*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 Owner's Lounge

While we are on the topic of quiet (or how quiet), does anyone have a sense of which is louder m15 or 51m?
I have two cases where this makes me curious, Office/real work and gaming. If I were taking bets I'd say gaming m15 is louder and day to day 51m may be louder.
It may be they are tied as one has more cooling but hotter chips and one has cooler chips but lesser cooling.

 

I've owned both, they're about the same in terms of loudness but the m15's fans do kick in more often. I rarely hear the fans of my Area-51m spin with normal usage like opening Word Documents, browsing the web, watching YouTube, only in gaming do they spin up.

 

Thank you

 

Anyone know if they’ll fix the fan problem with an update? Was the noise pretty much nonexistent when doing basic tasks before the update? I really hate fan noise while browsing YouTube and using word etc
Edit: I don’t even see the Oled option anymore here in the states

 

I'm really not sure what the noise fuss is all about. On balanced profile I have about 50% CPU fan on, system fan is off.


This is with about 20 tabs open in Opera and YouTube video playing. I literally have to put my ear to the chassis to check if there is any noise and even then I can barely hear it. I only get audible noise under heavy load and even then fan never seems to hit 100% even in demanding games with no material performance loss.

BTW I also fixed the upper left fan in my Tree Bee like 4x120mm fan cooling pad and retested (it was just clogged up with dust). There is actually material improvement in CB20 - temps are down about 2C compared to just raising the rear of the notebook (so about 7-8C down compared with no pad at all), and the score is about 100 points higher. Seems like it can hold the TB longer with the additional airflow, and the temps under 45W load (3.45Ghz) are about 2C lower. I was also wondering if the bottom two fans make any difference, and yes - they do contribute to the overall airflow and temps are up without them. HTH

 

Yes my fans used to behave the same until I updated to the latest BIOS!

 

I'm on the latest BIOS. To be fair, the system fan occasionally comes in at around 50% too adding a bit of extra shimmer. I haven't noticed any fan spikes during low load tasks (at least nothing anywhere near the jet engine roar of my old AW 15 R2). To be fair though, the balanced setting at least has a huge hysteresis, meaning it takes a long time to respond to load changes and this is what probably causes the concern here. It should be more responsive. After the load stops, the fans quickly drop to about 50/50 but then it takes a few minutes until it reaches the almost completely silent 50/0 mode depicted above. All in all, it's not an issue for me, but I can see how they could make improvements.

 

Are you sure you're on BIOS 1.5.2? My system fan is now always on regardless of load or any user modifiable settings.

 

100%. Again, it only turns off after the system has been close to idle for a while. Perhaps overall system temps or GPU specs come into play too? I'm running 2070 on stock paste (and -155mV CPU undervolt) with idle temps as above.What are yours?

 

My machine runs a few degrees hotter than yours but I guess that might be simply because I dont have a cooling pad under it , just a ventilated laptop stand. My system fan doesn't ever seem to shut off with this BIOS - perhaps this is a bug/feature that only affects 10 series GPU machines.

 

A pad is worth trying for sure. BTW I noticed this morning both my fans were at zero after wakeup from hibernation, albeit the CPU fan spinned up after a while of web browsing.

 

Just FYI, and hard to say what this means, but the OLED panels are only appearing on the very top end config of the m15's now. Could be that they are clearing the 8th gen cpu's to make way for the 9th gen's just announced. But do take note.

 

I got an email at 5:00am this morning telling me my m15 oled was delayed. At 9pm I’ve got another message saying it just shipped and is two days away wtf Dell. Ahh this makes sense. The 9th gen cpu’s could almost be updated in their models. I hope it actually underperforms and runs cooler

 

I am curious what the performance delta would be against the 13 R3 with OLED. Hopefully the GTX 2060 could drive games at UHD on the new OLED at the same framerate as the GTX 1060 could at QHD on the old OLED.

 

I’ll let you know what the results are! It’ll be here today or tomorrow

 

Waiting on the combination of OLED and the 9th gen, but eager to hear about impressions of the OLED screen. (drool protection recommended I suspect)

 

I thought the OLED screens will only be 4K right? Never buying a 4K screen after having had owned a Dell XPS 15 9570 with a 4K screen. As beautiful and sharp as it was with stuff that scale well. Stuff that don't scale well make using the device a nightmare.

 

That’s interesting. I’ll never use anything less than 4K after having used multiple laptops with 1080p yuck and 1440p acceptable. I’ll take the extra color gamut and higher pixel density any day. I’ve never had an issue with scaling.

 

Hi there was a new bios released yesterday 1.6.2. Has any of you already installed it?

 

Sorry if asked before, but at what specific WATT, does the 3 different RTX gpu's run at?
So the RTX 2060, RTX 2070 max-q and RTX 2080 max-q.

 

Hmm, just some 2060 fix and OLED compatibility. Haven't fixed the Turbo Boost issue yet...

BTW 4K on a 15" laptop is insane, the forums are full of user complaints. Yes, OLED is OLED but at what price? 4K looks great on my 43" monitor.

