*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 Owner's Lounge

It doesn't, however, I conducted a broader battery investigation and would like to share the results:

1. Installed BatteryCare (batterycare.net) and read the helpful guide
2. The main benefit of BC is that it shows me the system power draw - can use that to determine battery life and factors affecting it. it's also supposed to provide an alternative statistical battery life estimate, and remind the user of a need to recalibrate battery after 30 cycles. Battery life extending options seem useless in W10
3. I found the MSI Afterburner to be a serious culprit (power spikes up to 35W on idle) and set it up so it turns off on battery, TS lowers the power draw by a few W
4. My idle power draw on roughly 30% screen is about 10.5-10.9W - around 8h battery llife
5. YouTube video playing cranks this up to around 13W - 6-7H battery life?
6. The system is limited to 40W power draw on battery iff the power saving mode is disabled, if enabled it limits the draw to 20W so I've set the power saving mode to be always on, as I don't want something to kick in behind the scenes and potentially leave me with 2h battery life when on the go. Games are still playable on 20W, albeit some need to be put on much lower settings
7. The above numbers are after setting max battery saving power options for the power plan and in intel graphics driver settings
8. Finally, I followed the battery care instructions and "calibrated the battery": full uninterrupted charge, full uninterrupted discharge until auto-hibernate at 5%, wait 5h, charge

Lo and behold, my battery voltage is now 1.3055 mV, up from 1. 2686mV previously "at full charge". ePSA is now showing 100% charge, up from 98%. Windows still thinks I only have 82Whr charge and 8% wear, despite the increase in voltage. I don't think I will have time to further test the battery, I'm happy enough with my system's performance, and the additional battery charge gained.

Overall, the battery life numbers do look a good 1h weaker than on my AW 15R2, but to be fair this system is over 2x more powerful plus much lighter and compact so fair enough.

HTH and good luck. Hope the brightness issue is just an OLED teething problem (being an early adopter is a privilege, but could also be a bit of a curse!), would google for windows bugs as per @Vasudev 's suggestion and see if there are any applicable registry hacks to override this idiotic behaviour.

Have a nice weekend and best of luck!

 

If so then brilliant - a trivial solution exists: just adjust the brightness to desired level and it will remember the setting.

 

Apparently, Phobya Nanogrease Extreme is the king of the hill now.

 

BTW a little puzzle: when I started the laptop after battery calibration cycle, all seemed great in ePSA, however, after un-hibernating Windows I started hearing faint crackling/sizzling noise on the lower left side of the laptop. Obviously, not a great symptom, literally like something was burning inside the laptop, no smoke or smell though. I thought I overcharged the battery and it's going to blow! I quickly hibernated the laptop, and started looking for causes inside - nothing was apparent, dusted off the fans as a precaution, disconnected the battery - to no avail, the sizzling was still there. Anyone would like to hazard a guess as to what was going on?

 

Will definitely try it, thank you.

Left the computer in standby by closing the lid during the night and lost 18% battery over 8h.

Weirdly enough today the battery saving mode doesn't increase the brightness. I just don't understand what happened. It somehow decided to remember the setting. It didn't yesterday. Anyway, as long as it works!

Have a great weekend too!

 

The charge loss during sleep seems normal, that's why the default setting is to hibernate after 3h. I don't use sleep at all mainly because of the Turbo Boost bug, but also because I'm avoiding the sleep drain and in fact hibernation seems faster than sleep.

Glad you're getting there with the brightness issue.

 

Is that why the core speed seems to be stucked around 3900 MHz at idle?

 

Just some info on OLED panels in the notebook marketplace.
https://www.oled-info.com/oled-laptop

 

No, that just happens when the laptop is plugged in. The frequency is high, but that's just the clock and the cores are mostly sleeping and thus not drawing much power. Notice that power draw is still minimal, 4W for me, albeit higher than on battery whereby it also throttles the clock (around 2W).

The Turbo Boost sleep bug has more to do with power limits. When I wake up from sleep and run Cinebench 20, I no longer see the CPU operating above 45W for longer than a second during the benchmark run, and clocks fall back to 3500MHz immediately despite CPU temps being nowhere near the thermal throttling threshold of 100C.

