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

So how does the cherry mx keyboard compare to the standard one?

 

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/help-me-choose/cp/hmc-aw-video-card-laptops
So I just found out that Dell has a dedicated page on the m15 R4 and m17 R4 GPUs. It has information on the max graphics power, total graphics power, dynamic boost power, base clock, and boost clock. It shouldn't be anything new, but what is interesting is that the m15 R4's RTX 3080 laptop is lower powered (has identical power limits as the RTX 3070 laptop) compared to the m17 R4.
That said, some of the text on the page is outdated or irrelevant (like SLI).

 

Yeah the lower TGP 3080 was known for a while now, the interesting thing is I have not seen (until this page) the indication that 140w is the official spec over the 125w base. In the past info straight from Dell showed 115w + 15w.

 

There is a 150+15 (165W) and a 125+15 (140W) vBIOS version for this system in the Dell vBIOS updater.

 

Can you pick or does it detect what system you have automatically?

 

With those incredible temps after synthetic benchmarks (that usually reach 92°C+) I wonder why DELL does not use liquid metal by design for these models. Would be perfect.

 

Because alienware is no longer a special boutique brand and is just a mass produced product. And if they did offer it, you can bet your a** they will make it an option called AlienPaste +$150.00

 

While I do have a 330W brick can anyone confirm if there’s a way to lower the power output so it doesn’t slowly drain and recharge the battery on the m17 R4? Only does it during gaming. If doing a GPU-only task, such as mining, it never shows charging. Not sure how the laptop is exceeding the 240W brick. The 3070 absolute max is 140W which leaves 100W to power the rest of the system and the CPU during charging periods is under 20% or less load.

 

I have the same issue and it's annoying because when it decides to start charging the battery it will use power and throttle the CPU till its charged. I want a 330w brick but can't find any dell official ones, they are all Chinese knockoff junk

 

@GenTechPC or @Kevin@GenTechPC should be able to hook you up with one. I got mine from them.

 

Just realised this was an issue with Dell/Alienware



This is the configurator for the M17R4. By default a monthly subscription of $14 is selected which can rack up significant costs over time for a useless service.

Forget about it for a year, thats $168 out of your pocket. Two? $336 Three? $504 and it keeps on adding up until you cancel it.

 

What was the price ?

 

Yeah, and Gamers Nexus put more wood(s) to the fire https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/mwkoub/alienware_defaulting_purchases_to_999month_basic/

Not so sure they have spare parts either. Dell is dried out, same also for Parts People who is their partner shop for refurbished parts. Yeah, this just follow what I said before in this thread.


Want the orginal Dell 330W adapter then buy the SKUs who have it in the package.

Selling more and more laptop models that don't come with the 330W adapter doesn't help on the dry out either. I expect they will push harder for their newer Small Form Factor power adapters they have started offer with the Aw m15 Ryzen models. But this one also max out at 240W as most of the power adapters they use/have in stock.

 

That sucks. Guess I'll need to take my chances with a garbage, Engineered in China, 330w PSU on Amazon

 

Eurocom probably have better quality 330W adapters. But' you''ll pay Premium https://eurocom.com/ec/upgrade(2,459,0)AlienwareArea51M

Remember a failing aka cheapo garbage power adapter can push the whole hardware into hardware heaven.

 

I am going to test and see if it happens with the 330W here shortly. If it doesn't happen this is absolutely a design flaw and I am not sure how nearly 4 months into release this hasn't gained more traction. There's zero reason that a gaming laptop shouldn't be able to be powered correctly with the adapter it is bundled with.

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/324198369404?hash=item4b7bba887c:g:oPQAAOSwEYReQg-h

Realistically that isn't expensive and everything looks like that is 100% OEM.

 

Looking forward to your results. If the 330 stops the laptop from using battery power in heavy games, I'll buy a 330 tonight.

 

It didn't. Funny enough I left HWINFO32 running to see what the max power draw of the system was and it came out to just barely over 230W.



Here's battery charge



My guess is this is intentional in the BIOS for some very odd reason. Do we still have any Alienware reps on here that could get an answer to this? If it's happening on a 3070 with a 330W brick attached you can be sure it's going to happen to my 3080 when that arrives (that actually comes factory with a 330W.

