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

Computer has a smell (clay like) coming from it?

 

Does it smell like that wonderful "pre-heating" the BBQ smell?

Make sure not to run the 200w firmware, VRM's been popping - and / or undervolt too before benchmarking or game bingeing.

Wet clay smell from some pastes, haven't smelt it "burning" myself - I usually taste the flaming selenium smell top notes predominately.

 

Like fresh thermal paste? or like melting plastic?

 

Did any of you guys run the EPSA test? I am getting this error although the laptop itself seems to be running OK. What's concerning for me is that this error seems to be video card related (For those who haven't done it yet, shut down your computer, press and hold the Fn key and then press the alien head start button to power it up and let go of the Fn key after a few seconds. It should go into the diagnostics mode where you can run a test and see error codes if any).


In my case, I am reaching 87 degrees on the graphics card with Kryonaut while playing Sniper Elite 4 with ultra settings. I am not sure if that's OK because I have heard people telling me that their 2080 run hot as well. Does any of you guys have such hot 2080s on your Area 51m?

 

I’ve been on the 200w firmware , should I go back to the 190w vbios? Anyone have the installation file for it ?


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The max I have seen mine is 84C with balanced fans and 79C with performance. This is with a high OC. 87C is the throttle point so make sure it isn’t trying to get hotter than 87C but just throttling the core like hell


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Any specific games i should try?

 

Mine is running at 2100 MHz with Memory running at 7000 MHz. The FPS in heaven benchmark is lurking between 280-340 which is more than good for me and games + everything else is super! But I am really not comfortable with this high temperature. If nothing works out and Dell finally tells me that it's "in specs" then I will have to go liquid metal on this monster.

 

Little bit. Yeah. My temps were never over 67c.

 

Some components don't have temperature probe / monitoring, the VRM's could be a lot hotter - especially if they don't get heatsink treatment / paste coverage.

 

The kind you like to play for hours at a time?

Turn on FPS / temp monitoring overlay - watch CPU usage / GPU usage, find the games you like that exercise one or the other or both, play.

 

Well... my second Area 51m just smoked and died. This one lasted about 2.5 days.

Death by Division 2 apparently. No OC, stock parts, fans set to performance.

These things are defective, I’m gonna return it and wait a couple months. Luckily I’ll just barely be making my return window.

 

There is a higher setting for fans which is "Full speed" and I've noticed that they rev much higher than they do in "Performance" mode. I discovered that after quite a lot of poking around in the AWCC and this alone helped me in dropping the temps by 3-5 degrees. Although, still touching 87 degrees on the GPU which is insane. Did you delid your CPU? What about thermal paste? I would think 10 times before pushing such a powerful system with stock thermal job on it.

 

Nah... totally stock. Wasn’t pushing it though, stock settings, no over clocking. Just playing some Division 2 for a couple hours.

 

I have a strong feeling that bad thermals ended your machine. I can tell from experience as my 9900K was idling in mid 60s and continuously touching 100 degrees with minimal work load when it came and now after delid and liquid metal with a copper IHS, it's idling in mid 40s to early 50s with an absolute max temp in mid 80s under multiple benchmark loads running in parallel (with an undervolt! imagine that) at 5.2 GHz boost. This thing is an oven when stock. Also anyone out there trying to push their luck with stock gaming on this machine, I sincerely wish you good luck.

 

Yah, I think you’re correct. That said, if a $4,000+ machine is unsafe to even run normally as it comes.... it needs to go back. It’s one thing if I was OC it to the max and stressing it as hard as I could like some of you guys do. I get having to specially mod it at that point.

 

Thermal mods are a must on this machine, especially if you are getting 9900K with 2080 because both of these run VERY hot. And fan settings are another story as there is a "full speed" mode which runs the fans faster than "performance" mode which I'm not sure everyone knows. I found it out accidentally and I'm glad that I did. Dell needs to do a better job with this, although I am happy that the other day, Frank Azor gave go-ahead to his team on Twitter to put third party OC and Fan control support in the roadmap. That will immensely help things going forward, considering the fact that AWCC doesn't allow you to undervolt the CPU to it's full potential. In my case it only allowed 100mV undervolt, which was not good enough and I managed to undervolt it to -115mV stable with XTU that actually reduced the temps by another 6-8 degrees.

 

Man all of these machines dying is a bit unsettling. More so because Dellienware is keeping quiet about it.

I get the numbers are low in ratio compared to the amount sold, but still.. they should at least write a tweet letting everyone know there is a problem and they're working on solving it, instead of being hush hush about it. A little bit of honesty goes a LONG way.