 

Hmm, they forgot black levels and contrast as perhaps the main benefits, and mentioned an energy efficiency benefit which is an inaccurate statement unless the displayed image is mostly black. More broadly, no mention of disadvantages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED#Disadvantages

I guess time will tell how these displays perform in laptops, hopefully Samsung did a good job managing burn-in and color balance effects.

 

Yep exactly - just going to have to see over time. I do like that this time we have high number of vendors, Razer, HP, Dell, Lenovo who will all be using the SDC panels. So we "should" have a large sample set, albeit with all the variables that multiple machines, vendors and builds entails which is lots. I think the 13 was a good example run and has been good to owners so far. Even now I debate whether to leap on the 15 or go for something in the 17 size now that thin bezels have made them much smaller devices overall.

 

TBH a laptop display is probably a ternary aspect for me since I mostly use the laptop plugged in to a 43" monitor or on the go. In the latter case brightness, outdoor performance and perhaps energy efficiency are primary considerations, in both cases I'm very happy with matte IPS displays in my Alienwares - they are super comfortable, and the 144Hz in m15 is the best IPS yet. The resolution is great at 100% scaling, 4k is an overkill and a risk of scaling issues. I wouldn't want to routinely watch movies on a 15 or 17 inch display anyway and I wouldn't pay a significant premium for an OLED laptop display. My next TV would ideally be a 65" OLED though

As for the form factor, I find the m15 to be just great - an obvious improvement over my old AW15 R2. I mean this thing will fit in some hotel safety deposit boxes. At first, I was annoyed Dell discontinued AW 15, especially after reading all the moaning about heat. Now, that I have the laptop tuned up I'm super happy: it's lighter, smaller, cooler and over 2x more powerful.

 

My next TV will be OLED as well. Being able to tuck the smaller device in a hotel safe is something to consider.

 

Well investigating OLED, turns out that SSD (Samsung) uses PWM combined with analog to control its OLED displays. LG does not appear to use PWM for the larger TV displays (not positive, only it was not detected). So keep your eyes open, for any impact from this if you go OLED. It's something that will need real testing but peripheral vision will pick it up more strongly than straight on.
https://www.oled-info.com/pulse-width-modulation-pwm-oled-displays

Also remember technology evolves over time so if someone has more up to date information, feel free to share. I mention it because "most" LCD's have moved away from PWM brightness control.

 

What's the PWM frequency? Anything above 3kHz would be safe.

Speaking of safe, I've just read that the optimal brightness from eyesight health perspective is 120nits under "normal lighting conditions" (whatever that means).... The 144Hz FHD panel is 300 nits and noticeably way too bright by default. Turns out such brightness levels are actually harmful. Yet, unscrupulous/ignorant manufacturers and reviewers have engaged in and fuelled this brightness war, resulting in 400 and 500 nits panels being pushed to customers (4K OLED and IPS panels for the m15). True, such brightness can be handy outdoors, but I bet 99% of customers don't realise they are harming themselves by staring at those screens at full brightness.

Luckily, manufacturers are beginning to introduce automatic brightness control in laptops (51M might have one?).. Of course, dimming a PWM display actually enables the flicker.

 

If anyone who has a oled m15 and 13 r3 oled please post comparison pictures!!!

Oh yeah, definitely is!

 

Well. Looks like the m15 is just a bad unit. My charger is working on and off. I took it back into microcenter. Turns out they had already noticed wear on the heatsink on my “brand new” oled unit. He showed me some pics right when I showed up and said he had a feeling the paste wouldn’t solve the issue. Do some stress tests, it overheats yada yada. Then keep getting this bluescreen reinstall windows after it doesn’t budge and is stuck at 0% apparently the rep has personally dealt with 10 m15’s that ended up needing a motherboard swap, trackpad and now I’m thinking Alienware is still a bad brand. Now I know why the support didn’t send out a technician and requested I send the unit into the factory or go with a replacement. They’ve only wasted four hours of my time over the last few days. Can someone fire Frank Azor? I’m putting 50% of the blame on him. Rant over

 

Have you considered the possibility that the microcenter screwed something up and are BSing you to avoid responsibility? Was the unit bluescreening and suffering from charger issues before you had it repasted by them?

