*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 Owner's Lounge

Pair that revelation with the Walmart hate and I’m no longer a fan. Oh well. Glad to know folks like you and OoD are around.

 

What is everyone's power max short and long set to default and what are they now?

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U cant raise the pl on this Notebook. Lowering makes no sense in my eyes

 

So it's a case you can't have too much? So I should leave it at stock? When I had XTU installed it always wanted to set it at 60 long but I am using throttlestop and someone asked on reddit. Things seem a little faster and better described on this thread.

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The PL in this Laptop will always be at it’s stock values even if u raise it at for example 300. Only thing u could do is lowering it at for example 20 (under default).
The CPU will only draw about 20W which makes no sense for me. It can only be accomplished by lowering its clocks and this is something nobody (?) wants i guess.

 

Yeah i know, that's what i was stating. I Thought the 4.2 was all core, but some people have had their system clock 4.1/4.2 all core. I came across a chinese forum on taboa with some people having strange numbers within their lenovo. I don't know the exact number anymore, but there where people that could boost 4.2 all core. they probably had an unlocked UEFI firmware, or it was an engineering sample.

 

Still curious about the possibility of having a graphite pad instead of the usual grease or LM. Anyone have any input on this matter? Only thing I am concerned of is the clamping pressure. Maybe m15 can't apply enough pressure for it to work?

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Watch this WHOLE video

 

Undoubtedly, yes since getting a 'review' copy always will impair the reviewer's ability to give a fair assessment.

Been following your videos and you are doing a great job! Keep it up!

Hopefully, you will continue to remain impartial as I have lost hope that any successful reviewer will continue to be impartial once they become a success.. :|

 

Thank you! Very good and thoroughly explained video!

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I’ll quit before I sell out. I’ve had two review units so far and those weren’t “sellout” reviews.

I try to offer solutions to issues when I can for the shortcomings of a particular laptop.

Sort of justifies my honesty from a manufacturers standpoint.

 

I mean it really shouldn't, if a reviewer is giving good reviews on a unit he/she got for free, they're not a reviewer, they're a commercial.

 

Oh good i'm safe then as commercials are not 20 minutes long!

 

Looks like Alienware put Dave2d's review on the m15 website.

 

I just wonder how dave2Ds unit had such good thermals unless it has liquid metal or something

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Honestly I just think that it's not just alienware that has issues with the i7-8750H, been looking around and similar "thin and light" laptops with this specific cpu has had issues with cooling. I personally think that these benchmarks are scaring a majority of the people who will never stress their m15 to the point where it hits these high temps.

 

It was seen in his video that his CPU hit 100c at one point and throttled when he was benchmarking it. I think he means temperatures while he was just gaming/under normal use. He also points out that his fans were semi loud/ his thermal profile was probably set on balanced and max performance when plugged in.



You can also see he has the copper heatsink on his SSDs meaning that alienware sent him a review unit with either 512 ssd x2 or 1tb x2

 

That’s just it his review showed thermals hitting 100°C.

Pause it at 4:46

OwnOrDisown called him out too.

 

I still think the m15 is the best 1070 Max q all around (zephyrus s beats it but loses battery, thunderbolt port and build quality not as good). I just think some small hardware mods and some repasting will bring out the best out of this machine.

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Yeah I see it now, thanks for pointing it out.

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It didn't. You can see from the video that the CPU hits 100 C during the benchmark. He just glossed over that and said it had good thermals. Feels like he either was being optimistic or really didn't look at the thermals that closely. I think his unit ran probably the same as many other units.

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Yes yes, I saw lol. I really love the m15, don't plan on sending it back but I definitely want to work on those thermals some more.

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Placed an order for the M15 with the following specs using the recent 15% coupon: 1080 144hz, 1070, 256Gb SSD, 90Whr Battery.

I compared it to the current 144hz 1060/1070 laptops on market and wanted a thin laptop with good build quality and decent battery life and this was one of the cheapest options that ticks all my requirements.

 

Alienwares are now the cheapest option, this is a new world haha

 

Yeah, sorry if I sounded rude. I just don't love how he was hyping up the machine like the thermals were amazing out of the box or something. He wasn't talking about under volting or tweaking to get good thermals, so I assume he's talking about out of the box experience, which is disappointing. I'm still happy with mine, I just want to make sure people are aware of the caveats, etc.

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No no, you were not rude at all. I'm glad to see this forum has a lot of friendly enthusiasts that at the end of the day want to share their knowledge and love for hardware. So far everyone here has been very helpful in trying to provide information to those trying to get the most out of their machine or answer questions to those who are on the fence.