BIOS showing the 330W brick in use:

 

Can someone tell me if it is worth getting the RTX 3080 over the RTX 3070 for a M15 R4.

I am getting the OLED model but from what I can find there is hardly any difference in the actual performance between the two GPU's. I want the 32gb ram but even adding that as an option is the $150 cad difference worth it?

 

$75

 

I have 32gb of ram in my home pc and I thought that I should get the same for my M15 R4 as it is not upgradeable. Any opinions on this?

Sorry for the questions but I have been going back and forth on this purchase for awhile. All the amd cpu's are coming out soon as well.

I would go with the M17 model but I will mainly be using this in a camper-van and space is very tight along with the convenience factor of being able to take it outside.

 

These are both OEM 240 and 330w both from DELL.

 

Very weird. Why the heck is it using battery power if the AC adapter had more than enough power? Has to be a flaw in the bios, and one that your average user won't catch, so dell most likely won't ever address this. I hate having to worry about my battery being charged so that I don't throttle. I'll take it from 100 to 50 in just a couple hours of gaming. At 50 I have it set to charge again and that's when the throttling occurs

 

My recollection is that there is about a 15% difference between the 3070 and 3080 on the M15. One thing I would say is if you plan to use this outside, the OLED display is going to be noticeably tougher to see with its very glossy finish. Personally I would not want to be stuck with 16gb of ram in a soldered design if I planned to keep this for a few years. Only you can decide whether all of this is worth the money. My $.02.

 

Honestly, unless you are using the laptop for tasks that you know will use more than 16gb, there's no need to get 32gb.

 

Trying to follow the power supply problem.

Are you guys saying the the 330watt fixes the issue with the battery charging under gameplay. Or are both power supplies not holding the charge... and is the laptop itself?

 

That is truly weird. I have the same config as you with the 240 watt adapter. I've played around 40 hours of games and it hasn't ever drained the battery when plugged in. Sorry if you already did this, but have you tried resetting BIOS? Might also be worth trying disabling Windows Fast Startup. Windows is great at caching bad settings and carrying them over through reboots and shutdowns. Disabling Fast Startup and then resetting power plan settings (just to make sure they're correctly written) could be worth a shot.

 

Depends on the game as well. Playing black ops team death match causes the drain. Playing other games like doom eternal or RDR2 causes 0 drain.

 

I've been playing Cyberpunk, RDR2, Valhalla, Far Cry 5 and Apex. No Black Ops.

 

Yeah it seems like it has to be a game that hammers both the CPU and GPU. In black ops my GPU is between 120 and 130 watts and the CPU is always around 60 watts at a locked 4.1ghz all core with an undervolt. No other game stresses like this game

BTW, love your YouTube channel, just subscribed the other day.

 

OK that's REALLY bizarre, my battery has never gone below 95%. I would say something else is going on triggering your battery to drop that low because that's not normal in my experience. I have left games running for several hours and have never seen that.

 

I can tell you the opposite is true on two separate m17 R4's. Leave HWINFO32 running in the background and launch Outriders and let it sit in game for 20 minutes. After about 10-15 it should drop the battery down 2-3% and then charge back up.

EDIT: I have confirmed this running Nier Replicant as well and that game definitely isn't anything super graphical heavy. Also, like I said the issue does NOT persist when just doing mining operations, for example. Which, if anyone cares, -500 core +500 memory gets you about 59MH/s which is on par with a desktop 3060Ti

 

I just watched your review on YT and noticed your SOTR framerate was VERY low. Was the battery fully charged when you ran it? We have almost a 20fps delta between us on the same settings. Something definitely not right there.

 

This is because I have a custom charging mode set in the bios. I set it to charge at 50 percent and stop at 85. I did this because I was sick of it going between 100 and 95 and throttling every time it started charging the battery at 95. At least 85 down to 55 gives me a couple hours of throttle free gaming. Very ridiculous. The throttle only takes away from the CPU and brings it down to 35 watts from the 65 watts, clocks go from 4.1 to 4.3ghz in the game down to 3.4ghz which kills performance in a CPU bound game like black ops cold war

 

Fully charged. Core i7, 3070 (not 3080) and game's default highest settings.

