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

Even if so... with an average chip you have these temps with stock clocks.

And are still far away from

Just a bit UV and you can use the a51m even with stock paste pretty fine...

 

Weird Dave 2 and Notebookcheck have different opinios on this. I know at least Notbookchech test it properly vs. Youtuber Dave2 hunting only for clicks. Oh well

Still, Dell went in right direction. Would be a disaster with only Max-Q gaming laptops

 

It was mentioned earlier, but you can go through the Ebates website for 10% cash back. Student discount won't stack with the 17%.

 

Check out the ebates thing that @mattcube64 turned us on to...it's back up to 10% for Dell purchases through 3/27...other than that, I'd have to figure that Dell has some student discount, it's just whether or not you can stack it with other discounts that's the question.

OOPS... @Dragonacc beat me to it...

 

I agree about Dave2D dude - I watched a few of his videos, they were the least informative I've seen. He's clearly one of those "I tell everybody how good your stuff is as long as you send it to me for free" ;-)

It was actually funny since his videos were mentioned on Reddit in Alienware subreddit when some person was deciding whether to buy Alienware m15 or Gigabyte Aero 15, where person said "Dave2D really liked Aero 15 so I will be ordering it instead of Alienware" (regardless of the fact that Alienware m15 has better cooling design) ;-)

 

Which is why I ordered the 51m. I'm just using this for now until it arrives then back to Best Buy, it's not working out..

 

Just got my 51m and why oh why is Dell QC so bad?

Almost 5K config and this is how it arrives damaged? with a loose trackpad too huh. Also the right side monitor bezel is not even with the left lol. But this laptop is super lightweight atleast for me.

Issues so far

1. Top edge of monitor is damaged!
2. Edges of the screen are inconsistent!
3. Trackpad is loose on the side with the physical buttons!

I haven't turned it on yet it has no charge apparently so I expect to be happy to open this guy up and all I get is frustration. I don't think this is a experience worth the money.

 

I can confirm that this is, in fact, false. None of the fan modes directly affect GPU or CPU clocks. They only control Fan speed. I do not know what they did to half thier GPU score. But it wasn't the fan profile

 

The "Q" in Dell's "QC" doesn't stipulate if it is "good Q" or "bad Q"...and it seems that it's a bit of a toss-up at this point.
I wouldn't even press the power button on yours (I'd just return it if it is damaged), but if you do decide to turn it on, have a fire extinguisher close by...just in case.

 

What do you mean by #2? Light bleed?

You should probably return it. They may through a discount at you to try and keep it though.

 

Well, if they are doing things like Asus is with their high end laptops, then yes it does matter....But don't quote me on that.

 

#2 means physical bezel is 1-2 mm gap on the right side vs left of the monitor. How the hell does dell expect someone to pay nearly 5K FOR this and get it in this trash quality? I've tweeted frank and lets see what he has to say. Why would I pay this amount of money only to get scratches and this crap. A $500 dollar walmart overpowered LAPTOP Has better QC than this.

If you want to sell a high end laptop it should be perfect zero excuses. A $25 dollar cordless home phone comes without any defects or scratches yet an expensive machine comes damaged.

Honestly unless dell will just overnight me a new laptop to replace this without defects I probably won't get it replaced but who knows I'm pissed off right now. I don't want to deal with the hassles of going back and forth waiting for weeks and then getting another laptop with issues. Might get one with no scratches but has dead pixels or vice versa. It's just sad that it's like this.

In today's market you have to order like 5-10 machines then find 1 that doesn't have issues when the issues should have been caught at the QC Level and never gotten out.

 

My screen also didn't get glued in straight, about 1-2mm angle, everything else is fine though so fine with it.

 

I just ran several benchmarks. I get relatively the same scores in "Full Speed, Quiet, Performance, and Balanced mode".

However " COOL" profile does half the GPU performance.