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Well, dell's tech came to replace my heatsink. They just sent the heatsink, honestly I was expecting fans too but whatever. The guy took the laptop apart, took the fans out of the heatsink and then thought it would be prudent to put the fans back in and then try and shove the heatsink back on top of them instead of putting them into the heatsink first. When it didn't fit, he just started bending the heatsink to "make it fit" and snapped the heatsink in half. He noted that the part "must have come broken from dell" and left.

Honestly, I think I'm probably going to go for a return at this point. I miss prosupport. They'd usually just send me parts and leave me alone.

 

Yeah, this is what I thought as well when I saw the video, seeing how even the 13R3 stayed cooler than the M15 stock but he mentioned that the 13R3 got very hot. Also the review on the Alienware subreddit by Mogrules said the thermals were ok even though he wasn't allowed to post temps. This is very disingenuous IMHO and for no laptop 100c should be seen as an acceptable temp, especially when it's throttling.

Western Gents United also posted a video recently where he said the temps were good. He hit 100C in benchmarks, even hit 100C in BF:V with an undervolt yet still said that the performance was good. I can't believe how much people have been lied to for this launch when it comes to thermal performance. I always thought Western Gents United had a bias when it came to his reviews, but this takes it to a whole new level.

Meanwhile, my 13R3 doesn't breach 80C with an undervolt and repaste in even the thoughest of benchmarks or games and usually sits between 65~75C when gaming. The M15 was supposed to improve on that but it fails miserably.

 

8750H die layout puts all of the cores right next to each other. This is so the ring bus which connects between the cores can have the lowest possible latency. What is not clear is how much that communication link distance actually matters and translates to real world cpu latencies and overall performance.

Intel could help here by padding the cores out away from each other on the die, for example by having thick corridors of the igpu 'slices' in between them. At the moment about 1/3 of the total die are is occupied by the igpu, which is off to the side. Making that change would then make the 8750H a bit easier to cool...

Well I say that, but now we have the next 10nm or 7nm node shrinks coming up. Which will exacerbate this same heat issue further still. Perhaps taking such actions would end up cancelling it out, at best. Leaving us still with the same '8750h' engineering problem to contend with. Which is by no means impossible to handle, just rather difficult and challenging.

This reason is also why I am now looking towards Amd Ryzen 3000 in the hopes that they might release a more competitive product next year. That is also faster in mobile products. Because if the laptop's sustained effective clock speed is only around 3.5 ghz to due excessive throttling on the intel side. Then that is a much lower bar / easier hurdle for them to clear. Unfortunately AMD just never seem to consider their mobile SKUs / mobile lineup as such a high priority. So I hope that changes also.

 

Yah, I don't trust Techs because their just contracted technicians and they had probably never touched a m15 in their life.
If only they let you do it yourself like you requested...

 

The problem is that the techs are contracted by Unisys (in Europe) and mostly deal with business customers with XPS or Latitude line laptops. The tech that was at my place yesterday said that I was his 6th Alienware this year. He was nice and patient and listened to my instructions. The previous tech I had was new to the whole repair technician world and had never worked on computers before that. He managed to **** up literally every step of the disassembly and had no idea what he was doing. In the process managed to damage my middle frame and palmrest. An easy battery swap turned into a crazy nightmare, he didn't even know how to remove the bottom lid.

I also had another tech who has a 15R4 himself and did a liquid metal repaste + thermal pad swap and knew every detail about these laptops. You never really know which type of tech you're gonna get.

 

It is really a hit or miss with these dell techs...

 

I don't know if we can say that they failed in that regard, they put a much hotter CPU (higher clock speed and more cores) in there at the same time. If we had an m15 chassis with a quad-core in it, I bet it would run a lot cooler. I think in the next few months when an i5 version comes out, we can do a better comparison to the 13r3. I'm not current on the 15r4, but if that has the same/similar CPU as the m15, I'd be curious to see how it ran as a more comparable benchmark. I've heard that this CPU has run hot in many systems, so I'm not convinced that the new cooling system is necessarily worse than the current one.

 

So sorry, man. Stuff like that makes me cringe.

Someone on reddit suggested taking the laptop apart before the tech gets there so they can't break it coming apart (though it sounds like your tech messed up in the reassembly). I wonder if they see you've gotten that far, that they trust you to put it back together. If I have to have a tech come out to work on mine, I will probably take that approach (assuming I can't convince them to just send the part to me).

 

How many watts does the i7 pull? 50W iirc right? The 7700HQ pulls a max of 45W so that's only a 5W difference. With an improved cooling design this 5W shouldn't be such an issue.

 

Sometimes the i7 6 core pulls like 60 W of power...