On the flip side, my m15 arrived with a faulty GPU/Mobo too, it's just that Dell replaced the mobo for me within 3 days, with no further issues which is pretty good service.

 

I considered it. I am 100% sure that they didn’t do anything. I was already having problems with the charger when talking with support yesterday. I also didn’t start getting the blue screen until the Alienware support remotely upgraded through the Alienware app. Some intel drivers and killer WiFi. How did you get them to do that. They’re saying at least 10 days for me after sending it in. They won’t send a technician out

 

OK, so let me get this straight: you ordered the laptop from Dell, played around with it a bit, obviously noted no issues other than the temps, otherwise you wouldn't have taken the unit to the Micro Center for repaste. The unit comes back and you start seeing issues, and yet you are 100% sure the micrcentre isn't at fault?

Judging by my case, if Dell supplied a faulty mobo, you would have encountered issues immediately after unboxing.

 

No, but have you read The Crucible? I’m feeling like John Proctor. Here! Let me help you get it straight. The laptop arrived 5 days past the due date. Left for Vancouver a few hours after receiving the laptop. I got back on Tuesday, didn’t start messing around with it till Wednesday. Didn’t take it into Microcenter till after I spoke with Dell support and noted the power adapter, bsod, trackpad, and temps. I didn’t list every little issue because I spent two hours on the phone with them having remote access and potentially messed it up even more. Now I have time and can vent about their bad quality control

 

I haven't, sadly. Yeah, the fact that you hadn't mentioned any issues prior to the repaste confused me. I certainly wouldn't have taken the unit to a 3rd party repair service for just a repaste with all those other problems so, I kind of agree with Dell here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachments/fff2334b-c661-4116-8fe5-7241bebf011a-png.174058/

Regardless of the other issues, the MicroCentre seem to have done a bad job with the repaste.

BTW I also had a charger issue with the faulty mobo, after opening the PC, when turning it on without the bottom covered affixed - it would say "charger type not recognized". No such problem after mobo replaced.

I agree with you that Dell indeed have fallen short of QA expectations. Faulty mobos, Area-51Ms ablaze etc. It's also true that the m15s are too hot out of the box, and it's only thanks to the amazing undervolting capacity of the i7-8750H and repasting that the systems can be fine tuned by end users to run at reasonable temps. OTOH the out of the box temps are in line with similar models from other manufacturers - for instance, rinneh is happy his Blade 15 runs at 86C "because it's such a small chasis".

One moral of the story, is to always upgrade support to premium with Dells to get the onsite service (something few other manufacturers offer), especially when ordering bleeding edge systems and whenever 10 day repair times are unacceptable. If I didn't I would probably have to return it resulting in a huge waste of time (which you unsuccessfully tried to avoid, without paying Dell for premium service).

Edit: Premium Support is actually the default for Alienware laptops and that def includes onsite service...

 

Your power draw seems very high. If you want better battery use Speedshift 180 (disable turbo boost for max battery life) Value of 180 means max clock freq will be stock clocks w/o turbo. If you want little higher boost dial the value down to 150 to boost it to 3.1GHz for all cores and single cores.
Recalibrating the battery isn't needed unless you strain the battery everyday with 100-10% power on daily basis, otherwise windows 10 takes care of recalibration and battery longevity methods.

 

I recieved my m15 aw with 2060 and OLED so I may post my numbers if anyone is interested.
Battery wear as for HWinfo is 1,4%,i have 60 w capacity.

As for undervolting in TS, I am suppose to change mV as for CPU core and CPUcache, but as for iGpu as well? What about ccMax or something like that at the bottom of TS? Thanka

 

I would be really interested to know your benchmarks and how long you can last on a full charge of the battery.

 

Just stick to inhome repair. If you’re within your return window, just exchange it. Also, as an FYI, don’t ever tell them you took it somewhere to repaste, just say you did it yourself. You’re definitely allowed to repaste yourself, but involving a 3rd party is always an easy way for them to get out of it.

You also should not need premium for onsite repair unless you’re not in the US or something?

Bottom line: it sounds like it’s brand new and your first system so just return or exchange it. If you want, you can push for some compensation or upgrade to do an exchange over a return.