They must have mixed up "COOL", and "BALANCED"

 

Not talking bout after you played with it. Only talking about when you first get it from Dell....

 

Did any of yours have charge when you got it? Or did you have to charge it because Mine won't even turn on so time to plug it in and see whats up with it.

Also when you first turned it on did your keyboard default to rainbow? Or was it a specific color I'm suspecting maybe my unit is a returned device?

 

To be honest I ignored the Dell Fan profiles until I had Throttlestop up and going, and disabled Alienware OC.

I get what you are saying now. They may have some OC profiles tied to the fan profiles or something that my fiddling disabled?

Don't know why the profile for "COOL" is still working then though. All others perform how I would expect (fan performance tied to temps independent of clocks).

 

Well, that's because you are also part of the group of us that are like..."Forget how it came, lets get to how it should be" LOL

 

Did anyone check there default cpu voltages? is dell nuts with them going to 1.5V max? and hovering around 1.4V?

I quickly undervolted the cpu but it still spikes.

 

I wish dell would boost up the TDP for the 2060 and 2070. If they could get them performing similar to the desktop variants they would have a serious winner and probably better thermals. We should petition them to bring the 200 TDP to also the 2060 and 2070.

Has anyone actually gotten a 2060 model?

 

Mine had zero charge, also does the rainbow on boot. (Was a light blue when in windows though)

 

So I have my 970 pro that I took out from my burned Area 51M right.
The new system I will be getting is identical spec wise as to the one I sent back.

So normally I should be able to put back in the 970 pro, re-activate windows 10, and continue exactly from where I left off right?

 

Did they offer you anything compensating the issue ?

 

Nothing. Will just be getting a brand new machine that is the exact same as the one I ordered. So yeah.
The new order was just approved. I hope it just won't take too long for me to get my new laptop

 

does anyone know what thickness thermal pad I should be using for around the cpu. I don't want to take mine apart again to measure because if I do I know I won't be using my 51m until I get new pads for it.

 

There are two ways to look at things. While i dont doubt clevo has the upper hand when it comes to CPU tweaking, cpu OC, various bios tweaks, Area-51m WINS hands down when it comes to GPU prowess. and since this is a gaming laptop, having the MOST powerful GPU is my weapon of choice any given day when playing games. No amount of clevo cpu tweaks can overcome the performance of area-51m GPU power.

Quoted from notebookcheck:

"Real-world gaming performance is still essentially identical to a desktop RTX 2080 despite what the synthetic benchmarks above indicate. Running Metro Exodus on maximum settings, for example, is a few frames faster than on our reference desktop. Performance is about 30 to 35 percent faster than a regular GTX 1080 or 40 to 45 percent faster than a regular desktop RTX 2060."

Out of the box, It's even faster than dekstop RTX2080, beating out a respectable MSI gaming X trio 2080 factory OC desktop card.

So yeah, from gaming perspective, i totally agree with the notebookcheck. Area-51m is the clevo killer

 

Hi guys, I have only had my 51M for 1 day and this morning after leaving it for a while I came back and it was in sleep mode and I couldn't wake it from sleep by doing anything. I ended up just holding down the power button until it turned off and now when I boot it back up there is no display at all and it just makes these loud beeps? Is my GPU fried?

 

i came here just to see how Mr. Fox is doing since its been sooooooooooooo long since we had a REAL laptop back in the alien stable !

 

if your nose is up to it, do a smell test. haha.. joking aside, the only way to know for sure is to disassemble it and check.

 

Intital boot up impressions.

