*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 Owner's Lounge

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Are you saying that's you in the video, or what's the actual point?

Apple laptops throttle very aggrersively. Yeah you won't hit 100C that much or maybe at all, but at the expense of performance. You can throttle your Alienware down yourself if that's what makes you happy.

 

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-250mV does sound amazing, however, your CB20 results are similar to what I'm getting with - 160mV on both CPU and cache. Again, the alternative is to use static voltage on the CPU. Amazingly this brings temps down quite a bit while maintaining performance,. Unfortunately I failed to find a completely stable static undervolt, so just sticking with dynamic. I never run CPU loads anywhere near CB20 levels so never hit 100C and can run 3.9GHz on all cores constantly in realistic scenarios. This is with Phobya Nanogrease Extreme paste. There is always the LM option too.

Right, I'm going to jump off here. Sorry you are so unhappy - hopefully you will find some of all this advice here useful, and manage to tune the machine to a manageable/useful state, if not flog/return it and move on I guess. Good luck!

 

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I see. But you have another option https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/selling/start-selling-ebay?id=4081

 

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I think you're being a little dramatic. You're not happy, we get that. We suggest some things and you don't want to do them. Fine, sell your laptop or "trash" it if you have to. I can tell you that your laptop isn't stable at -250mv, it's not applying that undervolt. On most CPUs if the CPU and cache aren't the same, it's not applying it, also Intel CPUs will ignore out of reason undervolts.

 

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Don't expect the grass is much greener on the other side of the fence http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-g-owners-lounge.831618/page-24#post-10992141

 

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What models. And from what year?

 

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If you added 50% more cores with higher clocks and you'll get same overheating mess in there as well. Shrink the chassis thickness down to todays standard and it will be even worse. With the modern narrow bezels the chassis will also be smaller. With less chassis volume you will also get less space for needed cooling. Just look at the Applebooks. Put in todays max power capacity big footprint batteries (has to be bigger footprint due todays shrinked chassis thickness) in thinner and thinner models and you can see some compromises has to be done. See... Often small and wimpy MB with no space for other than soldered ram slots, no 2.5 sata slot, not even space for enough heatsink screws etc.

 

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Seems you get it wrong. It's up to the notebook manufacturers now put the power limits for Cpu (allowed by Intel). With 4th gen BGA 8(Haswell) and the locked down Kaby lake (7700hq) the manufacurers followed Intels guidelines from A to Å.

And to be able to manage to cool more power from todays processors we have got more and more use of Unified heatsink. In games the Cpu won't run 100% the whole time. See.... The manufacturers put more work into cooling of the graphics and will let the Cpu run at 100C... It's called gaming laptop! The money is put in the graphics cooling.

Put in todays max power capacity big footprint batteries (has to be bigger footprint due todays shrinked chassis thickness) in thinner and thinner models and you can see some compromises has to be done. Hence the need for creating small and wimpy MB with no space for other than 2 soldered ram slots (if not soldered still only space for 2 ram slots), no more 2.5 sata slots, not even space for enough screws for the heatsink (see the dreaded TRIPOD) etc.

 

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About time you buy for you needs. You bought a pure gamingbook.


You can select the weakest graphics but with 2080 cooling capacity https://www.hidevolution.com/evoc-h...00k-i7-9700k-i9-9900k-rtx-2060-2070-2080.html

 

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And I never did. I said you bought a gaming laptop,

Se post above.

You have already got more powerful Cpu Just compare todays results with your old Mobile Haswell or the newer 7700Hq.

And if they offered even more performance.... You think the cooling have been better?

Still not the die size who is main culprit that your Cpu boil in that chassis.

You have ACC and Del's OC app. You can't undervolt with that app?

One thing for sure. I don't excuse for Dell. Read my posts the last years

You have to do your due dilligence. I always do. I even posted a couple of options for you. If you don't accept 100C then you should have returned it back in first place. Dell offer 30 days return window for refund

 

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Why you think newer tech will run colder? Here with 10nm chips from Intel. And don't expect otherwise will come from AMD. The manufacturers will just design the chassis slimmer and continue with same weak cooling. Nothing will really change I'ts up to the people do their due Dilligence. So Good luck with your next purchase


Microsoft Surface Pro 7 Core i7 performance can throttle by almost 30 percent over time

As we've mentioned before in the past, the performance of a processor can vary greatly between two different laptops even if both are equipped with the same CPU. It's easy to forget that larger laptops are generally faster than thinner laptops despite having similar internal specifications.

 

I'm already off but one more thing lol

" because cpu hits 100C even with random download and web browsing"

This is clearly indicative of a serious cooling system fault in that particular laptop (heatsink, paste, fan). The CPU in my m15 stays in 40-60C range during light use (including dozens of Opera tabs). Dell should be pushed to solve this if the user can't. If the issue was reported to Dell within the return period, they should offer a refund even if that period now passed.

