*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 Owner's Lounge

He was being sarcastic, had you even the slightest bit of maturity to check his guide to help fix your problem, you would have noticed

 

No it is new actually. $950 off dell coupon plus additional $50 off using member pricing through my work. Upgraded to 1TB M.2 and 90w battery. Was thinkin of upgrading to 240hz but I'm fine with the 144hz honestly to save some money

 

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Slickdeals. Also the same coupon code was offered through Rakuten so I got the cash back as well. How is gaming on a 15.6" laptop? Is it that much worse than a 17"?

 

Yeah its always good to buy around a major holiday. That's how I got such a good deal on mine. Christmas sale + some cashback website + bought 2k$ of Dell gift cards for like 1840$ + Dell rewards. Used the leftover rewards + gift cards to buy a Xbox One S on Dell (got more Dell rewards + free controller). Sold the Xbox. Nearly paid half price for my Alienware meanwhile lots of people say they are expensive lol

 

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Yeah I've heard it's very close because they lower the Max-Q's clock speeds. Still, I got a good deal on a brand new M15 that will outperform the 1660ti for about the same price other's have paid for the 1660ti or 2060. I also had some upgrades that normally would put the M15 2070 Max-Q closer to $2K.

 

Has Throttlestop stopped working for anyone else after a recent W10 update? Complains about some DLL. Adding a windows defender exception on the TS folder doesn't help.
Edit: resolved itself after reboot.

 

Less then a year in (a few months ago) my m15 R1 developed an issue whereby it would start running the fans at 100% while automatically starting ePSA diagnostics at boot/wakeup from hibernation, and then reporting a fan failure. Shutting down the laptop and starting again resolves the issue. Dell support suggested things like uninstalling Support Assist, which made no difference. In the end they suggested I reinstall Windows lol, but refused to send me a replacement fan and also disabled harware scan and the ability to submit support tickets from Support Assist, so now if the system develops another issue it will go undetected and unreported. Pretty poor show.
Edit: just noticed that there is a new BIOS with a fix for my issue:

- Fixed the issue where the system incorrectly reports a fan error during the Enhanced Pre-Boot System Assessment (ePSA) after the system is rebooted.
Will give it a go.

Now the laptop developed a faint but annoying hissing/buzzing sound when charging.

Anyone else experienced similar issues?

Overall, coupled with the fact that my laptop arrived with a DOA GPU, it seems safe to say that quality took a hit in this model compared to my old AW15 R2 which is still going strong.

 

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Checking the connectors is a good idea, but remember that each and every time the issue would get resolved by a simple shutdown and restart. Support claimed it's a software issue and now Dell released a BIOS update for this specifically.

Now I'm more worried about the hissing during charging which Google suggests could be a hardware problem.

 

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I did check the connectors. Come to think of it, the problem would mostly happen on wakeup from hibernation, which is probably what the BIOS fix is for. I will know in a few days.

 

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I use it because of two issues with sleep: turbo boost stops working after wakeup, and it causes battery drain. Hibernation does cause some extra SSD wear, but killing is def an overstatement.

Anyway, main issue now: hissing during charging.

 

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My device is absolutely silent. No coil/ choke whining or hissing.

 

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I don't think the hissing was there before. I don't have to listen closely, it's disturbing. Could be a failing choke I guess. It stops when I unplug so it is somehow power related.

I should mention the noise is audible in just plain desktop, even with fans running at 50% (although to a lesser extent of course).

I have been monitoring my SSD, haven't noticed any concerning utilisation so far - will check again later.

Yeah, SSD utilisation is of no concern in my case after 10 months of hibernation use (9TBW). Perhaps if the laptop had 128 GB of RAM in routine use... I'd start worrying around that mark.

 

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Not saying it's not normal to hear some coil whine, but mine makes none. And I hate coil whine, I even bought a bunch of ferrite beads to put on electronics around the house to avoid any kind of electric noise, because it annoys me. Some coil whine is likely normal, but this person is hearing it very noticeably during use (with fans running) which isn't normal

 

Support advised it's harmless coil whine. Quite annoying though, now that they fixed the fan issue making the laptop otherwise quiet when relatively idle.

 

Coil whine is a byproduct of power passing through electronic components and making them vibrating and resonating. It is harmless, but annoying. If i recall correctly from several years back (amd Athlon XP 1700+ years back ), there was someone suggesting to apply transparent paint / nails polish over the culprit component to reduce the amount o whine they produce. Never tried myself to be honest.

 

Worth a shot, I've read about the merits of drowning the culprit in K5Pro. I guess I'm not clear on how to identify the exact culprit, or how to prevent K5Pro from dislocating and going flying all over the laptop's internals.

