*OFFICIAL* Alienware X Series Owners Lounge and Discussion

Unlikely to be an issue. Measuring latency is dead simple. However, attempts to run benchmarks crashing the system, like in @bsch3r 's case, is not a good sign at all.
Recall when people were trying out low CL memory with Area 51M R2, there were initial enthusiastic reports and high fives, followed by a somber conclusion a few days later: the memory was unstable. Hopefully not the case here, although the use of mobile-phone grade technology is highly suspect.

 

I feel you. The non-standard keyboard layout is terrible from touch typing standpoint. If you are going to have a tenkey-less keyboard, why not use a layout like the one on the old AW 15


The special Alien keys on the left were occasionally confusing, but at least they generally did not nothing unless programmed otherwise. The touchpad is in the centre which promotes good posture and is the only benefit of a ten key-less keyboard on a laptop.

In contrast, the full keyboard on my m15 R1 is wonderful - no gimmicks, just standard dual-function keys on top:


Although the user is slightly off-center this way.

The x17 keyboard is just another victim of the thin design. It's the worst. Touchpad on the left for no reason, cursor keys rammed into the standard layout resulting in smaller standard keys in that area, extra confusing keys on the right:

 

@ JinTexas regarding pcie 4.0 ssd slots. Did you perform some benchmarks to check if both slots are equally fast?

 

I did several times and on every test very close to each other.

 

RAID 0 performance with two 980 pros?

 

I haven't RAID'd them because when I did my clean window's install it was prior to my discovering them to be both PCIe 4.0. So I set the BIOS up for individual drives.

 

I decided to repaste my X17.

CPU: Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut
GPU: Thermalright TFX

Here are before and after results from repasting with Thermal Grizzly Condutonaut on the CPU.

Stock Paste:
Ambient temp: ~26.1C




Repasted with liquid metal:
Ambient temp: ~27.8C

 

@ werdmonkey4321 Did you check temps in real world usage?
While gaming for example.
How difficult did you find the dissasembly and repaste process?

Thank you very much, sir.

 

Gonna try and do some gaming right now to see. Also Thermalright TFX takes a week to reach peak performance so early results will be a few degrees hotter on the GPU.

 

This was my first time disassembling a laptop like this, so I took my time reading the service manual while taking it apart. Overall the whole process of disassembling, cleaning, repasting, and reassembling took around 3 hours.

I would say its more time consuming than difficult. Everything is clearly laid out and straightforward to take apart from the service manual.

In the future it probably won't take as much time. I would estimate it would only take 15-25 minutes to disassemble it the second time around. I was just deliberately very slow and careful doing it the first time around.

 

Can I ask why did not you LM'ed also the GPU? Because did you find it unnecesary?

 

Interesting, maybe in a few months I'll do it too. But now, I don't know, it's too new to tear it appart xD.

 

New AIDA update released today

 

Or rather update for the beta. The last final release was in March.

 

Mostly, because the performance difference is negligible between TFX and liquid metal on the GPU. The other reason is that the prep time would require me to wait a day. I would have to put liquid electrical tape on the capacitors and wait for it to dry. Then I have to cut out a properly sized foam barrier to surround the GPU to prevent runoff.

Also here are some additional pictures of what the disassembled laptop looks like.

https://imgur.com/a/5gc9bxx

 

Again, something is weird with how Dell route the ssd’s. The 4K speed is disgusting. The whole write speed is way of @Spartan@HIDevolution @tilleroftheearth

 

Here are my scores with the new Seagate Firecuda 530 1TB, maybe the X17 doesn´t play well with Samsung drives:

 

I expect you have one PCIe-4 drive. What with the second ssd?

Intel has only lanes for one Pcie-4 drive for Tiger/Rocket lake.

 

Yep. I cloned the drive and replaced the original Micron with the Seagate.

Here you can see how the new WD does:

 

Here are some thermals playing Call of Duty Modern Warfare for 10 minutes. Note that these are preliminary thermals as the Thermalright TFX on the GPU hasn't had time to settle in yet.

Background:

CPU: Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut
GPU: Thermalright TFX
Thermal Profile: Full Speed
Power Profile: High Performance
Ambient Temps: ~25C

 

How can you trust a review from someone who stated if you want to use PCIe 4.0 it must be in slot 1? He obviously doesn't take the time to do what I figured in the first 5 minutes. Doesn't say much about his credibility. I responded to his youtube page about his error so it remains to be seen if he responds back.

As far as Samsung drives it's because Samsung has not released drivers for then 980 pro's and relies on the Microsoft NVMe drivers. Samsung makes great SSD's but their software engineers must be on extended vacation.

 

Note: Stick with the GPU drivers from the Alienware support page. Do not download drivers from Nvidia's website. It will incur a huge performance hit if you try to switch to drivers from Nvidia's website. The Alienware drivers are heavily optimized compared to the generic drivers you download from the Nvidia website.

Liquid Metal Repaste (8/7/21)

Did some overclocking on the GPU and got these scores in Time Spy. Didn't really fine tune it much. Just eyeballed it. I can probably push the score a few hundred points higher by carefully tuning the overclock. CPU has a mild undervolt of -70mV, but otherwise turbo speeds are stock.

I will probably overclock the CPU and shunt mod the GPU in the future. For now though I'm done messing around with the laptop. Going to enjoy using it first.

GPU Core: +150Mhz
GPU Memory: +1500Mhz

Ambient temps: ~24.4C

Link: https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/64625302





Stock Thermal Paste (8/6/21)

Also just to be thorough. I also did some benching yesterday with stock thermal paste. Again, the overclocks were very crude.

GPU Core: +150Mhz
GPU Memory: +1200Mhz

Ambient temps: ~28C

Link: https://www.3dmark.com/spy/21964634

 

I'm in chat with him in YT, he told me 2nd slot gave slower speeds and he will test more tomorrow.

