*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 Owner's Lounge

LOL indeed, unless one is a fan of AW.

I don't think anyone here has soiled themselves by buying and keeping one of those R2 solderbooks. Hopefully Dell will get the message.

It's not just about VMs: serviceability, heavier multitasking, support for a number of memory hungry pro apps, just better performance due to caching to name just a few other benefits of having SODIMMs and 32GB+ in a system.

CL19... Those people truly have no shame.

 

I remember when Alienware released their first BGA-Books early 2015. The buyers asked why there wasn't any Raid support with the new Alienware Echo models... Alienware and Dell Support without shame said... Gaming notebooks don't need any Raid features. Just lately this year some could mod the bios and add in the hided Raid functionality who was in the firmware for first gen thin and slim. +4 years after AW15R1 and 17R2 was released.

 

AW15 R2 released in late 2015 had RAID support.

 

Of course they had to for <coming> models (Remember all the other brands gaming models had Raid support on that time).

 

At least they have historically learnt from some of their mistakes, a little.

 

You think or mean Dell will let the Alienwares go back to memory slots and wifi card you can swap?

Spoiler

 

Yeah i'm already trying go sell my bgaturdbook for something sturdy Again. Won't never be tempted by a BGA machine again. Will settle for a Clevo barebone even an R17 (2013) will do. But no BGA anymore. Tired of endlessly tryingto tweak a locked down prison box without any respectable results. Only headeaches and dreams of coming close to the big guys in benching.

LGA/PGA/MXM or nothing. But no BGA ever again.

 

I cannot lug a 17inch / 4kg laptop with 2h battery life around, so hope they make a 15 inch variant of the 51M with BIOS-selectable Optimus. Failing that, they need to bring SODIMMs back to the m15 or I'm out at the next upgrade. The 15 inch version of Precision looks too gimped in the graphics department and has no AGA port.

 

One thing for sure... You won't see a 15 inch (gaming) laptop from Alienware Dell with LGA and upgradeable graphics. And soldered ram and wifi is here to stay. Re-read also my previous post #3106

 

Does anyone know which wifi cards are supported in the m15? This qualcom chip I have is pretty garbage and I'm thinking about putting the AX200 in it.

 

I don't know if they have, but I have learned from their mistakes. Lesson learned: Don't buy Dellienware turdbooks. Class dismissed.

 

Is the zephyrus s with 240 hz display + gsync any better? Or the Lenovo Y740? I feel like m15 is still better than those (R1 of course)

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Hi bro. I am not sure which of those are better products. I haven't followed any of these newer thin and light BGA models, so my advice would not be anything more than assumption or speculation on my part. As far as the screen goes, I think choosing 240MHz trumps G-Sync at any lower refresh rate. Higher refresh rate is always better than G-Sync with a lower refresh rate.

 

The zephryus s has 240hz AND gsync with option to turn on Optimus in bios (but no thunderbolt 3 and most ports including power is on left side and battery life is subpar around 3-4 hours WITH Optimus)
Lenovo Y740 has Gsync 144hz with Optimus mux switch and about same battery life as zephryus s AND has most of the ports on the back with thunderbolt 3 but Max GPU is 2070 Max q while zephyrus s gets full 2070.

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I guess it all boils down to what you need and want. Based solely upon what you posted, if I were making a choice based on that information the Zephryus would win hands down with the 240Hz, the ability to manually disable the Intel Graphics in the BIOS (or turn it back on again), and the full 2070. Those features trump anything the Lenovo has to offer among those two product. This is also on the assumption the 240Hz panel is a really good one, and not a crummy one with a high refresh rate. I don't really care for G-Sync and it's not much value (largely a gimmick) on a panel with such a high refresh rate. G-Sync is better suited for powerful machines that run games at ~100 FPS while connected to low refresh rate G-Sync displays. I have it on my 165Hz desktop monitor and I cannot see any difference with it enabled or disabled, other than benchmark scores are lower with G-Sync enabled.

Unless you have a specific need that requires TB3, I certainly would not choose the Lenovo on the basis that it does. Unless you have a specific need for it, there is no point in having it when other specs might be more important. If nothing else, decide based on how it looks if the specs are not as important. The ability to disable Optimus in the BIOS rather than using a mux switch would be valuable to me. I like being able to manually choose Intel Graphics or discrete GPU without Optimus rather than having a hybrid setup.

