drive and overclock stage 2. I never touched overclocking. Although I did use an external monitor, but again, that should not be reason for that.

I'm going to try to keep my AAA gaming sessions limited in terms of hours of gameplay, until I have further info.

FYI. my 860 Evo 4TB got bricked alongside my machine. When plugging it in. it was very slow to show in the explorer, causing explorer to not respond while so. Disk management shows the 4tb as RAW. Recovery tools could see my data (I had a backup of my data, so not a huge deal).
Tried chkdsk. did some fixes. Failed at journal step.
But result still the same. Tried quick format. Failed.
Tried removing volume and create new simple volume. Does now only show as 1.6TB instead of like 3.6.

Tried different partitioning tools, all showing the same. Luckily was still within 30 days of purchase, so I will be getting a replacement.
But was a shocker to find out that it was bricked.

EDIT: If anything close to this happens again. I'm switching to a slick weaker laptop. And use an external GPU.

 

Could be a short straw, i´ve been playing the divsion 2 for hours on both external screen and the laptop screen and besides it getting a little hot near the alienware logo i´ve had 0 crashes

 

For the people with the tobii eyetracker. The eyetracker works fine in the tobii experience app but as soon as i start the gamehub it says no eyetracker detecter in yellow beneath the hub. Anyone else got it working normally?

 

Does the system know how hot they are? Do they not report their own temperature? I thought that this is how those VRMs cause the 800MHz throttles on the AW17R5.

 

Is that some sort of technical explanation, "your system is really bad"?!!

We know your machine was fried, literally, you smelled it! There could be untold secondary damage done to the motherboard and components. They ought to discover and let you know of the root cause.

 

same here

 

back when i had an m18x-r2 with a 670m that was the only ever occasion when i saw vram temps in hwinfo. after i upgraded those 670m's with 680m's the vram temp display was gone and i've never ever seen one on any notebook again. i also don't understand why this isn't a thing since those things are getting so hot anyways, would be nice to know if they're around normal temps or preparing to melt... would be a good indicator to be able to monitor those suckers.

 

Morning folks. Having received my replacement finally, I am now in the "tweaking it" stages. I am working on undervolting the 9900 this evening. I have seen a few lines of thought here. Some say -100 is as far as they would go, and I have seen others taking it to the extreme like -180 etc. I understand that each chip is different and everything must be tested thoroughly to ensure it's stable. Is there a any reason to stop at say -100 vs going to -125 (in increments of course) to reduce the heat a bit further. This computer was/is used pretty much for gaming only and I have no intentions of OCing the cpu at this time as I don't feel the minimal gains in fps are worth the heat trade off. Thanks fellas.

 

Sorry for your troubles, to be sure. Thank you for the informative update, and please let us know if you hear more. A QC issue could mean something relating to how a part was made; an assembly issue; etc. If it was a part, which part? GPU? MB? Power port?

It's more than likely that there are more than a few ticking time bombs out there. Let's see if Dell handles this properly through open an honest communication and action, like Microsoft did in the infamous case of the Xbox 360 "red ring of death":

"On July 5, 2007, Peter Moore, the Vice President of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business division published an open letter recognizing the console's problems, as well as announcing a three-year warranty from the original date of purchase for every Xbox 360 console that experiences the "general hardware failure" indicated by three flashing red LEDs on the console.

A source that has been identified as a team leader and key architect in the creation of the Xbox and Xbox 360 and a founding member of the Xbox team provided insight as to the high rate of failures. The interviews suggest that Xbox 360 units that fail early in their life do so because of problems in the system design, parts supply, material reliability, and manufacturing issues as well as a system not tolerant to faults. These issues were alleged to be the end results of the decisions of management in Microsoft's Xbox team and inadequate testing resources prior to the console's release. A second source cited that, at one time, there was just a 32% yield of one of the test production runs. 68 of every 100 test units were found to be defective.

Years after leaving Microsoft, Moore recalled preparing to tell then CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, of his planned response to the incident, "we've got to tell Steve, here's what we have to do: we need to FedEx an empty box to a customer who had a problem - they would call us up - with a FedEx return label to send your box, and then we would FedEx it back to them and fix it. ... I always remember $240m of that was FedEx. ... It was sickening. I was doing a lot of interviews. ... We couldn't figure it out. ... There was a theory. We had changed our solder, which is the way you put the GPU and the fans, to lead-free. ... We think it was somehow the heat coming off the GPU was drying out some of the solder, and it wasn't the normal stuff we'd used, because we had to meet European Standards and take the lead out. ... He said, 'what's it going to cost?' I remember taking a deep breath, looking at Robbie, and saying, 'we think it's $1.15bn, Steve.' He said, 'do it.' There was no hesitation. ... If we hadn't made that decision there and then, and tried to fudge over this problem, then the Xbox brand and Xbox One wouldn't exist today."" (Wikipedia).