1. Dell installed the OS on the Raid SSD's vs the SShd hah one thing right.
2. Default voltage is like 1.4-1.5 range? Yikes lol
3. Temps out of the box are horrid CPU is getting 90+ C and gpu is getting hot in the 80's this is a 9900K/2080 config.
4. Performance is there no question about it but there's alot of junk I would need to remove and tweak the CPU voltages/etc because there wayyyyy too high and the temps are out of control.
5. For it's size it's lightweight atlest for me since what it packs
6. Aesthetic Visuals are there you can't argue with it.
7. Trackpad is misaligned and the bottom clickers the edge is loose and you can tap it. That's not good or acceptable on this type of machine.
8. Because of the issues that my unit came with it sort of "took the excitement and steam out of getting it" so on the first emotional experience part of it I was disappointed and pissed.

I guess I'll revist it the next day, but as of now for the amount of money spent on this thing I do not feel it's worth it. It's like getting the Ferrari of laptops only to discover your car is keyed and the interior Rattles.. and all I can think of is like it this a joke?

 

Doing a hard reboot by disconnecting power supply solved the issue, had a Win10 BSD WDF Violation upon first startup, restarted and then worked fine after that.

 

Sleep has been buggy for a lot of people recently in Windows 10. Honestly its really useless on an SSD laptop that boots in 5-10 seconds. I recommend turning sleep off.

There is a troubleshooting guide for it somewhere if you really need it though

 

Download HWinfo64 and go to the CPU section and see if the AC/DC loadline information is present.
A 2.10 mOhms AC loadline could potentially set voltage to >1.45v at idle. But 2.10 mOhms ACLL is only supposed to be for 4 and 6 cores.
BGA versions of 6 core are supposed to have 1.8 mOhms AC loadline.
God only knows what Dell decided to use for the AC loadline value
See if HWInfo64 will tell you.

 

Ok give me a few min ill report back.

 

It's set to 1.6
I'm assuming this is the correct AC/DC part you were quoting?

I dragged the alien commander center undervolt to -100 and cpu voltage to lowest but it's still in the 1.3x range when boosting lol it was set to 5ghz overclock when I booted the machine up by default.

It would just be so simple if we could just set per core voltage and do all this from the bios like you can on intels HEDT platform Sigh! guess I'll have to download TS and fix the voltages. What I don't get is you make this machine with desktop parts treat it as your going to upgrade it but hamstring the user by not allowing full bios control which makes zero sense. It's like going 90% of the way and failing on the last 10%

 

my sleep has been buggy too. i've got it to where short term sleep of like 3 to 4 hours is fine. but if it sleeps over like 5 hours when i get back to the laptop it's fully off and when i hit the power button it boots up like a fresh boot up. event log shows a crash log. from what people are saying it sounds like hibernation can be one of the things is causing it. people are saying in the newest windows version decides when it wants to hibernate instead of it being any set time. i just turned off hibernation today so we will see how long term sleep does over night tonight.

 

On my wife's 5 year old Dell Vostro running the latest build of Windows 10 and latest drivers, when it goes to sleep and I wake up, my external Logitech G900 Chaos Spectrum doesn't work until I unplug it and plug it back in. so issues like these as you stated may not be a problem with the laptop itself but rather with Microsofts piece of trash OS

 

Such a shame. Totally understand where you're coming from in regard to the emotional aspect. I posted a few weeks back about how pleasently surprised I was by the machine in my short time with a display unit at MicroCenter, and it really hyped me up.

But between all the delays, the issues, and the constant impressions of scratched or misaligned screens, wonky touchpads, and even damage to the chassis out of the box, I'm pretty much just preparing myself for disappointment at this point. Hope I'm wrong.

This thing has SO MUCH potential, and Dell got SO MUCH right. But it's insane how pathetic their QC seems to be.

 

Alienware don't make big differences between their desktops and laptops. They prefer to maintain the same simplicity. Both for themself and their customers. I'm sure AW specialist (desktop) @Cass-Olé can explain more.

Alienware Aurora R8, Can you OC from Bios?

Adding more RAM lowers my overall RAM speed from 2666mhz to 2133mhz?

 

I've contacted Frank a couple of times about this. I think it would help if others did the same!