The only way I'm aware of to push the CPU to 95-100C range is to run CB20 and then the temp only slowly climbs up. Performance fan mode does help to further slow this down if needed, so that's what I'd use for any extended heavy CPU loads and benchmarking. Sorry if this is kind of stating the obvious, we are getting desperate here

BTW just to give Dell a little credit where it's due, the spurious ePSA fan alerts after wakeup appear to have been fixed in the latest BIOS.

 

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Sounds about right. Mine can support 55-60W (will check in the evening), with a 5 fan laptop cooler I should say. To be fair, the CPU is specced to run at 45W only for extended periods. 90W is for short turbo boost only, where it's expected to hit the thermal limits.

 

Myself and other people have gotten the GPU (2070 and 2080) down to 65C under load. Yes, a cooler is beneficial here, as is GPU undervolting, but feel free to keep trying to do things the hard way.

 

You didn't post pictures of your repaste or of your heatsink. Is it flat? is there something you can do to fix the die contact issue? You don't want to do anything software with throttle stop (which is pretty much a requirement in EVERY laptop now), so perhaps you'd be willing to look at something hardware wise. I think you're dreaming if you think that buying an asus or whatever off the shelf will run amazing out of the box without similar mods. TDP doesn't mean anything today, running 6-8 cores at 4-5GHz is NOT possible at 45w.

 

Everyone here agrees with that, nobody is disagreeing with you on this. But the amount of time you've spent debating what you don't want to do, you could have just undervolted (the correct way, if you choose a number like - 250.mV, it's unstable or your CPU is under clocking itself).

Everyone here wants a unlocked BIOS, but unless you can convince Dell or find a way to unlock it it won't happen because it's just not a thing on most laptops.

Dell has even given us a fan control setting in AWCC, but disabled fan control on these laptops because they don't want anyone to damage their laptop with high Temps and blame Dell. Imagine what people could do with a unlocked BIOS.

If you just spend 15min with a quick undervolt, or about a hour with a larger 100% stable undervolt, you'll have stability and reasonable temps

 

Why did you assume I was testing "simple gameplay" (whatever that means)? I was talking about TimeSpy, which - being a DX12 benchmark - is more taxing on the GPU than FireStrike. Haven't tried Heaven though, will have a play and call you. What's your number?

 

You can use Speedshift to modify that behaviour independently of voltage.

 

That just proved you don't understand how this works at all.
1. The frequency only determines max power draw, but it doesn't in itself cause it. I can have my 8750H running at 3.9GHz on all cores with around 2W power draw.
2. Low CPU clock would not cause instability, the opposite might be the case. The higher the clock frequency the higher the voltage required.

 

You probably set your Speed Shift EPP to '0'. Click on the number and set it to about 64 or 128. I use 128, because I am not needing my CPU to boost to 3.9Ghz in the blink of an eye. Most people use 64 or 128, 64 of course makes it boost to higher speeds quicker than 128. But 0 just locks it to the max clock possible. I can assure you with -145.0mV, I have gone away from my laptop for hours and have never once came back to a BSOD. I even use 'sleep' mode daily, it has no problem waking up with Throttlestop running as it did when it went to sleep.

However, I did have a problem when I set Throttlestop to run at boot once, which was a pain for 5 minutes to delete the settings to stop TS from running at startup but then I just gave it some more voltage and now it is 100% stable. Its trial and error, but if you don't have it run at startup and if you don't Give it extra voltage, there is 0 risk, only reward.

 

67C completely stable running Extreme preset at 20C ambient...

 

Changing gears here cause honestly it sounds like a lost cause...sucks you're not getting what you expected but it may be time for u to either get a new laptop or figure out how to fix it on ur own. At the very least you shouldn't continually go back and forth and back and forth on this forum....

Changing gears, my M15 R1 2070 Max-Q finally shipped!! Expecting it Monday I can't freakin wait. Thank you everyone whose contributed to this thread! Real question tho, should I disinfect it since it was produced in China??

 

Heh, I saw your earlier "plug your laptop in" post, which now seems deleted, thankfully, and re-ran the benchmark on the lower quality settings you used to achieve the 4000 score (tessellation disabled) - just in case someone was wondering what the performance delta between 1660 TI and 2070MQ looks like... wasn't actually even trying to eke out max performance here, with a ton of tabs open and doing stuff at the same time..



Anyway, good luck again and hope this has been informative.

Cool, have fun with the new machine!

Fair point about the back and forth. to my defence, even the admin couldn't resist trying to help here, which as you said is probably a lost cause, unfortunately.

Apparently the virus can only survive a couple hours on surfaces, so no worries at all.

 

Some people say it could potentially survive like 9 days on in-animate objects (saw this one yesterday on some news article from Fox or something), some people say it can't handle the shipping temperatures going from china to the US, some say even if a package was overnighted from China it wouldn't survive. US media will say one thing one day and the next day say something completely different so its hard to believe any of it, they just want money from views. I'd wipe it down just in case. The Lysol wipes now say they kill coronavirus on the containers... but who knows how they confirmed that.

