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

What version of windows?

 

RAM problem. Are all your RAM sticks matching pairs or they are from different brands?

 

Windows 10 Education latest build I believe

What? How does that work? Everything installed except for CC and OSD (OSD says not compatible with this machine).

2x16GB G.SKILL 2133Mhz RIPJAWS So-Dimm

 

Is there a way to completely remove all Killer Lan and Wifi driver and run off intel one?

 

Sounds like a windows issue. See if you can install in compatibility mode

 

are you sure you unblocked the file before extracting it/installing it?

"Are you sure you want to run this file?" [Yes or No]

 

first uninstaller the Killer App from the Windows store apps if you have that installed then run this and reboot:

Killer Uninstaller

 

LAN/Ethernet needs the Killer Driver to work. In order to install the killer driver, it makes you download the software. You can delete the software manually.

 

Try and put back the original RAM, install the CC (which comes with OSD if I'm not mistaken). Then switch the RAM again.

My guess there is incompatibility with the "FUSION" Tab of CC which shows CPU, GPU, and RAM stats.

 

Crud. My gpu is running in the 28000's on firestrike. Curious how those will compare when the 200w update drops.

 

What you posted here is exactly why i said it is better. We are in agreement there.

The part about it also being the "same," in quotes, is that the 51m will ever only have a single GPU, and my statement was about it's current 2080... The cooling system seems robust enough that it will always keep a 2080 Notebook from throttling... even when it gets it's small impending tdp bump, and even if it gets a cracked bios (I'm thinking the 51m's internal psu cant push enough power into it's 2080, if it ever becomes unlocked somehow, to heat it up to the point of overwhelming it's cooling system... but mayyybe. Probably engineered with VRMs that can push 200w or slightly over. That's of course only speculation!)

So if the Clevo and the Dell can both keep a 2080 cool and running at full tilt, they are the "same" in that reasoning.

It's a very limited scope to maintain the truth of the statement, almost like it could be used as a Dell marketing statement... haha. Where it is "true," but only in the very basic case that they both can achieve the same thing for a specific single GPU; No throttling for a 2080.

 

Sweet! Any plans to wrap it in icy cold air!? Let's see what happens to your "maxxed out cpu+gpu" if you get a direct AC feed or similar up under her pipes. Would be good to show how heat constrained your top scores are.

***EDIT: Saw you did some with the AC on it. Any specifics on that? May need to get the units opened up and tweaked a bit, mate the evaporator coils to the 51m's heat pipes with some temporary modding.

 

Pascal and Turing perform better the colder you can keep it. The question is... Will the shared pipe between Gpu and Cpu affect the Gpu temp neagative in prolonged gaming? See... Cpu puke heat over on Gpu. Below or around 46C is the sweet spot for max Gpu temp/boost. Higher temps than that will lower the clock by 13 Mhz at each stage (5C degrees higher temp = each stage).

 

I had this long drawn out explanation, but decided against it. Since there will be no way for an A51M to prove it can even handle anything above 200W while the VC is capable of 500W...No comparison.
Side note. All these 2080's are power throttling, just so you know.
Edit: And yes, I do understand what you are getting at, but since the bar is set too low right now.... No way to find out what the A51M is capable of cooling.. Not interested in what the manufacture wants us to believe. I'm more interested in what it can really do.

 

True indeed. I thought it was 15Mhz per step, are you sure it is 13?

Would be "cool" to see some charts of the heat rise/Celsius from idle through peak during burn it testing/benchmarking for the 51m, to compare against others. Doing it with the various fan profiles would be great info to! I don't have a 51m, so cant contribute unfortunately.

 

All speculation at this point, true. Technology banter. I personally don't think Dell would be one of the manufacturers designing in much headroom in actual power delivery potential... seeing as how they (and nvidia) worked hard to sign the bios and lock everything down. Along with these minor heatsink engineering revisions recently coming to light, i bet they are targeting close to the bare minimum capacity, for all subsystems, anyway.

My last Clevo has a GTX 880m. Loved that machine! Rick solid, minus the poor synaptics drivers at the time causing random BSODs.

My next upgrade cycle is still a year away, but I'm at this point planning to visit Xotic for one again (or HID, which i didn't know about back then.) IF not, Dell is my second fav still, I buy a lot of their laptops for various users... performance ones included. Never complaints.

 

That's an error when windows is installing things in the background. The app installer can only work with one stream of source code when installing a an application thus giving you this error because off some other background installation. Best thing to do is yurn your laptop off (not restart) and back on again

 

So i was wanting to know if anyone else has tried running off of the single 330w adapter? The laptop runs terribly. It gets locked in at 300 core or so and drops frames. The stutter makes games almost totally unplayable. It's ridiculous. There is more than enough power in 1 330w adapter to power a 2080 enough to reach consistent playable frames. This is an almost criminally insane decision on Alienware's part. It's like someone sat down and said "Hey everybody will think that this is the baddest laptop around if we require two PSUs!" and then put no thought into properly implementing it. My laptop runs flawlessly with both adapters in but this kind of dumbed down software handicaps make me furious. If I pay 4k for a laptop let me use it the way I want to.