Edit: All he messaged back was a someone elses Twitter tag saying they can answer it or talk to you about it.. tagged that person and they never answered. So I'm not sure if they're working on one or not. I dont see why they wouldn't make it just as powerful as the desktop version, considering the 2080 runs fine.

 

The 2060 and 2070 versions have no VRM cooling. Probably a good reason they won’t do it right there.

 

Nope spoke too soon, laptop crashed playing the division and now wont boot at all even doing hard reboot. No display and just gives a series of loud beeps. Very disappointing for something this expensive.

 

how long have you had it? You bought it from Dell or a reseller?

I'd raise a ticket with Dell and have them fix it.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...m-owners-lounge.826831/page-573#post-10885129

RMA for refund or new machine.

 

I have been kicking around the idea of returning the laptop and getting a system with a 9900k and the dual ssds as well as the 16gb ram. I bought mine on the 13th of january and it still had the old base config. I paid $3700 for the a51m with a 9700k a 2080 gsync screen and base everything else except 1 year premium plus warranty. With the save17 promo I could get a 9900k system with 1 year for 3200 plus more extras.

After weighing the options for a week and even opening a request with approved return I took a credit for the system instead. It seems my A51m is a gem and came perfect from the factory and I just couldn't bare to take a chance on getting something lesser. I paid just over 3k with a backpack.

I want the 9900k but only because i want to scratch my upgrade itch, it is clear the 9900k is likely reasonably outside of the A51m's current capabilities. I have hope that they will release an upgraded heatsink and unlock the bios or something similar. I know it's dumb to downgrade but a delidded 8700k runs full out in this thing and provides a ton of cpu headroom for me. With added bios support I bet it'll run as well as a desktop implementation. I reccomend trying out an 8700k if you fellow owners have one laying around like I did. I bet you guys won't regret it. The heatsink can handle both the 8700k at 5ghz and a 2080 with a +150 core +450 mem oc and both stay at 70c or below on performance fans.

 

Where can I contact frank? I'm sure if enough of us pressure him they might cave. I mean it only helps them out because they'll sell more laptops overall. As far as I know these RTX laptop cards are just severely TDP limited and underclocked full desktop cards. Other alternative is flashing the card to a full desktop bios.

It would be to alienware/dells advantage too as more people will be willing to shell out for the alienware 51m. I mean essentially you have a 2060 laptop card that will beat out most 2080 maxqs and really give people a reason to ditch the thin and lights and with the base model at $2k~ its quite reasonable.

Isn't the VRM cooling on the 2080 passive anyways. Has anyone confirmed that the heatsinks between the cards are any different.

Has anyone opted not to get Gsync? I was considering forgoing Gsync so that I can use optimus to prolong battery life. I think it's interesting PCworld's review they somehow got almost 6 hrs of battery life when every other review seems to only get 2~ hrs.

 

i'm sitting on the idea of importing area-51m since dell refused to offer this amazing laptop in my country. right now it's either HIDevolution or Xotic PC both of which are from the USA. i see many of you guys here support HID, but HID pricing is very high and expensive, and offer very little discount when compared to what Xotic PC is offering or even Dell with their standard 10% discount or even more (save17 etc). What do you guys think of Xotic PC? or are there other resellers to recommend?

 

I've had it 1 day, on phone to dell now organising a return as i bought it direct from Dell

 

I know that the 2070 and 2060 seem to be cut down but the 2080 in the a51m runs pretty close to a desktop. Within 10% i believe. My 2080 hits almost 29k graphics score in firestrike and others are at 30k to 31k. It's pretty impressive. They need to address their pad fitment though. Seems they are lazy with clearances but it's been that way for a while unfortunately. My 1080 ti desktop hits 32k underwater. The fact that i come within spitting distance of my full custom loop system is nuts. It's also good cause this thing wasn't cheap.

 

The question is... Is the power delivery strong enough? Doesn't help with VRM cooling if the cards lack needed VRM's etc.