 

2070 mq and 2080 mq are 90W and ship with 240W PSU. Not sure about the 2060 but it ships with the 180W PSU, probably for a reason, and has just 6GB of VRAM which might be problematic given that I'm seeing 7GB+ utilisation in some games.

 

Hi, has anyone tried the new 1.6.2 BIOS yet? I so, does it still have the issue of not letting the fans go silent?
I'm still on 1.4.1, since I simply cannot have a laptop where I am forced to have the fans spinning, even on idle.

Thanks.

 

I was an early adopter of the past few releases - not planning to take one for the team this time, sorry!

 

Fair enough

 

The 2060 now ship from Dell with the 230W PS. If it doesn't I'd ask them to make it right.

 

I fix it for you From what I know Dell don't have 230w adapters.

 

Apparently dell dont include the Sata HDD cable for the 2.5 drive if the laptop wasn't originally shipped with a 2.5 drive?

I have just bought one from a re seller and it is only the 256gb m2 drive, i was hoping to put a 2.5 drive in for storage as it has the space with only the 60whr battery.

can someone with a 2.5 drive let me know the part number for the cable please?

appreciated.

 

Poopoosan =

 

Just got my m15 oled. 4K works with the 2060 with medium and low settings on a variety of games, but 1080p looks gorgeous as well Unfortunately the trackpad seems messed up

 

So games scale down well to 1080p?

 

Is the OLED screen glossy?

Did your m15 OLED unit came with any additional application to reduce the burn in (auto brightness control etc)?

 

They do!! This is the best looking screen I’ve ever seen on a laptop. I’ve owned a ton of laptops. I also own an lg B7, C8 55in oled tv. This thing looks pretty great side by side. The colors are phenomenal. Unfortunately it’s extremely loud
And the temps are this high just sitting in the loading screen of OW. I’m actually considering a return because of these issues. Shouldn’t be dealing with this on a $2000 laptop

 

Doesn’t really seem glossy honestly. It may have the lightest matte coating

 

I'll be weighing the fan noise heavily when I get mine. Lovely to see the screen finally. Hopefully we'll get more of that as they proliferate. 9th gen cpu's will need to get vetted as well. And has AW gone through a learning curve as well in reducing the bad ones land in customers' hands.

 

The reality is that these laptops need to be undervolted and possibly repasted. Def try the former: it's dead simple, risk free and might be enough. Start at - 125mV, mine is stable at - 155mV.

 

I have to wonder if that's just what Intel does with the 9th gen to keep heat in check is adjust the "factory" voltages having learned what every enthusiast automatically does with their machine when they get it home.

 

Right. The initial benchmark results of the i9-9750H suggest they didn't do much more than that! Of course they can play around with more parameters, hence the higher Turbo Boost clocks.

 

That's unfortunate regarding the temps. I guess we'll get a better idea if others with the OLED are having the same issue as you.

 

Guarantee every m15/m17 will thermal throttle and hit 100c out of the box. You will have to tweak undervolting cpu, gpu and possible limit boost clocks and down clock the gpu to get temps under control. Thats why i love my little AW13r3 OLED, temps stay in the 60's-mid 70's depending on the game.

 

You have to keep in mind that the "Balanced" mode on the Alienware Command Center is actually 60w when intel processors are supposed to be at 45w. That's why it's kinda hot out of the box.

 

Huh? CPU TDP on my m15 with i7-8750H is def 45W in both balanced and high performance mode, the only difference is the fan profile.

 

On mine it changes the max wattage of CPU from 45w to 60w from quiet to balanced profile. That's why I always keep it on quiet. Temps are great after a repaste and undervolt BUT I have uneven temps, like a 10C Delta so I imagine it's an uneven heatsink.

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk

 

Balance will let it turbo to 60W

 

And according to XTU to 90W for upto 28s!

 

OK, I understand the confusion now: I'm talking about standard TDP which is just 45W, however, what you are saying is that Quiet mode disables Turbo Boost which has its own power limit of 90W. If you undervolt, the power drawn at max turbo boost frequency is lower than that: around 65W for me, and around 60W for you. So basically what you were saying is that "Dell allowed Turbo Boost in the m15 balanced mode" which is obviously expected and normal - the trouble is that there is insufficient cooling to keep the temps down under Turbo Boost. Even at 65W it still climbs to 100C and throttles for me (no repaste yet, though).

 

The CPU still boosts to 3.9 GHz on all cores on quiet mode. I think the time it stays at 3.9 GHz is lower however.

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk

 

BTW What did you repaste with and what temps are you getting now?

 

I used phyoba nanogrease extreme, I also tried the graphite sheets from innovative cooling but they didn't really work well. With phyoba nanogrease I now have an avg temp of low 80s with my CPU cores pinned to 3.9 GHz EXCEPT 2 cores that reach 91 C because of uneven heatsink.very manageable with quiet mode enabled and the recent Nvidia hotfix driver helped increase performance now that the CPU isn't being taxed all the time.

Sent from my Moto Z (2) using Tapatalk

 

Yep, it still boosts and power drawn is 65W for me. Looks like quite mode is just some minor fan tweak in BIOS 1.5.2.