 

Have you tried downclock cpu and see if this make a difference? Let’s say you put 4.0 GHz all cores. I expect you still use 8700K. This will be more like the AW17R5 who use single 330W psu.

 

This is so stupid, I officially completely hate UWP apps. I reinstalled 10 Pro this time and same issue. But I just now got it to work doing this...

1) Install CC from the Microsoft Store (this version will give an AlienFX error)

2) Install the official downloaded one from Dell's website (it will overwrite the old installation)

Spent like 2 hours figuring this out...works fine now.

Time to restore everything else.

Windows 10 Education apperently has some weird permission errors, turns out that wasn't what was causing it.

There was no option for this since it was digitally signed by Dell

I would be extremely surprised if this was the case, luckily it wasn;t. Installed with my 32GB non oem ram.

I restarted countless times. Turns out it looks for an older install for some reason....

I haven't tested this yet, I'll give it a shot.

 

Yes i tested it thinking the same thing. It behaves the same. I don't understand why they would willfully do this. Just let the laptop draw what it can. Don't use software to handhold your customers.

 

If one buys this machine without the nvme's do you need to buy anything separately to mount your own Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMEs? Any special holder? Heatsink? Screws?

Is it even worth using heatsinks on these m2 NVMEs for 7-10C cooler?

Edit: seems like the m2 heatsink part number is 3n3w3? Still can't seem to find how much cooler it will run with this and whether the screws for the m2 are there by default or need to order them separately too....

 

Mine has screws for both slots included. No heatsinks. That's the correct part number. I'll do some testing in a bit on temps

 

The screws are there. I ordered mine with just a 1tb hard drive and no m.2s. I installed both of my 2tb drives with no heatsinks and they seem fine. The screws are there

 

The aw command center exe file wants another exe file and that's why it's failing ?

what i meant was a coldboot, not a restart (thats why i put in my comment not a restart). When restarting you're just letting windows close off some programs so it can update them, but windows itself is not completely turned off. That's why when updating windows it says you cannot turn off your pc. It would lose all the information stored in the caches and ram because of the shutdown.

So maybe if you try again from a coldboot it does succeed.

 

I don’t know the MB schematics for the dual power connectors. Could as well be a max hardware power limits if use only one connector. Have you checked what it pulls from the wall? If you have UPS or Kill-a-watt you can easily measure the max power draw. Even better if you also have a 240w psu you could test with.

 

Do you know if the Dell DGFF 2080 is using GPU Boost 4? I'm assuming its enabled. If so, then there are so many factors involved in the clock rate that it would be difficult to chart it as a standard. It would differ per die i think, binning related. Hrmmm.

Do you have more in depth info on the clock rates you've experienced on the Turings you can share?

I know from Pascal it started cutting down from peak GPU Turbo (3.0) from as low as 38c, and settles at its base turbo bin (still above its boost clock) at 68c.

 

Soooooo am I tripping or am I missing "NVMe controller" under storage controllers?

Samsung NVMe drivers won't install...



I'll be ordering that SSD heatsink...Idk why my crystaldiskmark looks like that

@Papusan

Read ~ 71C max
Write test ~ 92C max

 

During installation of AWCC INTERNET SHOULD BE ON, and it will come smoothly. Looks like AWCC 2018 year edition also UWP or DCH application.....(f*ck i don't know how to call already this bloat)...... It will download some files from web and everything will be done. Or like you sad you can go to microsoft bloatstore and install exactly from there.
Forget guys about beautiful times when there was no need web to install drivers. What we have now?? --- Intel graphics, Nvidia graphics, Realtek audio control, AWCC........this is all DCH....and nobody knows how much more will be in future.
Somebody can say: "Hey man, you are wrong, it makes our life easy, just connect internet an all your software will be up". But I prefer like it was before --- just prepare usb stick with your windows, drivers and sofware and make clean installation without internet connections. After connect, activate windows and You are happy.
But now.....................

 

92C?!!

 

Some testing...

330w + 180w plugged in:

CPU 5Ghz
GPU 1905Mhz

only 330w:

CPU 5Ghz
GPU ~900Mhz

only 180w:

CPU 5Ghz
GPU ~900Mhz

Plugging back both in instantly fixed performance (no need to restart)

Looks like they are throttling it the same regardless of power adapter. They need to fix this, 330w can handle rtx 2080 & cpu up to 8700 at least. Even 9700/9900 should be possible if the game isn't using 100% cpu usage.