 

As a user of K5 Pro (on cpu and gpu as a barrier to prevent eventual LM spillage & on the VRM instead of thermal pads) i can safely tell you that is not going to fly around over the laptop internals. That thing is pretty sticky and thick. On the other hand i don't know how would it work to prevent a component from vibrating/resonating vs transparent paint/nail polish that will actually dry out and become a sort of hard coating. But hey, i guess is worth a try if you manage to find the whining component, that's it. On a side note, either i am hearing impaired or my m15 is really silent/got lucky with component behaving and not whining over being energized (j/k)

 

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So the hope might be that one can apply a generous amount of K5 Pro, perhaps - 3-5mm over suspect components and that would dampen the noise? According to you, there would be no risk of those blobs falling or dripping off etc. The question though would be what to apply this to? There are a few large suspect chips to the right of RAM. And above battery connector, plus maybe a few others under the heatsink that aren't covered with pads.

Another question: if the approach fails, how easy is it to remove K5 Pro?

 

It think this was said here a few dozen times already: ca. - 160mV dynamic undervolt alone brings max short power down to around 60W (at 3.9GHz), the static voltage trick reduces temp further 5-10C, albeit that doesn't translate to any significant improvement to CB20 scores.

 

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Lol

 

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Put the blame where it should be... On the engineers who created the heatsink. Not on the die size. Other ODM/OEMs have put same or equal power limits and can avoid 100C and the dreaded throttling.

From the chart below you can see there is a major differences between how good the cooling works. Better cooling = More performance. Just ask bro @Mr. Fox who have this Cpu in his thin ELUKTRONICS MECH-15 Jokebook.

 

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What does your thermal paste look like after you mount the heatsink? If you're hitting 100C in 2 seconds with a CPU load, you're not making contact. Could be the heatsink, could be your pasting job. Have you looked at the heatsinks to see if they are plane? I had a few XPS 9550's that had pre-bent heatpipes and I had to carefully bend them back (watch those heatpipes, they are soft).

 

I did some benchmarks with the m15 after a repaste and few tweaks/ mods. The perfomance is not bad, no problems so far.



Fire Strike: https://www.3dmark.com/fs/21896157

Time Spy: https://www.3dmark.com/spy/10737138

Sky Diver: https://www.3dmark.com/sd/5827134



FarCry 5 Ingame-benchmark:


Sorry for the german text. I forgot to set the benchmark/ game in english before testing. No matter, the numbers should be visible.

 

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The heatsink is not great for sure. One of the screws doesnt go all the way in. Yet, even with a non-LM paste and a mandatory in this model undervolt (an unfortunate requirement, particularly painful for non-technical users, I agree), my 8750h m15 scored top 5 in brother @Papusan 's CB 20 ranking of 9750h laptops, with max CPU temp of 95C IIRC.

 

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Obviously the fact that one of the screws doesn't go all the way in means that:
1. There is an undesirable asymetry in sink pressure
2. The sink pressure is suboptimal at the particular pressure point

No wonder many people including myself complain about uneven core temps (only really observable in CB20 though).

Sure, the laptop will hit 100C fairly quickly on stock settings. Nobody here apart from you cares, because they know how to use Throttlestop. I would assume you do not, in which case I would recommend investing time in learning how to use TS - reasonably straightforward.

 

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Don't we all.. C'est la vie!

 

Lower voltage means lower temps and theoretically longer lifespan of device/components. Why you wouldn't want to spend 15 minutes undervolting to some obviously safe voltages, but you will spend 30+min commenting the same posts over and over is beyond me lol.

 

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No, because they want it to be 110% stable no matter what scenario. Yes, I said 110%. That means they gave practically every single CPU over 100.0mV Extra. Mine is stable at -145.0, others are stable at -160.0. If you put yours to -50.0mV, there is not a single doubt that I or anyone here would have about it being stable, but would surely still give better temps and performance.

 

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Dell-Alienware have made a lot of suboptimal design decisions lately (and it keeps getting worse, e.g. soldered RAM) - just ask @Papusan, therefore you can't argue that just because Dell didn't do something, it doesn't make sense.

 

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Well, Apple throttles CPUs in their laptops into a coma under load, but I guess people who buy those things don't care about real performance that much.

 

So you are saying you've done all the tests to undervolt your system and ensure its stable, complain about temps nonstop and then say you don't want to undervolt? Not only that, but it is not stable at -250.0mV. Idk why I bothered to comment, just by your recent comments imo you lost all benefit of doubt of your repasting, undervolting and fixing of laptop lol