*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 R4 / m17 R4 Owner's Lounge

Fans are running full bore, so I'm pretty sure that's not it. So I decided to rip it open and repaste it. Attached are photos of what I discovered. By the way, any finger prints you see in the paste are not from me. I am still cleaning it, but will try it out in the morning. If it's not any better, then in the box to fedex it goes.

 

Looks like a good target for LM.

I just don't have time to take apart this monster and I'm out of fingernail polish.

 

Those pink thermal pads are not from dell. I suppose they are Grizzly minus pads.
So not only the MB was replaced but he also replaced half of the thermal pads for Grizzly, is that correct? (i am not a fan of repad and certainly not of the Grizzly minus pads)

At this point you have a new machine that has: A replaced Screen, a replaced motherboard (maybe refurbished maybe not), A questionnable repad and thermal paste of second quality (who knows now if the heatsink was not bent).

All of the major parts of this computer have been touched or manipulated to many times. You need to restart fresh with a return since you have the opportunity to do it. That's my advise.
Take care.

 

I actually agree after seeing this. Why risk it. If your new screen is bad send it back as well.

 

I had no idea those pads are not from Dell. Why would they be there in the first place? I repasted it with OLD artic silver 5 paste, and when i tested it out, all my scores were halved basically. I found some Kyronaut I ordered last year but had misplaced and applied that - it brought my scores back up to where they were before I started everything. If those pads are not from dell, then I wonder if they are preventing a very tight connection between the heatsink and the dies. Thank you brjebo and others for all your help and advice. I'm packing things up and taking it to Fedex in in the next couple hours. I want to love this machine because there are so many positives, but this has been a really terrible experience with Dell.

 

I think (pretty sure) they are Grizzly pads. I couldn't find a picture of the new M17R4 heatsink on the web yet but here is a picture (m17r3) of what dell's thermal pads usually looks like.

Teardown of the M17R3 video.

 

You're welcome. You will love the machine. When you get the new one let us know and we will dial it in tight. You can get a lot of performance by tightening a few things up. GPU for example bins really well around 775-800mv.

 

Hey guys Got my M15 R4 today I have almost the same specs as @HaloGod2012 I can't find why his CPU is geetting such higher scores than mine. my specs are:

i7-10870H
3070
16GB
Raid 0 with 2 WD-BLACK SN850 NVME 1TB's

https://gyazo.com/112c85f0c36e06e1cf2911d8c43ca4f5


https://www.3dmark.com/spy/19347416

 

What ever you did is my issue let me know thanks!

Seems my CPU wont go past 3999.70 MHz

If you can @HaloGod2012 post your throttlestop settings for me would be a huge help. Thanks

 

Seems my system is about right then with what scores am getting. Looked up everyone with my system and am the top for a M15 R4. 3070/10870H

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/19359908

what is odd I seem to get better performance not using Throttle Stop or MSI afterburner and just use ACC.

 

Curious any of you guys that have this laptop and the 3080 and also do some mining..what rates are you pulling in on this thing? Same as the desktop 3080...around 80 MH/s?

 

Not a chance considering the 3080M is just a 3070 die, you'll get around desktop 3070 mining performance.

 

but do you have the 3080M? just looking for actual #'s..not hypotheticals....

 

I might test it on my 3070 ill let you know the hash rate when I do

 

Getting 53.33MH/s without tweaks with the 3070 this was just throwing nicehash miner no settings or anything.

 

Nice not bad at all..3060ti right there!

Edit: That is actually 3070 desktop hash rate as well..forgot that the 3060ti and 3070 are pretty much equal when it comes to that.

 

Hi.

Just got my new M17 R4 3080 i7 last Monday. Everything seemed fine I really like it. However I been having some problems with it.

As soon as I got it I used ThrottleStop to undervolt it by 70mV and ran some benchmarks (Cinebench, 3d Mark, ts bench) and all was fine. Out of great precaution I even set TCC at 90C in the bios. But at some point I was just opening a PDF and I got a black screen, had to hard reset it.

This got me nervous and I decided to run Furmark + TS bench at the same time. Around 10min TS bench starts showing errors (it didn't crash as I stopped the test). My temperatures never surpassed 90C for the CPU (as was limited by TCC) and 80 for GPU. This happened again even when I eliminated the undervolting.

I decided to uninstall ThrottleStop, lower the TCC to 85C and I ran Prime95 (alone) and got a BSOD around 50min in, no errors before. The dump showed the following:
Error: MEMORY_MANAGEMENT
Bug check description: This indicates that a severe memory management error occurred. A corrupted PTE has been detected.

I then ran the Microsoft Memory diagnostic tool and it came ok. I have also ran the 3dmark torture test for several hours and some games and have no problem. I just finished 12 loops of memtest64 in safe mode without errors.

Thus, other than errors when running Furmark+Ts bench at the same time (which may be overkill) or running prime95 for about an hour, the laptop seems fine.

My problem is that while I can return, using the warranty latter would be difficult since I'm outside the US (used a freight forwarder). I got this one with a discount so if I return I will loss it. What do you think guys, should I return or keep? Will the crashes get worse?

 

Prime crushes a laptop. One crash should not bother you. I push to the edge so I still get a crash here and there.

 

Thanks glad to hear that! At least confirms my confirmation bias. I really WANT to like this laptop lol

 

There is a lot to like for sure. A better screen and update to CPU would make it near perfect in my opinion. I really want a 4k 120hz OLED

 

Here again. Made some further testing with TCC and ThrottleStop off and balanced fan profile (basically stock).