Having most of the ports in back is probably the only truly compelling feature to the Lenovo based on what you posted, but that's just my opinion. If I truly needed TB3, that might be important as well, but I don't need it. I am not a fan of Lenovo notebooks. I have had several for work and I'd be hesitant to spend my own money on one. (Again, just my opinion.)

Maybe check the Owner's Lounge for each of those models and look at thermal management and benchmark scores would help you decide.

 

Zephyrus G looks kind of compelling until you realise it has an inverted motherboard. A TB3 hub is rather handy, especially if you are planning to do some VR as you should.

 

Yea... Zephryus is almost everything I wanted if only it had tb3 and power in from the back.

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How much height did they really shave off by soldering the CPU and GPU? The 51M doesn't look too bulky. The m15 still has internal space to spare (although, to be fair, not much). They actually offer DGFF cards (but still BGA?) in their thin Precision line, about the same dimensions as the m15/m17.

 

I did the repasting with conductonaut. At the end I was unable to set up a foam dam as even the softest foam I had was not soft enough and the contact with the heatsink was affected by it. I used two layers of conforming silicone and another two layers of Kapton tape and put some old ultra thick EK paste that I had around as somekind of dam. I kept the Phobya Nanogrease in the GPU as the heatsink or the die is not as flat as the CPU and anyway, my RTX 2060 runs pretty cool (compared with the CPU).

I get around 12C and now all the cores are really close to each other, most of the time within 1C or 2C. Cinebench R20 is giving me around 3180 and all cores are around 71C after some runs, all of them at 40x for the full benchmark. Ambient temperature is around 26C, so I pretty happy. Let's pray to the liquid metal gods and hope it doesn't leak

It's pretty incredible that playing easy games (like MTG Arena) gives me an almost silent laptop running way below 50C. My delidded water cooled Ivy Bridge [email protected] is looking to the tube of Conductonaut with envy ... it is already below 70C under mprime maximum heat, but I think I'm going to try. The problem is that the mainboard is vertical, but the clamps of the waterblock are going to do much better at compressing the foam.

 

Well done! Fortune favours the brave. I still have my Phobya repaste in the pipeline - curious to see how it will fare against LM.

 

BTW what's the max GPU temp and delta to stock?

 

Wanted to report back that I got the 2x8GB DDR4-2666 Kingston Impact sticks installed and they work like a million bucks. Immediately booted, CPU-Z shows the XMP automatically applied and they're running 2666MHz 15-17-17-35. It made a significant difference in my gaming (heaviest thing I'm using this for now). For example, when I used to parachute into a city in PUBG on Ultra settings I'd get significant stuttering and frame drop as everything loaded when I got close to the ground (down to ~40FPS from ~90FPS); now it may drop to the 70's at most and there's no stuttering at all, very impressive. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

Wait what? You used to get issues? Currently having some odd fps drops when I played league of legends....could it be the ram?

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Who knew 20% slower Dell RAM could, you know, slow things down?

 

I don't know, I thought the stock ram @ 2666 mhz was the fastest this laptop could handle. Also it's random frame dips, I capped league with riva stats tuner to 120 fps with scanline sync and sometimes it'll get random dips or play at 110 fps constantly... Without the lock the Max fps I get average is like 134, not 144.... I have a 1070 maxq and only 30% is being utilized. Has anyone been able to reproduce this issue and solve it? If any of you guys can help me get to the bottom of this, that would be amazing. If someone has a better config than mine with 144 fps average on summoners rift with no dips PLEASE let me know so I can start looking into upgrading or just waiting for next gen CPUs....

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Frequency is only one factor, the other is CAS latency or CL.

 

What is that and how do I check for it? I REALLY want to find out why my $2000 machine can't play League of legends at 144 fps constantly.

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https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cas-latency-ram-cl-timings-glossary-definition,6011.html

Hwinfo, CPU-z? The default dell RAM is CL18 or 19, 2666 hyperx impact is CL15 - over 20% faster.

 

. I just also looked up that ddr3 ram has even lower cas of about 10 but ddr4 ram can move much more data at once....

So if I buy
Kingston Technology HyperX Impact 16GB 2666MHz DDR4 CL15 260-Pin SODIMM Laptop Memory, Kit of 2 (HX426S15IB2K2/16) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N2VUOBJ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_TNrvDbX5QQPKH

I should be 20% faster is what you are saying? Damn ram is expensive...