 

Good point, thanks. I forgot to configure the battery profile in TC. This has brought the idle utilisation down by around 1W, idle battery life estimate is around 8:30, which is good enough.

That's what I had thought until I went through the exercise and gained 600mV of full battery charge.

 

Not clear whether onsite service is always available:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/supportservicesforhome/cp/supportservicesforhome

it says hardware repair model "varies" rather than onsite. On the other hand onsite service is mentioned in basic consumer hardware support contract in the US, Canada, UK etc.

Anyway, the point is moot because it seems the only support options for Alienware laptops are Premium or Premium Plus.

That being the case, it's weird they didn't offer him a home repair, presumably on the basis of his repaste at MicroCentre...

 

I was about to say I definitely have onsite warranty lol. The rep didn’t offer it even after I mentioned it. Microcenter did a fine job with the repaste. It dropped cpu temps by 10c the gpu is ffed. I didn’t notice the issues till I messed around with it otherwise would’ve done an exchange immediately. I was hoping the other problems would be fixed by on-site and I’d get a new adapter shipped out. Didn’t want to be without a laptop again for who knows how long

I’m sorry you’re Alienware was messed up upon arrival as well. That just reaffirms the fact the laptop is ****ty. We both got messed up “new” units. Come on. They didn’t know about the repaste until I posted on Twitter. The rep I talked with “before” the repaste offered me 2 options. Send it in to the repair center and wait at least 10 days, or return for a full refund. I don’t know why you’re mentioning the microcenter repaste repeatedly. Plus they are an authorized dell service center, so that idiot Twitter rep has no idea what he’s talking about. I got a call from a service rep apologizing for that mistake yesterday and asking if I was satisfied with how the “situation” has been handled thus far

 

I will bench it Skolar and put it here.
Guys please may you check my previous comment and advise me about udervolting?

 

Perhaps the problem is this Twitter or phone support? I'll tell you what I did. I didn't bother calling anyone. I ran Support Assist blue screen diagnostics, which crashed, so I opened a support ticket via Support Assist around 1 am on a Thursday. They responded via email first thing in the morning asking me for details of the blue screens (not really sure why since all blue screens are recorded by Support Assist) and whether I am on the latest BIOS (again, I would have thought Support Assist provides them with details like that). I sent them photos of the blue screens as well as windbg analysis of one of the dumps for good measure to clearly show it's a GPU issue, and asked if the motherboard can be replaced in a timely manner, otherwise I'm returning. They said yes, and arranged a repair - a very competent 3rd party service partner tech showed up on time on Monday and sorted it in an hour-ish including testing. BTW The laptop is marvellously simple to service, unlike say the AW17 from what I can see in the repaste threads.

I don't quite accept it's a bad laptop in the engineering sense. Yes, too hot as shipped, but not hotter than say the Blade or Aero 15 (and unlike the former it can be easily repasted), and that issue is manageable. Once overcome the laptop is great. There is something wrong with the Alienware's Chinese manufacturing / QA process though. My first Alienware arrived from China with the wrong motherboard (wrong GPU), the second one arrived from China with a faulty GPU. That's more than just bad luck.

The fact that you weren't offered onsite service is quite concerning, given that this is Alienware's significant USP (amongst the likes of Razer, Gigabyte, MSI, Asus and Acer). Actually, this was also the case with my first Alienware - they didn't want to send a tech to replace the mobo with one having the correct GPU. My only options were to return, refund, or take a cash incentive to keep the laptop. The difference is that I spoke with sales support in India on the phone, as opposed to local support people over Support Assist / email, and, of course, that was 3.5 years ago. HTH

 

Hey, have you read the official TS guide? It's quite good. You change OFFSETS for the CPU, cache (should be the same values), and the offset for Intel GPU (I've read here it's -50mV and I haven't tried taking it further down).

I haven't touched the iGPU Unslice (not sure what that is), or the System Agent (not sure either - mobo voltage?).

 

QA levels on parts and subassemblies sourced from China were always tough before the current trade troubles. Now everyone is living with the fallout. And it's not a great situation for anyone. I'm not relieving Dell of responsibility. I'm just letting you know that many industries are managing with considerably more difficulties than before. This is also impacted by Intel's stretching it's technology level to the very limits, where there used to be more parts that would at least meet a minimum level of promised performance.