 

May i know why do people want to get rid of the killer driver and etc (or I misunderstood anything)? I have zero knowledge about this.

 

Can Samsung Magician Recognize your Samsung SSD? I expect if you use RAID mode and this will probably prevent Samsung NVMe driver from working.

Yeah, as expected it run hot. Probably low or almost no airflow flooding over the SSD.
Run ATTO Disk Benchmark two times in a row. With Hwinfo64 as showed. Atto is nice ssd test and you can see the different scores shown in a chart. Thanks

This depends on how Dell's engineers have designed the power delivery for the two power connectors. Could be that the power paths for the connector have a max limits (to prevent overload on each power paths). The big question is whether each of the power inlets is dimensioned for 330 W power consumption. Maybe ask Product Specialist Umar.

 

That's a huge shame that it cripples on battery or with only one psu in. I dont want to have to cart both around all the time and would prefer it to just drain as quick as it needs with either battery or one psu. All these issues and limits are making me want to cancel my order.

 

Yeah then maybe the a51m is the wrong product for you

 

I have to agree with captn.ko this laptop is a desktop replacement not a macbook air.

 

From the past days, it was always buggy, used to cause BSODs and the whole concept is dump in my opinion. Here's why:

What it promises to do is, throttle bandwidth from other programs so that the programs which need it more like games or VOIP applications can have more allocated bandwidth. Maybe that was a worthwhile feature in the past but nowadays most people have very fast connections that it doesn't even matter. Heck, when I am running any app that's using the internet, I want it to use my full bandwidth so I can make use of what I paid my internet provider. I want 0 throttling of bandwidth in ANY app. I can be downloading a large 4GB ISO at max speed and still use Skype VOIP with no problems. Windows isn't that dumb, it has a built in QoS service anyway.

 

I had that once where I installed the Intel Chipset Drivers then immediately the Samsung NVMe driver it failed. Then the next time I formatted, I installed all my drivers and kept the NVMe driver till the end then it worked. You have to be on AHCI though it will NOT install the Samsung NVMe driver if your BIOS is set to RAID which Dell does even for non RAID setups for some reason

 

No. I don't care which product it is I don't want any of them to power throttle when I take out the charger. I want them to suck the juice if they have to, or give me a choice to change a setting not to cut the GPU in half with just a 330 watt supply.

 

So I am still looking at this issue, trying to figure out. Is this normal? I can see on MSInfo that it shows my 2nd monitor under Inter GPU. WTH?
Although it shows it properly connected to the RTX 2080 on the nvidia control panel, and under DXDiag.

Only on MSInfo it shows it like that. See screenshot.

Is this normal?

 

Wow.. nice piece of explanation. appreciate it so much. Thanks mate.

 

It's been a while since I did it, but iirc, I had to run FixUI.bat.

- https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskmark/

- https://www.tenforums.com/general-support/121916-ui-bug-microsoft-account-crystaldiskmark.html

 

So there are still issues with not being able to come out of sleep mode when on battery power... So I tried you solution, but now the computer will never go to sleep...

 

That's not very uncommon. Even my current MSI GT75 has that problem. Seems like it's an old Windows issue. Disabling Fast startup and completely deleting the hibernation file via powercfg -h off seems to solve it

 

FYI: By default, it looks like the AGA runs at only PCIe 2x speeds. You can force it to 4x speeds if the built in dGPU is completely uninstalled, but this is not a reasonable long term solution. If you have an AGA and are willing to try and troubleshoot a bit, send me a PM please!

 

If you say so. I wouldn’t know as I set my computers to never go to sleep either way.

This setting should not affect the whole sleep scheme, but if you rather have freezes, change it back.

 

That bug exists on 19H1 and later builds as well. The laptop internal displays goes to sleep when HDMI is connected. Workaround: Turn off auto sleep and monitor off to never in power options. Sleep via Power button in start menu works fine but closing the lid permanently puts the laptop in sleep mode, I was waiting for 30 mins for it to wake up and hard reset the PC for it to work.

 

I always disable fast start up, but it's not even hibernation... It's freezing at sleep.. now it seems like I have an even worse symptom with it simply rebooting now when it goes to sleep...

 

Seems like the issue just got worse...
I have an intermittent issue where it I'm running off BATTERY power the laptop will do 1 of 2 things when it goes to sleep... It either reboots, or it freezes on a black screen, and the only thing I can do to get it back is to hold power button down and hard shut down...

Can you guys help me? Just change power options to 1 minute for screen off and 2 minutes for sleep (so your not waiting too long)... Let me know please if you are not having the issue....

Sorry to post again, I'm just a little freaked out that I might have send this machine back... I'm just looking for owners help ..

 

Nevermind