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It depends by the scenario. Some app will benefit from lower CAS, some you won't really notice the difference.
On synthetic benchmarks (ex. SANDRA), the HyperX impact CL15 will be around 25% faster in therms of bandwidth than the stock CL19 ram dell is using.

By any means, get your ram kit with the lower CAS possible. And regarding the price, that's a pretty good price for the kit.

Regarding your dip in FPS however i doubt that the ram is the issue. It could be a number of things (thermal/power throttling, game not well optimized, drivers, or just the GPU not able to keep up with load constantly). Do you get the same issue on single players, offline games?

 

I get the issue in a few games yes. Happens on overwatch too. I don't get thermal throttling on the CPU or the gpu as I already "repasted" with carbonaut, undervolted. CPU usually stay around 75C - 80 C on league with GPU staying around 69C. Im also thinking of replacing some thermal pads too to lower the temps on the vrms since we don't have temp sensors on those.

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As long as there’s something contacting the VRM’s to the heatsink you should be fine. Considering the low wattage CPU, lower temps, and the undervolting, the VRM’s shouldn’t get too hot at all.

 

Can anyone here actually run league of legends at 144 fps constantly with no dips (with riva 144 fps cap) on summoners rift?. If I can get proof of at least someone running it with my config or better then I think I can determine if it's the game or my laptop. It's times like these I wish I had gsync.... But there isn't any good gaming laptops with gsync that are easy to upgrade and 5 lbs or less.... :/

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So i used DDU in safe mode to remove my intel and Nvidia drivers and then installed the Intel drivers without any issue. But cannot seem to install the Nvidia drivers, this is the error I'm getting -





I have the correct version of the driver, its for Windows 10 64bit, is the DCH driver and is for the mobile GTX 16 series(i have the 1660 Ti). Any ideas what could be the issue here? I'm on the Windows version 1809(build 17763.678)

 

Ended up just installing the Nvidia drivers from the Dell website for now till i can figure out why I cant install the latest Nvidia drivers. But my battery discharge rate is much better now, got it under 10W now whereas it was mostly in the mid to high 20s earlier, getting as high as 37-42W at times. Estimated battery life according to Windows is 10hrs at 93% which is similar to what was estimated on my XPS. It usually translated to around 6-7hrs of actual use, earlier it was estimated at 3.5-4hrs at best and actually saw about 2.5hrs of usage before going off to sleep. My biggest issue with my m15 seems to be resolved for now , it looks like the battery drain was an issue due to the Intel drivers only.

 

Did you run the installer directly after running DDU in safe mode, without restarting?

 

Is that how you're supposed to do it? This is my first gaming laptop and on my Desktops I always installed new drivers back in windows after restarting post running DDU in safe mode. I did turn off the wifi as soon as I logged on(on a desktop its much easier just plugging out the ethernet cable, as I never really bother to set up wifi) and have turned off automatic driver updates on Windows Update. Btw battery is now at 74%, been in constant use for the last 2hrs since my last post, watching a Starcraft 2 GSL tournament. Estimated time at 7hr 34min, before this driver reinstall the laptop would be under 30% now.

 

You did it right, (is like on desktop) and i do believe that etern4l question was due by the wording you've used on your post

 

That's how I did it to prevent Windows from reinstalling the old drivers somehow.

 

I'll give it a shot and see if it works that way

 

To compensate for all the horrible throttling stories, my experience with the Alienware m15 r1 after a month.

Out of the box this laptop gets too hot, but this has been my experience with all my laptops since the Core2Duo. Then, adjusting voltage levels with rmclock was mandatory, so I was expecting to need Throttlestop to keep temps under control. Also, vendor thermal paste is usually terrible, something I don't understand as, compared with all the R&D, it should be pretty cheap to just use some quality one and train the people applying it. Anyway, repasting with Phobya Nanogrease and -150mV undervolt was more than enough to have a perfectly usable laptop.