 

I will rephrase the Speedshift thingy correctly. Using 180 or more disables turbo Boost even if you haven't checked Disable Turbo in TS.
i think you can fix the incorrect Turbo boost sleep bug by disabling Speedshift aka HWP or EPP in BIOS whilst Speedstep and C1E enabled in BIOS.

 

Another thing I noticed about screen brightness. When the laptop gets out of sleep or when the screen lights up after closing itself after a 5 mins idle, it will sometimes be at full brightness and I have to manually lower it down.

 

Well, they should just fix the BIOS issue. I don't want to disable SpeedShift.

 

I have no such issues. Have you opened a Dell Support ticket?

 

Use Speedshift functionality on Linux or Windows. I think Dell is aggressively increasing SST value that disables turbo.

 

That's not it. I tried setting SST to 64 and 32 after wakeup, it didn't help. Actually, it looks like it's not that TurboBoost is completely disabled. There is a brief, 1s maybe, power spike above 45W then it falls back to 45W. They may be setting Turbo Boost Time Limit to 1s or something. Changing this in TS has no effect. The default is 28s and that's the max it will normally Turbo Boost for regardless of temps.

 

Undervolting Intel GPU below -50mV results in significant power draw savings. Concretely, going to -75mV, which has been stable for a day, shaves another 1.5W off, so I'm now down to 8.2W on idle, resulting in 10h idle battery lifetime estimates (I suspect this is also underestimated, because of the apparent battery charge level reporting issue, which I also brought up with Dell support). Even now, when browsing, it's around 8.4W. Pretty cool, I will see if I can take it down further.

 

Just received the m15 with OLED, RTX 2080 and have issue with blooming /saturation (colors Red and Blue are so high they hurt my eyes) I am not able to find a way to adjust the colors. The display is showing as Generic PnP, and the Intel 630 GPU shows the panel to be 8 Bit? This panel does not seem to be as good as the Razer panel with is calibrated, touch, HDR400 and I am not sure I can keep it as is. There is little to no information on this panel which I would like to get to do a fair comparison.

 

Well i dont know where coud be colors adjust, but in hwinfo my oled is listed as panel with exact number. As for bits it says 8bits, but in alienware yt channel they commented it that oleds are 8bits so i dont know.

 

You have to use Intel's graphics settings. You might have to download the control panel from Microsoft store.

 

I had a similar issue with the 144Hz IPS panel. It was stupidly calibrated to be very cool, bright, and punchy. I used Windows Color Calibration tool (and colour and gamma calibration charts as per Google) to adjust the gamma, brightness and colour balance. It's fantastic now, operating at around 30% brightness.

 

Is your Razer Blade 15 also OLED display? Both should share the same Samsung panel.

 

Use DDU and completely remove intel 630 drivers, download the intel package from the intel website. You know you did it right if you have the intel graphics command center in your task bar. Adjust from there.

 

Could be just me but Intel's drivers fail to install on the m15 with a message advising to use manufacturer's drivers.

 

Do we already have a confirmation that the OLED panel is indeed Samsung's?
Is there any information about the PWM frequency of the backlight?

Can anyone with the OLED please post the model number or the device details from the device properties screen on Windows?

 

This is what happens if you don't use DDU and don't restart. Also make sure to disable automatic updates.

It should show up as a basic display adapter, then you can install from intel. I had the same problem when working on a buddies M15 and my 13 R3

 

Samsung (SDC) is the only maker providing OLED panels for laptop/tablets. At CES they announced they were offering 13.3, 14 and 15.6 models to be available over the course of 2019. I'm a bit surprised at being 8 bit but that might well be 8+FRC which is a pretty common approach to 10 bit, because it's cheaper. But all these panels, whether from Lenovo, HP Dell or others are all SDC displays.

And a ways back there was a discussion about only using manufacturer drivers for Nvidia chips. This article points out one of many reasons why you need to be able to get drivers directly from Nvidia. BTW if people haven't updated their Nvidia drivers, you should..
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...gh-severity-windows-gpu-display-driver-flaws/