I personally dont think it has to do with thermals. I imagine it would take much more stress than gaming for a couple of hours to just kill a machine.

But then again, 99% or so of the dead machines were the 2080.. so are they using different parts on the 2080 DGFF vs the 2070? Or is the BIOS really just feeding the card too much voltage with the 200W BIOS? It seems the BIOS feeding the card too much voltage is most likely the cause IMO.

In any case, I hope they come out and say they messed up and they're working on fixing it, cause its apparent the issue hasn't been fixed yet.

 

It is the thermals. After looking at it inside out, I can guarantee it. The thermal pad application on the back of DGFF in case of 2080 is critical and in older models, I believe that is not there. Even in new ones, the thermal pad job on that side is sloppy (it was in my case) and the thermals are not helped by that piece of coal 9900K as both the heat sinks share at least 1 common heat pipe. Top that up with 200W VBios and over clock, and you've got the perfect recipe for disaster. I think this laptop is insane and Dell has done a good job putting it together, but they haven't done a good job in dealing with it in terms of out of the box software and factory thermal support as they should have, considering it's nature and hot hardware inside. They're still pretty much dealing with it as they would with a traditional laptop with mobile components inside. A little bit of polish and it will become much more reliable, considering the fact that majority buying this kind of machines are only into buying and using and not everyone is willing to dig in and do the upgrades before gaming. This is something that the sooner Dell learns, the better.

 

Is not from bios update, if was bios in few days was 2000+ burned...

And performance mode don t ramp the fans 100% try full speed..will be louder but cooler

 

If I were Dell, I would make it mandatory to ship these units *ONLY* with delidded i9 CPUs with copper IHS option at the time of purchase. Dell could partner with any third party performance cpu reseller and that would go a long way in terms of taming the 9900K down and reducing the overall heat footprint of this machine considerably. That would leave a LOT more thermal head room for the GPU. The fans can get FAST on this machine, but for some reason, they are not allowed to rev up that high in AWCC. I feel that even "Full speed" mode is not pushing the fans to their max RPM which is a shame. Factory fan curves for these hot components are way too lazy and fans rev up too late, if you are using "Balanced" mode. On top of that, there is no third party fan control support because the fans do *NOT* appear in Bios which means no third party program can see them, let alone control them. These tiny tid bits add up to a big picture that is not pretty. And, if one of you guys are a buyer of this machine, you *NEED* to take these things into consideration before pulling the trigger and paying out those big bucks. You want to game like a big boy, you are getting a big boy machine, you take care of it like big boy machines demand. Don't treat this as a mobile component max-q ultra book. And for the love of God, everyone should use a laptop cooler! I can't stress this enough, although i'm sure i'll get a lot of heat for saying this since many enthusiasts don't really believe in laptop coolers, but I do.

 

Maybe thermals played a part, but I don't believe that's the main issue.

Thermals combined with overvoltage seems more likely. Someone has already pointed out that the voltage was much higher than it should be, if I could find the post I would link it, but it was quite a few pages back.

Its just not very common for a GPU to blow up, even in a laptop, because it overheated, especially in such a short amount of time.

When they get too hot they throttle. No one mentioned their games stuttering or a huge loss in fps (a sign of thermal throttling) before blowing; it was pretty much instantaneous. Which is another reason I dont believe it was due strictly to thermals.

 

At a crusty 87 degrees celcius on the GPU, my games were still working buttery smooth on this machine. Although I gave it a rest before continuing and turned up the room Air conditioner to cool down the ambient temps in order to improve temps, I am still not comfortable with 2080 temps on my unit. I will be going liquid metal on this thing if I don't get a replacement and that will definitely tame this bad boy to become a cool little graphics card again. But one VERY important factor in my case is that I am running a *delidded* 9900K with liquid metal and copper IHS which means that my GPU is not getting a lot of heat from the CPU side. This is important.

 

Cpu can have 70° but vrm 100+..i see very high voltage on cpu's 1.3v..1.4v on stock..to much!!!

 

Yeah I didnt realize the 2080s were getting that hot. Certainly not a comfortable temp. Haven't really been paying much attention to others temps, what are other people getting? I'd hope the normal temps for the 2080 dgff are a lot lower than yours.

Kind of glad I went with the 2070, even though I've had my issues, the 2080 is certainly having a lot more.

My 2070 never (rarely) goes above 54C, not even when running multiple firestrike tests in a row with +163/+800. I hope by the time I'm ready to get the 2080, this issue will have been sorted out.