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It does feel like a lot of people on here who probably don't design laptops for a living think that Alienware have deliberately designed a self cooking Turkey of a laptop!

Is there an example of an i8750h/1070-MQ laptop that runs cool and quiet with all cores at 3.9GHz? And if so, what does it weigh and what does it cost?

Engineering, like everything in life is all about compromise and trying to dissipate over 100W in a 25mm thick laptop is never going to be cheap or easy!

 

Zephyrus s does at the expense of some build quality, battery life, lack of thunderbolt 3 and in my opinion very bad software.

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I don't think you need to be a laptop engineer to know that 100C out of the box is not good. Dell deserves getting some flak over that, IMO.

 

And for me the keyboard position and battery killing G-sync were compromises I didn't fancy...

I wonder whether using the IGPU for Optimus on the m15 is adding a few watts to the CPU due at all loads?

 

It is indeed hot, but as Dell come from the land of class action lawsuits do you really think they haven't done their accelerated aging testing and concluded it'll survive?

I'm running my m15 with an external keyboard and screen so I'm not too fussed about the chassis being hot to touch, but the fans screaming up to max at random at light load is tedious to say the least. That can be fixed by selecting cool mode though.

 

There is no gsync on the zephyrus s, I agree the keyboard position is odd but that is an example of a laptop that doesn't overheat out of the box. The one you are thinking of is the original zephyrus or the zephyrus m (the m has a traditional keyboard and can switch gsync on or off but battery life is still 2.5 hours).

Alienware m15 doesn't throttle like the razerblade 15 and has better surface temps despite the overheating issues. Alienware m15 also had way better keyboard vs razerblade 15 in my opinion and it just feels god damn tanky.

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Or them finally fixing the Alienware command center to allow us to make custom fans curves that actually have an effect on the fans.

Have you ever gotten the dynamic alienfx lighting to work? Can't get it to work with league of legends or grip for example.

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Sure, someone at some level of the company saw the thermal results and decided it was good enough. It's possible that decision was made based on engineering units with hand-applied thermal paste and properly balanced heatsink, etc. that runs much cooler than production units. Either way, they deserve flak for setting too low a bar or reviewing something that is too far from the end product that consumers get. Whatever the process, the end result was not good.

 

Ah sorry - my bad! I wonder whether the Zephyrus' trick base is patented or just too tedious for others to implement?

 

I'd thought about doing something similar, but I wasn't expecting him today, figured it be Thursday at best so I didn't bring my precision screwdriver kit to work. Between that and him showing up with no notice it would have been hard to pull it apart myself, but it's an option for sure. Alienware support all but threatened me though saying that if the tech came and it was partially disassembled and/or I didn't let the tech do the work the tech would say I refused repair and leave and they would not attempt another repair for that part (not even sure that's legal but it is what it is).

Not all bad news though, I scored a pretty good deal (I think) on a dell outlet refurbished 7730. Not even in the ballpark of the m15 in terms of slimness, but the specs are good (i9 and quadro p4200 (1070 non max-q)) and it's large enough to handle it's own heat. My M6800 and 7710 never gave me any real trouble other than just not being great performers for gaming but this one should be better in that regard too. I'll miss the m15, and if they ever get the thermals sorted it'll be a great little machine, and the m17 when it comes out will be amazing if it can handle itself under load. Really, thermal performance of alienware across the board is just bad at this point, unacceptable I'd say even and it really is a black mark on what are otherwise, IMO, great laptops.

 

Don't even get me started. The Aorus X7 DT (has an overclockable CPU and 1080) had little paper holder clips you glue on the underside of the laptop that can be opened to raise the back and reduced temps by 15C! That's like a 50 cent solution and it works WONDERS, why wouldn't Alienware do this or at least add some extending feet.

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That seems a bit cynical to me - the cost of returns and reputational damage from threads like this one would focus the minds of the bean counters IMO!

The factory is also going to get beaten up for bad QA - big companies spend a fortune to get process repeatable and defects down...

 

Ah - I see. Tough to anticipate that. With them threatening you does not give me confidence. Appreciate you sharing your experience here. Glad to hear you found something that works for you.

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Your experience may be different. I've had a troubled history with Alienware. Had an M15x back in the day, tech came to replace a defective CPU fan, dropped the laptop on my table, damaging both. Was exchanged for an M17x R2 (still miss that beast sometimes) that I loved, but developed screen issues no one could sort out and so I eventually got a refund after about a year of meeting every service tech dell had to offer. Got a Sager at that point, then later my M6800. Precisions have been good to me, but I thought I'd give Alienware one more shot. Tempted me with that sleek form factor and build quality I suppose.