I ran Prime95 for about 15min without crash and CPU temp got as high as 97, I noticed no throttling in HWinfo.

However, the remarkable observation is that SSD temperature got to 85C! Which I think is too high, specially considering that the disk was not used during this test. Is this temperature normal? What's your SSD temperature during CPU stress tests?

Since my BSOD was related to the PE table (i.e. virtual memory), I got the idea that maybe the failure was related to the SSD. My M17 came with a Raid0 configuration, which may be even more fragile in this regard.

 

Told you.

Its not hard to predict mining performance. All you need is the cuda core count and memory speed. Power limits won't affect mining speed

 

What do you mean? He has a 3070, NOT a 3080. A 3080 mobile might very well pull 65+ hash rate if you can get 160w out of it.

 

Updated my area a little and matched everything, see attached

 

Right around 60

 

Hello,
I put a samsung 970 evo plus 1TB, but the speeds are 2700 read/ 3300 write...
Someone can help me please?

 

yeah it seems the 3080 is only a 7%ish gain over the 3070 not to bad vs price.

 

If it makes you feel better I have 2 1TB WD-Blacks SN850 in a raid 0 and it's only doing a sad 3300 read

 

I think all have this issue, dell have to solve it!

 

Yes I've tried everything I can think of 3k is still fast but we should be at lease double that speed. This is on the new Gen 4 NVMEs

 

Max you will see is around 3400 because the R4 only has gen 3 slots. Gen 4 will be in the ryzen and 11 series Intel refresh coming soon

 

Good to know

 

Spent some time today to try and get over 5k on Cinebench R20, but couldn't. All stock score was a pathetic 4332 for comparison. Anything higher than 4.9 all core even at the lowest stable voltage throttles and brings the score down. Will try and push above 5k before Fedex collects it from me next week.

Do you guys think I can apply liquid metal before the return? I'm kinda worried they'll reject the return if it they open it up.

 

Personally, I would go Phobya Nanogrease instead of LM

 

I think you would be good try try and then paste back over only because they have had multiple techs working on it.

 

With a single drive so true. With a Raid 0 drive you will see more but real world is about the same from 3000-7000 in my opinion and experience.

 

Unfortunately I can’t get it before next week even if I order now.

I don’t get what you’re saying. They have multiple techs working to examine returns?

 

Sorry no. I meant you have had two repair techs opening the machine replacing things correct? I could be thinking about another user.

 

Hey guys, just ordered an Alienware M15 R4 with i7-10870H and RTX 3070 on Dell's website. I saw on the internet that repasting should be done as soon as possible because Dell's thermal paste sucks, is it true ?

Also, any idea on delivery delays, it says it'll be delivered the 28th of April, seems pretty long lol.

At first I wanted the MSI GP66 but seems like in Canada, there is only the i7-10750H version. Also, I got my Alienware R4 for 2339$CAD excluding taxes, which is a really nice price for an octa-core and a high TGP 3070.

 

Bestbuy has the 15 and 17 R4 in stock right now with 1 or 2 day shipping and availability in stores. I have the m17 R4 and it runs very cool on stock paste, but the 15 def runs hotter. And you made a good choice, the 3070 in these run at 140w and the CPU stays locked at 4Ghz all core in games with no throttling. 10750H is good as well but you definitely want 8cores 16 threads now

 

I have not heard this and I have the same specs. Great Machine too

 

So after breaking 31K graphics in firestrike and 12K graphics in timespy, I just broke 7K in Port royal. This 3070 clocks like a champ and beats most laptop 3080 and full 200w/desktop 2080 super cards.

https://www.3dmark.com/pr/972672

 

Hey we have the same spec's 12k in TimeSpy what are your clocks etc can you let me know what all you did etc?

What are you using just AWCC? MSI Afterburner? ThrottleStop etc any insight will help thanks man!

Here is mine right now.

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/60219816?


https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/60219945?

 

Hello R4 owners. I'm having a really hard time deciding between the m15 and m17. The allure of the more powerful 3080 in the 17 is strong, but the portability and weight of the 15 is desirable as well. Can anyone share a picture of the larger power brick that comes with 3080 17s? For 15 owners, is the 3080 in that model worth it or are you better off sticking with the 3070 from a performance/cost/heat tradeoff?

 

I can help with my opinion. If portability is a concern, get the m15. The brick on the m17 is a monster. The laptop itself is not bad. I actually leave the brick at home and power the m17 at work with a usb-c dock. If you get the m15 not a huge benefit on the 3080 as the 3070 owners are reporting great overclocks on the GPUs and really good scores. If you go m17 3080 is a must. My gaming settings get me about 13.7k GPU in timespy.

 

I Use the bigger 330w because I hate the smaller one that has the blue LED on the end that light bugs me.

Here are some pic of the two power supplies.

https://ibb.co/R0dH8Mb
https://ibb.co/1vbWGFd
https://ibb.co/MkhfCch

 

Awesome, thanks! I actually thought it would be a bigger difference....

 

Anyone know how the 144mhz panels compare between the two? It seems the m15 is obviously the nicer of the two but will it be much difference? Is the advanced optimus just a pro for battery life?

 

Yeah, the blue bling bling is a flawed design. Here's one of many https://www.dell.com/community/Alie...d-m17-R3-power-cords-separate-at/td-p/7841111

The 330w adapter have a better overall design. And can keep ut with 425W power spikes and still not trip.

 

There's also the third option of getting the m15, flashing it with an m17 vbios and getting a 330w adapter for it. That will give you the best of both worlds. You then leave the larger adapter at home and bring around the smaller adapter.