I've already repasted with Kryonaut and I couldn't be happier with my temps but i'm going to be changing the pads out on my machine soon though, just to be proactive.

 

I agree with that. A nice and generous undervolt on the 9900K is a must if one wants to use this laptop without thermal issues.

 

I like that approach. A little preventative maintenance goes a long way and peace of mind is worth the few hours and a few bucks well spent. I'm personally considering a "FOAM MOD" on my 2080 with a block of foam around the dye before putting liquid metal on it. I have done that successfully in the past and it greatly improved temps on my gtx 1080 last year.

 

Yeah after inspecting the stock pads, I found out they're quite stiff and don't seem to conform well.

I'd prefer something that has a little more squishyness to it and has a higher temp rating.

I think for my machine I'll go with Fujipoly Extreme (11w/mk ones) and probably use Arctic pads on my wife's machine.

Do you happen to know if the arctic pads are squishy?

 

They are OK, but I like the 17w/mk Fujipoly ones. They are squishy enough and from my tests, do not degrade even after 2-3 years of intense use. I have a heavy load mobile workstation using these from the last 3 years and the temperatures are still excellent. Couple of months back, I opened it to do a repaste (although there was nothing wrong with temps, it was just my OCD kicking in ) I found that the pads were still "good" and I had to replace only one of them as it tore off from the middle while I was pulling the heat sink up.

 

Ahh okay, glad to hear they last a while.

I would like to go with the higher 17w/mk ones but the price increase is just too much for me to justify spending on, especially since I have the 2070. In any case, I think the 11w/mk ones will be quite an upgrade over the stock pads and the price is quite a bit lower than the 17w/mk.

Now when I upgrade to the 2080, I'll certainly be more comfortable dropping $100+ for the best pads.

 

Yeah for 2070 that'd be an overkill. 11w/mk should be good in your case.

 

Anyone knows what these errors are related to?

 

Atleast there was proper airflow for outgoing smoke!!
I hope Dell CS Europe doesn't say your system is not covered in Europe because you bought it from USA. For now say, you got it from Europe if you have successfully transferred warranty from USA to Europe.

 

Once you transfer ownership, this is not an issue.

 

I think PCIe link training algorithm may have failed which in turn says PCIe PnP has failed or is failing. Judging from the Devid it seems like Nvidia or Dell id for GPU. 8086 devid is Intel so I think your PCIe SSDs are working fine but RTX GPU is failing or has failed.

 

Doesn't seem like the case because I am gaming flawlessly with this error in place and getting no errors in Windows what so ever. The 2080 is running like a champ, apart from the fact that it gets hot under load. Could this be related to the integrated Intel graphics somehow? Because I have never used it and it cannot be used afaik in a Gsync environment.

 

In your case (If you're in France) chances of getting another Orange/Lemon is more than 70%. Dell is slowly and silently stocking and distributing new revised mobo, so if you're in the States or in North America for any developer conference you might get a new revised mobo. The chances of getting it above 80%.

 

Is there a way to identify new motherboards from old ones?

 

I don t think!!!

 

There should be something that differentiates new boards from old ones. As far as I know, the only thing that Dell was "upgrading" was the DGFF card itself.

 

I don't know for sure. Maybe they will etch rev2.0b or something like that and the rev number might change according to different countries.

 

You can run it because Windows does the masking and corrections via SW. Do you see WHEA errors in HWINFO sensors window?

 

I didn't think of HBM at all because most OEMs never bother with AMD GPUs on laptops and everyone like nvidia because of huge market share.

 

No errors what so ever.

 

Usually EPSA is dead right on temps and sensor failings. I don't know if Dell borked it in latest version because you can't rollback BIOS these days w/o bricking the device.

 

But is this code really for sensor failure? Or is it a benign error to begin with? With no errors and performance loss, I am still concerned for long term. Dell support is still stacking up all the unnecessary information from me in this regard that is useless in relation to the case but I guess that's something everyone has to deal with when approaching the manufacturer.

 

Hey guys. I plan to dual boot this machine- the stock 512 SSD for work only and the ADATA XPG 512 for my personal stuff.

That means I gotta buy a new copy of Windows 10 Pro innit?

 

Nope. As long as it's the same machine, you can use the same key over that you currently have.

 

Its not a sensor failure but has to do with PCIe interconnects on the mobo that's been affected. Most likely it'll result in CPU failure or even GPU failure or entire mobo will die out soon.
@Prema Any idea why PCIe training algorithm are returning a warning/critical flag?

 

mine was 9700k/2080 straight from dell