 

I ended up ordering the M15 R4 RTX 3080 with the 144 mhz Advanced Optimus. I tried to change to the OLED but the customer service? agent said it was already ordered - they gave me a 100 to keep the IPS display. I didn't ask for it but I was torn between the two so said fine.

Thanks for the input.

 

I don't understand.

This is mine:


This is yours:


I would REALLY like to know what the big difference is? I was using the last public release of the drivers on my first few benchmarks a few weeks back and now I am running it with the latest and still see the same framerate so I definitely was using the same driver version as you at one point and even that shouldn't have this much of a difference.

Side note: Just running the benchmark twice and battery is charging again, 96%.

 

I think i know why. @pdagal can you check your Anti-aliasing and make sure its set to TAA? Somehow it isn't affected by the in game presets.

@LVNeptune can you confirm that you are running it with TAA as well?

 

TAA for me, yes.

 

SMAAT2x for our test. I didn't set that, it was the default on my machine and installation.

 

Interesting. Mine defaulted to TAA without adjusting anything.

 

Yup, that's what I thought.

SMAA T2X is much more performance intensive than TAA. And it seems to be a CPU intensive effect judging by the Gpu usage.

Default is TAA for me too.

 

What vram clocks is everyone hitting on their 3060, 3070, and 3080s? My 3070 is currently sitting stable at 8200mhz with Samsung modules and I think I can go further. Have it sitting at 525 gb/s bandwidth. I've been able to bench at up to 8500mhz!

 

Chiming in on the lovely Hybrid Power function / virus (battery drain while plugged in). (M17-R4 3070)
TLDR: Purchased a Dell 330w adapter to try to fix it, still does the exact same draining as 240w

details+rant: I immediately noticed playing Monster Hunter World that my battery drained about 5%/hr. With a bios power plan set so charging didn't occur until 60% threshold, I can drain about 10-15% in an hour. This is even with a Dell branded 330w power adapter. Balanced thermal and power profiles. Throttlestop undervolt applied to CPU, nothing on GPU. No overclocks. What the actual F is this disgusting garbage? I'd rather have 2x adapters like a 51M than have my battery suffer unnecessary charge cycles. I have a warranty in case battery fails, but seriously I'm pissed. I finally get a thermally-respectable Alienware, and it does this stupid nonsense? Hybrid Power is a stain on this systems existence and needs to be disabled. I love this system otherwise, but it just had to have SOMETHING wrong, didn't it.

 

Dell learned from MSI. Bro @Falkentyne know all about it. He hatet it from the first day he saw what this was meant to be.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...performance-today.802078/page-5#post-10476298


And the end result will always be Alienware Battery Exploded

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/mz13c7/is_my_area51ms_battery_dead/

Be sure you ask for new battery before the one year warranty time-frame.

 

If you look one page back I already tried that. Does Dell have a response to this? What is hybrid power? First I've ever heard of it.

EDIT: Found this https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/...r-battery-drain-while-ac-adapter-is-connected Interesting that they don't let you disable it.

In other news. My 3080 model arrived today with the absolute worst backlight bleed I've seen in over 10 years. What the heck...This is on a whole other level. The 3070 one has some BLB but nothing super annoying. This is worse than the Alienware M17x R3 and R4 from 2009~ and those were pretty bad.

 

Benchmarks on the 3080:

Shadow of the Tomb Raider Benchmark, 12 FPS higher than my 3070 model. Not sure if that's really good but doesn't seem like it.


Time Spy 12013 https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/61140543

Hashrate of ~65 MH/s with a -503/+1499 on clock and mem

 

Your graphics score should be higher than that. My 3080 in the GE76 raider can hit 13 to 14k graphics score and the 3070 in my m17 r4 can hit 12.1K graphics score. Also, that backlight bleed is pretty bad, mine is nowhere near that. Are you going to return the 3080 unit and just stick to the 3070?

 

You are hitting 12.1K on stock or with an OC? All benchmarks I've been seeing have been in the 12000-12300 range for the R4. The 3070 was free since I had a geek squad protection plan on a Razer Blade and they couldn't fix it. Not sure what I want to do with the 3080 right now. Pretty annoyed.