*OFFICIAL* Alienware X Series Owners Lounge and Discussion

Just sharing this - I ordered my X17 (4K 120hz, i9, 3080) on July 13th and been watching Dell keep slipping the ship date time and time again. It was finally supposed to ship last week. It didn't, and the site wasn't even updated. Today they emailed me saying the order has been severely delayed and will ship "sometime in mid October". Count yourself lucky if you got yours!

 

I ordered my X17 (4K, 11980HK, 3080, 1TB) on August, 25th and my projected shipping date was September, 17th. Yesterday I got an email saying shipping date has been delayed to October, 7th (estimated delivery date October, 21th). Apparently some components are in short supply. Boy, this blows...

 

I ordered my x17 (11800h, 3080, 360hz, 16gb) on the 7th of September and received a delay email this morning saying it should ship in mid october.
They also offered me 200$ CAD rebate.

So with the rebate my total price is now 2815$ + taxes. That's a very sweet deal here in canada.

 

Could be anecdotal, but seems like quite a few people who actually got hands on their machines here had called Dell threatening cancellation. Just saying

 

I have secure boot disabled.

 

Interesting. I wonder what may be causing Mint to not be able to boot back up after the initial installation? Mint installs, but once it restarts it does not boot back into Mint. (when installed with Secure Boot OFF.) Hmmm

What's your secure boot mode set to? Audit or Deployed?

Was there anything else that you changed in the bios before installing Pop?

Also are you running Windows on one SSD and Pop on another SSD?

Thanks

 

Secure boot mode is set to Deployed. I honestly didn't change anything in the bios other than disabling secure boot.

I am running Windows and Pop!_OS on separate NVME drives.

 

Thanks for confirming.

 

This was hard to find since Dell doesn't sell them as far as I could find, but this was the closest I could find in terms of part numbers anyways. So far it works the same as the original. I wanted a spare and that is why I purchased it. Total cost with shipping was $70. I ordered it on the 9th and just arrived which isn't bad since it shipped from China to Texas.
https://www.8adapter.com/

 

If anyone is interested, this is the Dock I purchased that works for Thunderbolt 4. My X17 recognized it with no issues connected through the Thunderbolt port. I attached two external drives and my Samsung TV with an HDMI to USB C cable. The cable was Thunderbolt 4 capable to include HDR. My TV maxed out at 4K 60hz which the dock recognized with no stutter or delays. The external drives although not thunderbolt 4 capable performed at the same speed as if directly connected to the laptop. The dock is entirely plug and play. The only changes I made in the device settings were the same I always do to all my USB connected devices which was turn off the sleep mode in power management.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08KRTKX9V/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

Be careful with bios updates. The dock can suddenly not work anymore. Dell sell their own so.... m15 R6, no connect to external monitors through dock

 

New bios (1.3.0):

 

Currently flashing the BIOS. Will give feedback

 

[4K] Owners: [Advanced Optimus is Here!]






Let it Rip!

Enjoy...

@etern4l @Starchies @pitha1337 @bsch3r @JinTexas...and other fellow 4K owners.

 

Good stuff gents. When the update went live it was so new that the details button didn't even load, so I went to go flash it to confirm, before I had jumped the gun on the update.

I just got done gaming some and the FPS bump is as expected. In OW with my 4K settings I was pushing around 105 FPS and now it's hard locked at 130 FPS.

In BF5 I was in the mid 70's fully maxed out on 4K, but now it's hitting in the low 90's FPS.

Warzone is pushing low 90's FPS as well at 4K... not bad.

I've had A/O on my laptop for about a month now, but it was a little wonky at times. It's nice to have an official release now with all the proper values lol...

Enjoy guys...

 

That's great stuff, still waiting for my laptop though...

Sent from my SM-F916B using Tapatalk

 

FreeSync is disabled with dedicated mode, correct?

 

Awesome! Just to confirm is this regular optimus or advanced optimus like on the x15 2k panel?

 

Amazing stuff. Will update tonight. Can you confirm that this didnt mess with the xmp option? I thought that a previous bios had turned that off.

 

It is normal Optimus. No automatic switch

XMP works as before.

Okay you will lose adaptive sync, but get a huge performance boost (G.Skill RAM, Undervolt on CPU and OC 150/400 on GPU)

 

You can of course still enable XMP in the BIOS.

 

Now this makes me look forward to my 4K x17 even more! Thank goodness they released this option!
Man I ordered mine back on July 28th and it just started production 2 weeks ago and still sitting at that stage. I think they lying!
expected delivery is now Oct 6th but something tells me that's going to change once again.

 

Anyone else get a black screen with blue lines with advanced optimus enabled. Had to disable mine to fix that.

 

Ok. Musta been the Nvidia driver because after reinstalling the Dell driver which I previously had the most current version installed yesterday from Nvidia the blue lines went away. And I knew it would only be a matter of time before Dell added Advanced optimus to us lowly 4k panel users. Patience is a virtue.

 

So now that we have this feature the correct setting is to have it disabled. Right?

 

If you want performance over battery, yes.

 

To HDR or NOT to HDR. Is it me or does HDR make everything look worse. That's on the internal display. When I have my laptop hooked up to my 4k Samsung TV which also supports UHD HDR I can't have HDR enabled because everything looks terrible. So I leave it off.