 

So, until so far they only did a diagnosis. The damage is severe, and I will be getting a new laptop. The burned laptop will be sent to engineering, who will try to figure out what went wrong and what could have caused it, and like I said, I let them know I wanted to know more, and the guy tried what he could. But that guy was not responsible for figuring out what went wrong, he simply was there to diagnose the problem, if possible/necessary do a fix or replacement, and ship it back. Because the problem is severe, the laptop will be sent to the guys who have to figure our what went wrong, which is the engineering department, in a different country.

So yeah, too soon to come to conclusions.

 

Like you said - every chip is different. And so I don't take anyone else's experience as gospel. Sometimes your chip will be a surprise beast, and you can take it further. Other times, you'll see it's just a bad bin, and you can choose to not care or go through the effort of an exchange to maybe get luckier next time.

Personally, as I don't chase synthetic benchmark rankings and care more about gaming performance and heat over all, I've always overclocked the same way, and undervolted the same way. Small, small increment. Test a synthetic benchmark twice. If it passes, small small increment again. Test a synthetic benchmark twice. Rinse repeat until I get a crash, and then I just dial it back to my last successful attempt. Then I play an hour of a CPU intensive game, and an hour of a GPU intensive game. If I get no crashes, I assume it's stable. If I'm happy with the temps, then I'm done.

 

Question for you guys. Are any of you using a laptop table/stand for you 51m? I am having trouble finding one and wanted to see if anyone had any insight into one. Something that can facilitate a mouse on the side obviously and preferably white or aluminum to match Lunar White.

Thanks!

 

For those of you in the US, the "SAVE17" code is back. 17% Off Dell Coupon Offer: Valid 3/21/2019 – 3/28/2019 6am ET
This is great news. Get those orders in!
Unfortunately though, the estimated delivery times still show April 25th for me, over a month out!

 

Yeah...but every time they offer the discount, they mess with the configurations and raise the prices...and they dd it again!

 

I have such little faith anyone would even get it by April 25th.

My 3/7 order just potentially saw it's THIRD delay. Signed in this morning. Packing slip had been saying 3/22 and delivery by 3/26. Now the packing slip date is blank, and delivery date is blank, too. Ugh.

I'm gonna give it a day to see if things bounce back, then I guess I'll give them a call just to hear they're still waiting on the display assembly, again.

 

I should mention that spoke to a Dell sales rep last night - and was told that the overheating issues have been fixed....yeah RIGHT!!

 

Oh?
I were the prices different yesterday? I checked today and they're the same as they were when I ordered last week.
And even if the prices were different, are you still saving more today than yesterday?

 

How are you guys seeing this packing slip? everytime I click on it and put it the order or purchase id number it says invalid, I'm not sure where my "customer number" is at.

 

I honnestly don't know why you'd want to buy the A51M.
I've read your post for the past couple pages and you really don't seem to appreciate anything about Dell.
Do your self a favor and buy something else.

 

got 160 on the core clock of the 2080 and 1000 on the memory. Was solid in Heaven benchmark. If i add anymore core for eg. 200 then it just straight crashes, even with 0 extra memory. Does it need more voltage?

 

Not true. I own a 5510 laptop, an M6600, and my son has a 17R4. What I DON'T like is when defective products get pushed out to the masses and customers get screwed. What I DON'T like is when problems arise and a company continues to push out the product. Now that it seems that Dell is taking ownership of the problem (still too soon to tell), and since it also appears that although they are taking new orders they are pushing back delivery times (hopefully in order to get a handle on these issues), I would consider purchasing this model from them again. It should be obvious that I was interested in this laptop before the issues came to light...I made that perfectly clear. Why else would I be here? My time is too valuable to waste - although I did take the time to respond to your post...

And if the situation is not handled appropriately by Dell, I WILL buy something else...thanks for giving me your permission.

Nice scores, BTW. However, if instead of scoring in the A51M lottery your laptop had been the one that @QUICKSORT received, you might not be touting Dell so highly right about now...

 

Oh...why yes, indeed they do. What Dell does is change the base RAM from 8 to 16, change the base drive from 1TB to 2x256 NVMe, and increase the base price from $1910 to $2106.

EDIT: HA! It USED to be that for the price increase you got 2x256...NOW it's only 1x256!

EDIT: @ 730 EST, the base config is now $2149!!

 

that base 256 + 16gb ram is booty. especially for people who do their own upgrades.

 

In The Netherlands they raised the price too. First you could get the 9900k with 32gb and the RTX 2080 for € 3548. Now it’s the same specs for this price but with the RTX 2070.

If you want the RTX 2080 you have to pay more than € 4200. Glad I ordered mine already on monday.