 

That's complete nonsense. The drivers are built by Nvidia, and just packaged by Dell. What optimisations do you think they could do? The only reason to use the older AW drivers is that they should be tested for compatibility, so there is less of a chance of some fresh NVIDIA bug causing an issue. I personally never had any issue with Nvidia drivers downloaded directly from their website.

 

For some reason there was a 10% difference in Time Spy CPU score between the two drivers. And the only thing I changed was the drivers. Every other setting was kept the same. That's why I brought it up. I could be mistaken though. I'm still a newbie when it comes to this stuff. I am still learning and will obviously have gaps in my knowledge. If you happen to know why there would be a 10% difference in Time Spy CPU score by just switching drivers from the supplied drivers vs the ones taken from the Nvidia website I would be happy to listen and learn from you.

 

It could be that the latest Nvidia driver is suffering from the same issue, but I bet if you installed the same driver version from Nvidia as comes packaged by Dell, you would see no difference. I would also double check if the observed 10% difference wasn't a freak occurence due to variance in testing (e.g. some background processes running, difference in setup, fan profile etc)

 

Thanks for the advice etern4l. I will try and download the same driver version and test again. With regards to the variance I had actually done 5 runs with each driver and the 10% difference was consistent.

 

This is more of a random follow up post with regards to overclocking the X17. This overclock is hardly stable for every day use but it passes the Time Spy benchmark each time, albeit with artifacts. I added +400 Mhz for the turbo speeds for the i7-11800H. I also used a cooling pad for these runs.

GPU Core: +200 Mhz
GPU Memory: +1800 Mhz

Link: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (notebook) video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-11800H,Alienware Alienware x17 R1 (3dmark.com)



The only thing left to improve the score is improve the timings on the ram or shunt mod it. I will leave that as a todo in the future.

 

That's a fail of TimeSpy, I wish they added functionality to detect artefacting. The test is too short - it doesn't stress the system enough to weed out unstable setups.
BTW why does it say that the graphics driver is not approved?

 

This is the Dell supplied driver from the Alienware X17 Support Page. This is another reason why I suspected that that they do a bit more then simply repackage the drivers from Nvidia. I don't really know why it shows "graphics driver is not approved". If someone else could chime in and add some context that would be greatly appreciated.

 

I guess in theory there could be some tweakable settings for them to play with. You are perfectly positioned to answer that question. Just check the driver version reported by Nvidia Control Panel, and install the same driver straight from Nvidia. For science!

 

Posting this video was not about trusting or distrusting anybody. You see him performing the benchmark live. BTW, the Firecuda 530 also uses the Windows NVME drivers and has no optimized drivers from the vendor. My post was just to demonstrate that there are SSDs performing better than your 980 pro´s on the X17, for whatever reason. My main point was just to avoid the impression that the X17 generally sucks at SSD speeds.

 

Futuremark don’t always approve drivers from OEMs. Often a minor change in the last number suffix (xxx. xx) of the drivers. But in short, none of the OEM make own drivers. Why should they and this would increase cost. They put rather works into validation with a few drivers for tech support.

 

Right. How would that even work? Nvidia drivers are proprietary. Nvidia would be insane to give Dell access to the source code and let them make arbitrary changes, even if only applicable to Dell HW.

 

Can someone who has replaced stock RAM with a good latency ones post some gaming results compared with cl22 stock ram?

 

Unfortunately, I can't find driver version 462.46, which is the Dell driver version.

Advanced Driver Search | NVIDIA

 

I wasn't able to rerun it with the exact driver version but I did get to rerun the yolo benchmark again. Scores are comparable with the stock drivers now. I don't know what happened that caused the 10% disparity before.

Drivers from Nvidia website:

Driver version: 471.41

Link: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (notebook) video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-11800H,Alienware Alienware x17 R1 (3dmark.com)





Drivers from Dell Support Page

Driver version: 462.42

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (notebook) video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-11800H,Alienware Alienware x17 R1 (3dmark.com)

 

I finally broke 14000 in Time Spy graphics with stock power limits.

Link: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 (notebook) video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-11800H,Alienware Alienware x17 R1 (3dmark.com)

 

Hi,
I got mine on Friday ... my problem: the fans are running at 100%, even in Balace or Silient mode ... any idea?

 

Check your BIOS, there is an option for full speed fans, also check that you don't missclick and activate performance mode with FN+F1.

 

Thanks ...

Two things: How do I get into the BIOS and if I use FN+F1 nothing happens ... also with other keys ...

 

F2 during boot.
Check if you have AWCC installed, if not, install it.
Also check if you have all drivers up to date.

 

OK, if I change within the Software the profile the fans are even louder ... but if I go back to silence, two fans are at 100% and two are at 70% ...

 

It seems, there is a huge problem. Even in Windows balance mode, both CPU fans running at 100%, both GPU fans with 68% ... temp almost 50 degree ...

If I start the Alienware software, it is only getting worse ... if I change the profile, fans are stopping for a second then they spin up louder ...

And also, FN & F-Keys is not working ...

Great ... a 5k € Notebook ...

 

Try doing a clean reinstall of Windows and reinstall all drivers from scratch.

 

Sanity restored!

If Performance mode is not set in BIOS or otherwise as mentioned above, do ePSA tests. Hold F12 after reset/power on then select Diagnostics. I've seen this where there is an issue with a fan speed sensor.

 

Any idea why the "FN" Key does not work?

Thanks for your help ...

 

De

 

How are you able to get such high cpu scores with the 11800h????

 

For the i7-11800H you can overclock it by +4 bins (i.e. you can increase the turbo ratios by +400 Mhz each).