 

I wouldn't personally put much weight on information from Fox. The estimates of its ability to survive outside the host I've seen range from 8 minutes to 8 hours. Low temps as in the cargo hold typically kill germs faster. Good news is that it's not one those viruses capable of surviving on surfaces for months.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/common-questions/

 

Yeah I don't trust the US media for much of anything, but I figure its better to be safe than sorry if you can buy some disinfectant wipes for 10$. I think its funny that these random journalists in the US somehow get all this info with no contact in China. Most of the reports have quotes without sources too. Which isn't surprising, its China, how can they quote someone they didn't have contact with /facepalm

 

I got my R1 a couple weeks ago and I immediately undervolted to -145mV and AIDA64 temps were mid 80s to low 90s but I didn't run it too long. Played 1 game of overwatch and got low to mid 90s and creeped up a little higher briefly.

I opened it up, repasted with Kryonaut and turned it back on. The CPU fan wasn't plugged in all the way because it has a loose connection. I noticed the loose connection before when I took the heatsink off.

I got an error message and code when I tried to boot and after that I shut it off, plugged the fan back in, and then it died completely. Only thing I could think of is I somehow fried the board when I turned it off to plug the fan back in.

Dell support came and replaced the motherboard and it worked for the initial boot but then got black screen of death. It would seem like it was on, fans blowing, lights working, but nothing on screen or even if I plug into my monitor. Dell tech thought it was weird and maybe a GPU Issue.

Ended up escalating my situation and they're giving me a new M15. Hopefully they can match the specs cause I had a great deal on 2070 maxQ with upgraded battery.

I've repasted many laptops before and while the CPU fan wasnt secured all the way, I find it hard to believe that that was reason it fried. It's probably from user error but oh well.. Still waiting for them to send me the specs of the replacement laptop.

 

Good to see Dell support are being extremely helpful. BTW Kryonaut is not the best choice for this laptop - it's likely to pump out quickly (a few months), need something thicker like Phobya.

 

Yeah they've been really responsive so far. Sucks I have to wait probably another couple weeks but it is what it is... Originally they were gonna replace the motherboard again and also check to see if the screen was messed up but parts were delayed until mid April.

That's when they escalated it and are now giving me a new one. I'll buy some Phobya too before it comes and try that out.

 

FYI AW are holding a community feedback event on Discord. Could be a good opportunity for m15 users to tell Umar what a wonderful idea soldered RAM was:

 

Hello everyone,
I am a new user of Alienware m15 R1 equips 8750h, 1 tb sshd, 8gb ram and gtx 1060. I have just downloaded the Division 2 and even at the low settings i can't get at least 30 fps stable. I have upgraded drivers to latest version and i have undervolted cpu -120v and oc gpu +100 mhz. My power brick is 240w. I repaste it and put the device at performance mode from awcc. What should i do as a suggestion other than them?

 

No experience with Division, but people say it's demanding. As a sanity check: what's your TimeSpy or Heaven Extreme score?

If everything else fails with Alienwares you have the fantastic option of putting something like 2070 Super or better into the AGA and getting near-desktop performance on an external monitor.

 

I haven’t try to test laptop with those tests but my division 2 benchmark score is 2299. I think there is a problem with laptop cause in internet i saw with same specs but another laptop they had a significant amount of high results.

 

You haven't mentioned resolution or settings, but looking at the expected framerates 30fps it seems low:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobil...060-Laptop-Benchmarks-and-Specs.169547.0.html

I've had this crazy drop in fps twice, as a reault of going overboard with the Afterburner I believe. Clean reinstalling Nvidia drivers using DDU and then using more conservative afterburner settings fixed the issue.

You can also run hardware diagnostics from Support Assist just in case.

 

I have tried to make a clean Windows install then installed necessary apps like nvidia, awcc, intel graphics center software and i got better results. Still there are some lags but i think it is because i use HDD.

 

I have used SSD for so long, that when I bought my first Alienware 3 years ago it came with a 7200RPM HDD and also Gears of War 4. That game lagged so hard, especially during cutscenes (idk how that makes sense for the cutscenes). But soon as I bought a SSD for the notebook, everything was fine. These m15 now come with a 5400RPM HDD. I can't say for sure its your problem since I never played that game, but some games definitely get held back by a slow HDD. If its like a 130MBps 7200RPM HDD (pretty sure you won't get that on a 2.5") those work great for gaming.

 

I have looked for mine and it has seagate firecuda 1 tb 5400rpm hdd. I was expecting to get one which has 7200 rpm. I will move on to nvme ssd as soon as possible. HDD also decreases the battery time.

 

Yeah I guess they figure even the budget 7200RPM they use are pretty bad for gaming, so why not use a 5400RPM SSHD to make it sound nice. The good thing is NVME are really cheap nowadays. Mydigitalssd makes extremely good performing SSD with warranties that match Samsung. And honestly my 970Evo throttled so much during gaming before I put a little heatsink on the SSD controller and it doesn't happen anymore. The Samsung 900 series NVME seem to throttle more than other NVME too, kinda dumb you expect quality from them and don't receive it.