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

Yes, that's my thoughts too. I buy a 2080 now. See here, here and here.

I use a similar one ( https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07D49GLQ6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
For a 330 + 240 (the 240 is cooler than the 180 and has the same dimensions as the 330 - you can tie them together without problems).

 

Question asked

 

Mines doesn't run at 100 degrees, mine has minimal unobtrusive light bleed, agreed, mine has not burned. I think people need to remember that not every system has these issues and that no matter the manufacturer every system maker could potentially have issues. I am just saying that I am happy with my purchase and what it provides me performance wise personally.

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

Awesome! This would be great to Know.

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

 

As far as I know your warranty and your experience is with the retailer you have bought from, whereas with Dell it is directly with Dell. Why Asus and MSI follow this system I do not know, but Dell is sweeping the floor with them.

 

I’m considering buying an Area 51m for my wife—does anyone know the real-world benefit of going with the 2TB RAID 0 NVMes vs. the 2TB SSD + 1TB SSHD option? Assuming the other components are 9900/2080/32GB.

 

In my opinion, the best NVMe drives are so fast right now, I don't see much benefit of going RAID 0.

I would get one NVMe SSD 1TB for Windows/ Apps, 2TB in bay 2 for Data. If they force you to take the SSHD then just pull it out and put it into an enclosure as an external drive and call it a day.

If money is no object: 2TB SSD + 2TB SSD + 4TB SATA SSD

 

That's what I've done (check my sig). I didn't RAID because of the increased performance which by the way only applies to Sequential Reads/Writes which I'm not bothered with, all I care about is the fastest Random 4K Read/Write but I went with such a setup as I like having the most storage with the least amount of partitions so combining the two 2TB NVMe SSDs = 4TB and the 4TB 2.5 inch 860 EVO is the best for my workflow.

 

Sounds perfect! I agree that simplicity is good- one OS + app drive and one data drive is ideal When the time is right I will spring for a 860 EVO 4TB as well. Not sure I'll see a big difference in speed while video editing compared to the 7,200rpm SSHD (please tell me its not 5,400?) but I think it would be nice to not have any more spinning hard drives in the machine!

 

Anyone know if (one of each) 1mm, 1.5mm, and 2mm 80x40 thermal pads will be enough to repad one machine?

 

So... lulz... is the official stance "Dell doesn't recommend the 200w vbios they promised because it *might* be a reason for dying machines but one of the lead engineers with a stronger social media presence says it's fine and probably nbd so go for it if you want because they'll keep the option linked on their support site for some indefinite amount of time"...?

I assume you can then roll back to 200w if you "upgrade" to 180w?

What about the thermal limit of 74 or 78 on 1.5.4(?) that was supposedly killing gpu performance?

 

Apparently that's how it's going to be from now on. But they will give us the option to use the older BIOS'. Pretty crappy...

 

The 3 fixes needs to take place in 1 month time. Not the life of the product. I harp to dell on this all the time. Such a bs policy.

 

In the changelog of the BIOS v1.2.0 it is stated " Added Intel Hyper Thread Control option to BIOS settings", does this mean it is possible to turn off hyperthreading on this laptop ?

 

It should be possible yes.

 

Good to know, thanks

 

Area 51m just doesn't stand a chance in performance compared to some true beasts which can really deliver 200w RTX performance without any risk like Clevo-p870 modded or Asus G703GX.
The thing is, Dell forced the 6-phase power supply gpu to offer this kind of heavy load while else's using 8-phase or even more.
Cost saving causes the potential limit of this dgff 2080 falling behind others

 

200W Vbios is *Optional* and only for power users. The official stance seems clear enough to me. And from practical perspective, there is no real difference between the 180W and 200W unless one goes on the benching route. And if a noob is benching with stock tim and thermal pad job and then fries his machine then that's on him. The laptop was not intended to sustain prolonged benching sessions (any laptop for that matter) but to play games. If you want to bench, make it ready for benching first. I wonder when will manufacturers start stating this in their warranty statements so that a whole lot of hardware issues could be avoided in the first place.
I know I will get heat for this comment, but that's quite normal here.

 

Yeah, without any adjustment, 180W delivers nearly the same performance especially when the temp coming to the throttling wall which happens pretty often.
The only thing is the feeling with the number 200 is much better than 180. That's some obsessive compulsive complex lol.

 

I am probably going to download every BIOS and vBIOS just for safekeeping. Might try 180W under gaming usage to see if it can still manage my settings without high temps.

 

Does anyone has numbers to firgure out in game performance difference between 180 and 200 ? But I guess it should not be huge based on what you said

 

Does anyone have the original 190w vBIOS?

 

Latest answers from Umar :




About 1.5.4 Bios

 

Thanks for the update. Not what I wanted to hear, but I guess there is still a slim chance we could get a TDP update.

 

I'll try to insist with this later if you remind me

not sure it'll change anything but better try to ask if there's a small opportunity

 

I'm also thinking of trying out the 180W vBIOS specially because my ambient temps are very high, 35C. Let us know if you see any performance difference in games while using it. Right now, with 200W vBIOS, I'm running my GPU at .9V with a max clock speed of 1890Mhz. If I can get the same speed with better temps with a 180W vBIOS, I don't see the reason why I shouldn't do it.

Also, if someone can share the 190W vbios here, I would really appreciate it. Thanks

Sent from a Galaxy S9+

 

I believe someone here has already upload the 190w vbios using backup, but you have to flash it via nvflash and as i tested it couldn't find the correct pcie adapter, could be a problem of gsync utilization .