 

Booty? Nah.

What it is, is Dell trying to push components that aren't very popular. I mean, 256's?? C'mon now!? With the size of games and Win 10, I wouldn't waste my slots on them. I'd much rather have the 1TB for storage.

And as I stated in this thread before, I have 32GB and 2x1TB NVMes waiting for a home...

 

Do you see Quicksort ranting here?
He's being informative and positive about the future and actually giving props to the way Dell is handling the situation.
Yet, you don't have an Area-51M and all i've seen from you is 15 post of Dell bashing.

If it was my laptop i'd be waiting on a replacament and i'd be happy about getting top 2 best laptop available right now on the market.
I'm sure you'll have more to say but honnestly unless you have something new to say i'm not interested in hearing the same thing all over again.

 

This configuration:
3.548,99 €

• Intel® Core™ i9-9900K di nona generazione

• Windows 10 Home (64 bit)

• 32 GB, 2 da 16 GB, DDR4, 2.400 MHz

• NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2070 con 8 GB di memoria GDDR6 (pronta per OC)

• 1 week ago it had the 2080 as standard

 

Yes, same as in The Netherlands. It's a steep price increase.

The delivery date of my order of last Monday is still 3/27 - 4/5. Don't think that will hold.

 

Exactly. That's why I ordered the 1 sshd with 8gb. btw, I'm loving my a51m so far.

 

Please be accurate. I have bashed when appropriate, and I have praised when appropriate...that's called being objective...which is something the fanboys are not capable of.

And dude...no one is forcing you to engage me.

 

@ssj92 @Johnksss @Papusan

Window FTW

[email protected]


[email protected]



https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/34745960?

 

my area 51 arrived today. wahoo. (9700k 2070) no oc on balanced profile

Trying to play some games to test it out and the screen will just go totally black after about 5 mins of gaming. only way to get it to work is to turn it off and on again. Anyone have any ideas.

i have reinstalled the gfx drivers completely fresh using driver cleaner to eradicate all traces in safemode

 

Sound like overheating. Log your laptop's temperature to a file using hwinfo64, then check what was your AW temperature just before the black screen

Enviado desde mi G8441 mediante Tapatalk

 

Problem is, it's not actually compressed against the components it's suppose to be protecting. (I feel this has to do with the part that it's screwed down too.) It's sort of very lightly touching it. The heat sink is already just about resting on the bottom base of the laptop. Maybe 1mm clearance at best. This all rest right above the vents that pull cool air in from the fans blowing through the exhausts.

 

Who is really to say there is a defect right now?

 

Defect...QC issue...assembly issue...issue...do you have a preference as to which term I use?

Let's not mince words here. @lukenathan just received his unit, and it looks like it might be overheating right out of the box after 5 minutes of gaming. What would you prefer I call t hat??

 

what is a good temp for gpu? as far as i can see it never goes over 70 c

 

Gotta say it's been turned on all day, played a few games, over watch, city skylines, rust, did some benchmarking and it's been an absolute beast I couldn't be happier.

Does anyone know if you can create game profiles for the keys, like razor has some cool features when your health goes low for eg. I dont know if alienware has things like that.

 

I'm getting 76.c with a 2080, if I add 160 to the core I get 79-80.c

 

I will open a support ticket with tobii tomorrow. I have a feeling that nobody got the gamehub working yet.

 

Nice! Btw, here's my FS physics at 5.1Ghz: https://www.3dmark.com/fs/18764713

Might wanna see if you're throttling as it's very close to mine.

 

Just got my alienware area 51m, I want to add my Samsung 970 evo as primary drive. What steps should I take. Last time my nvidia control panel did not open or work when i did clean installation of windows 10. What should I do differently

 

Maybe they're doing something different in other countries, but there is really no change here in the US.

Using the internet archive wayback machine at https://web.archive.org/web/ I compared some prices.
I checked what prices were February 8th.

The first config they had on February 8th was the $2549.99 config. This was the lowest at the time, because they didn't have a RTX 2060 ready back then, it started at a RTX 2070.

For the second config, the $2799.99 configuration, exact same components, exact same price.

For the third config, $3129.99 configuration, I had to change it to Lunar Light to be the same configuration as the one in February, so the price jumped to $3179.99, and that one was $3249.99 back in February 8th. Right now the 3rd config is $70 off, so without this savings it's really the same price it was in February.

For the forth config, the config in February cost was $4249.99 but had 32GB of RAM and was "Lunar Light", where today's config is $3899.99 with 16GB of RAM and "Dark Side of the Moon". If I change that one to 32GB of RAM and change to "Lunar Light" it jumps to $4149.99, which is still $100 cheaper than it was in February (it's $100 off right now, so technically this configuration is the exact same price it was in February).