But I wanted more. I opted for liquid metal and tried Conductonaut in the CPU (kept the Phobya in the GPU), the difference is impressive. Also, I did some more fine tuning with Throttlestop, and now I'm able to get 3194 in Cinebench R20 with temps just above 80C (ambient temp around 27C). The trick is to keep the pkg power under control (<60W). The 9750 seems to undervolt really well under load (not so well when idle), my current configuration is:

Profile 1 (default on AC)
Speedshift: 64
CPU Core: -158.2mV
CPU Cache: -158.2mV
Intel GPU: -0.0605mV
iccMax: 65A

Profile 2 (performance)
Speedshift: 0
CPU Core: 0.8252V (static)
CPU Cache: -158.2mV
Intel GPU: -0.0605mV
iccMax: 140A

Profile 3: (battery)
Speedshift: 192
Disable Turbo: On
CPU Core: -158.2mV
CPU Cache: -158.2mV
Intel GPU: -0.0605mV
iccMax: 40A

Profile 3: (low battery)
Speedshift: 255
Disable Turbo: On
CPU Core: -158.2mV
CPU Cache: -158.2mV
Intel GPU: -0.0605mV
iccMax: 30A


The big change for me was Profile 2, setting the CPU Core to static voltage instead of adaptive enabled me go much lower and to run anything except maximum heat mprime under 60W with all cores at 4Ghz and 100% usage. Rendering with 3dsmax or vray, compiling, rendering with Cinema4D, even mprime non-cache-only loads, just keep all cores at 4Ghz, no throttling, and temps below 85C. Of course for normal loads and most of the games I've tried this thing stays below 70C with fans pretty quiet.

I think it will last until 144/240Hz 4K OLED are available. For my use case, this is the perfect laptop: 2 nvme + ssd gets me 8TB, 4K OLED, the Alienware Graphics Amplifier port that allows me to have an upgradable 1080 Ti + RTX 2060 both enabled at the same time (425 V-Ray GPU Score).

I've had many laptops, including Dell Latitude C800, Inspiron 8500, Precision M4300 and M4400. Lenovo Thinkpad X220 and W520, MacBook Pro Retina 2012, Alienware 13R3 and this m15r1. I still have most of them, and of all, this one and the W520 are my favorites, and the form factor of the m15 is just unbelievable.

It is just an awesome time to be alive.

 

I unpacked the laptop. Let me know if you guys are interested in any particular test for m15 r1 8750h 2060 or some comparison vs Lenovo P1.

I will do some short power consumption tests using a wall power monitor

OOB, the Cpu Package reached 102deg while installing Windows/driver updates..

 

Very impressive temps! What are the temps when you are idling and when you are doing light work as only using Office (word etc)?

 

I'm deciding on a new laptop primarily for coding on the couch and on the go without being tethered to a plug for a long period of time, and some light gaming. While the XPS 15 is really tempting I would like the rare opportunity to play games while travelling. The Alienware M15 on dell's site (not the "new" one) with a 90Wh battery seems like an interesting idea. It's more powerful and not too much thicker or heavier (based on raw numbers at least), and should last quite a while (my current laptop is 5+ years old). I can't quite get real numbers of non-gaming battery life with the 90Wh battery but I'm guessing at least 4 hours based on reviews of the 60Wh one.

How comfortable is it on your lap when not gaming? Is it loud even in non-gaming scenarios? Is there some disadvantage that I"m missing?

 

around 42C with 24C ambient temp.

Has Anybody been able to use HWINFO64 to control the fan? I have BIOS 2.1.1 and the profiles seem to be unable to fully stop the fans.I don't want to go to 1.4.1 as it seems that 2.0.1 added support for the 9750 (my CPU). The laptop is pretty quiet, but when there is no other noise, I want to actually stop the fans, even if the temp rises a bit.

 

Battery capacity is likely to be less than 90W on arrival. Nevertheless, you are looking at 6-7h battery life during light browsing after tweaking. The form factor is great for lap use coming from other Alienware laptops. The machine is cool when not gaming, and it won't get hot when gaming on battery either.

 

Technical support explicitly told me that the fan control is not fully enabled on laptop.
They want to ensure the laptop does not overheat so they crippled the custom fan profile to ensure the fans keep scaling up as temperature increases.
According to technical team, the custom profile on the m15 only allows you to tweak the 'relative offset' to the fan speed the system decides, so it is quite useless.

According to my testing, the fan speed is not affected by the 'fixed' fan speed you set *at all*

That said, if you use the Quiet profile I think the fans do stop when on idle, or at least they are very quiet.

 

What do you mean "less than 90W on arrival"? I'm assuming by tweaking you mean undervolting?

 

Most people report a few % battery drain on arrival which Dell claims is "normal".

UV, Speedshift, max power saving settings.

 

Hmm ok, I'm getting around 39-40 with stock paste and just 150mv undervolt. The fans on battery will stop when your hovering <40C with bios 2.1.1, but on power outlet it acts very different. It can stop <40C but it takes alot longer somehow.