EDIT:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1V7doxPsJ53c-VC_pq2sIFTBZ4ugl7W9A

 

I can actually see two different 200W vBIOS on Dell's site:

https://www.dell.com/support/home/u...wt64a&productcode=alienware-17-area51m-laptop (It says updated 14 March 2019)

https://www.dell.com/support/home/u...wt64a&productcode=alienware-17-area51m-laptop (It says updated 30 Apr 2019)


Anyone wants to be a guinea pig?

 

By the way dude- so you have 8TB of SSD on the laptop which is awesome- but do you have a 8TB+ external HDD for backing up data? Interested in how you do things

Right now I have an external 4TB Lacie drive for many years, but when I run out of space due to shooting more video, I think I might go for a small Synology/ Qnap NAS instead of simply a bigger Lacie external...

Hmmmm, they are slightly different filesizes...

 

You can call anytime on Razer Phone Support works day from I think 14 to 17 Germany time, and repair place is here in Germany. You can’t use Dutch but english and german support is there, not bad from my test RMA experience, sent Friday and came next Friday in 2017, support was also nice guy didn’t like what I heard. And if you bought it from EU officiall reseller you’ll get 2 years warranty coverage with no cost (apparently due costumer protection law, dunno about other brands, maybe because it’s Razer laptops lul), so far I know Amazon and Razer Store, but some retailers like mediamarkt and notebook.de still claiming a year though.

 

A thought just occured to me.... Bios 1.5.4 throttled the gpu with the old 200w vbios.... Seems like nobody really had the chance to try 1.5.4 AND the new 180w vbios together because they were a few days spread apart....

What if the combination of 1.5.4 AND 180w vbios together fixes everything?? I don't think there is a single person here that has tried this?... Anybody?

 

Someone tried the 180w bios with 1.5.4 and still had the 75C throttle set point (if I recall correctly). I do find it odd that a couple of people report they do not have the throttle set point issue with 1.5.4, but the vast majority of users do.

 

Oh that is nice to know, thanks for the info! bought it from Amazon UK.

 

I had confirmation from Dell Advanced resolution team that my A51 has now been shipped. Hopefully, this should mark the start of everyone else's being shipped. Estimate of 17th June to get to me.

 

I'm still running the 190W stock vBIOS, but I would like to backup it and be able to flash it back just in case I want to perform some tests with other ROMS. Anyone know a tool for doing so that actually work? If we can create an image with the same format Dell uses maybe we could flash it by injecting it into their 180w installer replacing one image with the other.

It's the same ROM image with different installer.

 

@ssj92

Guys can someone verify this for me, I could've sworn that with the factory image I had before, there was an audio button to select a profile always whethere I had the Alienware headset plugged in or not. Now on a clean install of Windows 10 Build 1903 with the latest AWCC, there is no audio button at the bottom row. It only appears if I connect my Alienware Headphones. If I unplug the headphones, the Audio button goes away.

 

I have the button , always, sometimes it evaporates , reboot if it doesn’t come back go about ur day next reboot it will be back from shopping

 

Looking for some assistance.

Looks like my Ethernet port/card has gone bad. A few days ago my internet started getting spotty, thought it was just my service, but now my laptop will only connect via WiFi. I’ve tried 3 different cables and none of them work, I’ve also tried different ports on the router. I finally tried my old laptop and the Ethernet works great, so definitely something going wrong on my 51m. I’ve uninstalled/reinstalled the drivers with no luck. Does it sound like this is a hardware issue, or does anyone else have any suggestions? Thanks!

 

What day did you order, and what configuration build did you do? I ordered on 5/25 and I’m trying to gauge my build/ship.

 

my R5 has it, regarardless of there is a headphone plugged in or not. Looks like a new bug or just a broken AWCC installation. A reinstall can work sometimes

 

Hey all, I just turned on my laptop and the keyboard is not working anymore... No lights, doesn't register and key presses. I've tried a restore point to when it was working and still no luck. Has anyone had this problem?

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

 

Sorry, am a little late to the party, what does bios 1.5.4 exactly change to have "improved thermal stability"?

 

It craps out your graphics card to 500Mhz if the temps go above 77C. LOL.

That's AW's idea of "improved thermal stability"...

And in case you've missed it, there's a 180W vBIOS too which degrades your system performance even further.

This is my recommendation to everyone here based on my own experiences with this system:

Best BIOS: 1.3.2

Best vBIOS 190W, I had better thermals with them, 200W sounds awesome but what's the point of having it if you're undervolting to .900V anyways and limiting the max power draw of the GPU to ~160W. Just my 2 cents. I'm still running the 200W though, but will downgrade when I find the 190W vBIOS. Right now I can only find the .rom versions and I don't want to use nvflash on this machine. I've had some issues with it before.

Best CPU clocks( for 9700k) : 4.8@ all cores at -125mV using Throttlestop.



Sent from a Galaxy S9+

 

Are you able to type when booting into BIOS or when booting from a live USB drive?

 

Do you have a USB-C or 3.0 adapter you can try just to make sure it isn't software related?

Someone had the exact same issue and I think they resolved it. Software related if I remember. Try the forum search feature.

 

The problem is that the 190W vbios installer was never released. I would like to have it too because I also think that's the sweet spot. Maybe if we put some pressure on Dell they will release it.

 

Okay I tried searching to no avail. I'll try again

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

 

Found it:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/new-alienware-51m-dead-keyboard-anyone-else.828174/

 

Is anyone else waiting for area51m shipping by hidevolution? I ask that it has been more than 2 months that I sent back my burned and until the moment I did not receive a new one, hidevolution does not want to give me back my money Can they do this, not give my money back?

 

Thanks so much man! Seems he must have gotten his keyboard replaced. *cry*

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

 

I think I’ve managed to fix it. I ended up disabling my WiFi so it was forced to use Ethernet. At that point I was able to troubleshoot it with “repair” and it fixed whatever the issue was. When clicking “repair” with the WiFi enabled it kept getting an error.