For another check I went to the prices from March 3rd. March 3rd, the only real difference is they did offer a $1949.99 configuration. This configuration is the same as the current $2149.99 configuration, except for the memory and hard drive. They are forcing you to go to 16GB now instead of 8GB (maybe their stock of 4GB DIMM's is low/out?) and a 256GB PCIe SSD vs a 1TB SSHD. I would argue that nobody should buy a machine with only 8GB of RAM and a spinning drive, even if it is an "SSHD". They probably didn't want someone buying a machine like this, and their first impressions are it being slow because of the slow spinning hard drive and low 8GB RAM. Granted, it would be nice to give users a choice and spend less and upgrade their own system, but this configuration did go up in price by $200.

So what I can see is, prices are the same as they were in February. What changes maybe is the base configs. Maybe they are changing things around there, based on the stock they have available or unavailable, but prices are the same as they were 1-1.5 months ago (in the US at least).

Not only that, but as of right now they have their "SAVE17" deal in the US, where you save 17% off of those prices. That makes things way cheaper than they were in February.
So, in that case, even if you think about the configuration that went up $200, the $1949 RTX 2060 8GB/1TB SSHD configuration that is now $2149 for RTX 2060/16GB/256GB SSD, it's actually $166 cheaper now than the $1949.99 configuration was.

So overall, prices are the same or less than they were on February 8th and March 3rd in the US.

FWIW this is what I was comparing to today's prices:
February 8th: https://web.archive.org/web/2019020...ty/pdp/spd/alienware-17-area51m-laptop?~ck=mn
March 3rd: https://web.archive.org/web/2019030...ty/pdp/spd/alienware-17-area51m-laptop?~ck=mn

You may want to do your own research for your own country. I don't know how Dell operates in other countries, and how often they change prices. And they may also stack sales even when prices change, so that's something to watch.

Good luck and have a good day.

Oh and if you're in the US, now is a good time to purchase. Prices are cheaper than they were, and you save 17%. That's huge.

 

Your NVIDIA control panel didn't work because you used the "DCH" drivers, because the most recent non-DCH drivers didn't have the device ID for the Alienware Area 51m RTX cards. And when you use the DCH drivers, you have to get the NVIDIA control panel from the Windows Store.

Looks like version 419.67 just came out yesterday. I don't have my Alienware Area 51m anymore (still on order) so I can't test. Someone may want to download those and see if they work, or look in the INF file and see if the driver ID is in there.

Personally I just used the stock install and cloned it to my other m.2 drive. The stock install is very much free of bloatware, so it seemed good enough to use. I used Macrium Reflect free to clone from one drive to the other. Macrium will only see your drives if you change to AHCI mode. But even if you want to keep your OS as "RAID" instead of "AHCI", what you can do is change to "AHCI" in the BIOS, clone with Macrium Reflect", then change back to "RAID" in the BIOS before booting off of your cloned drive.
Or, what I did, was follow the article others have referenced here (I've used the same procedure for a long time with no issues) to convert from RAID to AHCI.

http://triplescomputers.com/blog/un...ch-windows-10-from-raidide-to-ahci-operation/

I basically use that, but instead of using bcdedit, I just run "msconfig" and on the boot tab just select "Safe boot".
Oh and after booting into safe mode, sometimes my keyboard wouldn't work right (windows key didn't work). I just hit Control-Alt-Delete, opened task manager and ran "msconfig" by clicking on "File->Run new task" in the task manager.

Good luck with your new system.

 

That's not a regular driver and not meant for gamers:

Source: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/.../?ncid=so-twi-rs-79151&linkId=100000005519026

nVIDIA Creator Ready Driver v419.67

NEVER do that people! That's the lazy way to convert from RAID to AHCI and is not the same as installing your OS in pure AHCI Mode!

You may have been successful in terms of conversion and booting up the OS but that's not how it's done. To start off with the AHCI Driver is not even present when you install the OS in RAID!

Please don't spread this lazy method around!

The Dell Factory Image on most if not all Dell laptops come installed in RAID for some reason whether you have a RAID setup or not. To fully benefit from AHCI's lower latency driver one must install the OS in pure AHCI mode

 

Got my 51m backpack today, its actually much nicer than I expected and not as huge as some made it out to be. At the discount price they’re selling it ($99) I think it’s worth it. I used my 3% Dell Rewards from the 51m to purchase it.

 

Physically installing...

As for software, idk I just downloaded all the latest drivers from Dell except nVidia & Intel drives (directly from their website) and nVidia control panel comes up fine.

It was my understanding that the RAID driver is basically the same as AHCI driver when running in a "non-RAID" disk set-up.

As for that creator driver being different....maybe I should do a test to see if it's really truly not better for gaming.