 

I ordered July 13th and they're now saying "mid-October", not even a specific date.

 

HDR turned on does make everything look washed out. I keep mine off as well. When watching movies though, that's where it shines.

Sent from my SM-N986U1 using Tapatalk

 

Looks like someone has swapped out the FHD display with a QHD screen on the X17.

(2) Alienware X17 2K 165hz screen replacement (NVidia optimums option still available!) - YouTube

Panel model is NE173QHM-NY1. Just leaving it here if anyone wants a QHD screen on their X17.

 

Just curious but are you using Auto HDR since you have Windows 11 installed? It's supposed to be an improvement over the old HDR option in Windows 10.

 

I have the option to enable or disable HDMI UHD color and HDMI+ on my Samsung TV. Surprising since it's a 2017 model. But I have both enabled. With those enabled it looks a lot better with HDR turned off in windows. I can also confirm that after the firmware update today allowing advanced optimus to be disabled HDR also makes the internal display dim. So I disabled it on the internal display also. Maybe it's something to do with Nvidia. Here is my screenshot of my Samsung TV settings.

 

Wow this is great! Seems to be not as hard to replace the panel as on other models. I have the 4K display so no need for me to swap but good to know it would be possible. G-Sync would have been nice

 

I hate to admit this because I always hated the Windows 10 start menu and have been using Stardocks Start 10 since the moment it came out. I didn't have high expectations with the new Windows 11 start menu so I went ahead and upgraded to Stardocks's new version Start 11. I like the ability to adjust the transparency to absolute zero so the icons on your taskbar look like they are floating in the wallpaper, but aside from a few little things I actually like the improvements that Microsoft made with the Windows 11 start menu. And if you don't like it being in the middle of the screen like the Mac OS you can move it over all the way to the left like before. I just wish Microsoft would make you not have to jump through hoops to add the recycle bin to the taskbar. It was doable with Win 10 but now it's twice as complicated with win 11.

 

Windows Start menu next to Start 11

 

Have asked him on youtube, G-Sync will NOT work with 2K 165hz

 

Oh come on people, what you got for the 165hz and 4k panels is called a MUX switch. Please stop calling it Advanced Optimus, that's a completely different thing!

 

Considering how AW came around eventually releasing the MUX switch for 165hz and 4K panel after the BIOS hacks proved they're already there, I've got high hopes that in time they could also release the gear 1 option for RAM.

 

The difference is that NOT having the MUX switch enabled was probably costing them some sales (especially given the poor 4k Optimus bench results), whereas NOT having Gear 1 is probably generating sales for them, as low latency memory doesn't perform in the laptop resulting in people possibly settling for the expensive high latency Dell RAM. Arguably few people are savvy enough to know what memory latency or Gear 1 are and what they are all about. It's also interesting to note that their flagship Precision workstations seem to be affected the same way. Time will tell

 

The mux switch is something that most consumers know about at this point, so Alienware has more incentive to bring out the feature or suffer the ire of its base, PR incentive. It's also great for word of mouth marketing online if they release this feature, looking at you iunlock . After the initial wave of early adopter sales(consumers who will buy it at whatever price they set just to get the device) has passed they are able to better sell these other models if they enabled the mux switch than to keep it disabled, business incentive. So from a business perspective there is a strong incentive to release this feature.

On the other hand most consumers don't have any clue about what Gear 1 means or how it affects them. I highly doubt Alienware will bother releasing a bios update to enable Gear 1, but then again I could be very wrong.

 

To be honest I thought after they released the MUX for the 165hz model only and not 4K a few month ago that I will never see MUX on 4K model. I was very suprised they have released this update. So everything is possible

 

In reality, only things that make commercial sense for Dell are possible. They are killing it on RAM sales: high-latency RAM is being pushed at premium prices. They would want to disincentivise people from buying low latency 3rd party RAM, wouldn't they?

 

I saw couple of youtube videos a month ago, showing that the Alienware X17 throttles to 30W on cpu while gaming. Has this been fixed now?

 

They literally released it hours after the bios updated. Spend too much of the video complaining about the mux switch. Then simply add a pinned comment noting this, and incorrectly note that Lenvo dont require a restart to take effect. Yea, definitely needed to restart the 7i to turn it on for me.

Come on, its not like its days or weeks after this video, but literally before you released the video.

 

Good. Teaches Dell for scr..ng around instead of including the feature at launch

 

Hard to comment without seeing the videos.

 

all valid points. I think Del as switched to capitalizing on basic gamers and not enthusiasts. I bet 90% or more of the people buying AW laptops now will never even go in to the bios much less know what gear1 or lower latency ram is. Their focus has long left enthusiasts.

 

I put this 3200mhz CL16 kit in my X17 and it works, shows up in the XMP menu in bios and applies the correct timings:

https://www.gskill.com/product/2/197/1540866230/F4-3200C16D-16GRS

Also any new owners, don't update the Realtek Audio Drivers. The speakers sound ok out of the box, but as soon as you update Realtek drivers the speakers half in max volume output and I haven't found a way to go back.

My panel also has a dead pixel around the middle, which actually bothers me (only because of my ocd), but none the less disappointed given the price of these laptops and Dell's pixel policy really only applies to bright pixels not dead ones.

 

Get the dead pixel sorted or reuurn for crying out loud.