*OFFICIAL* Alienware Area-51M R1 Owner's Lounge

Any original owners around still? I still got my 9900k and 2080 running strong... Guess we survived the MOSFET issue in the beginning...

 

My 9900K + RTX 2080 unit run from 6 April 2019

 

I had 2 Area51-m, first one I sold after 5 months, and now this one running for a month and a half on the 200W VBIOS and 1.5.0 I know it's the first gen because of the screen model (check sig) and how old the factory image was and it was a display unit so I know it's from the first badge.

 

Honestly their hardware isn't much better anymore. Double click issues across the spectrum of mice, shoddy quality on their headsets...it's a crap shoot.

 

I really enjoy the G903 but I went with Steelseries for headset because of the frequency range offered by their external wireless DAC and the meme gif support on the keyboard.

 

The one thing most forget is AW doesn't build computers to compete out of the box in synthetic benchmark trials. Their goal is to make a gaming machine. Its the enthusiast that take the machines to the next level for their pleasure of running benchmarks all day while others play games on them and use synthetics as a temporary guideline to make sure their machine is performing in the normal range it should.

I use a g903. I installed the software to program the DPI and buttons and saved to onboard profile then uninstall the software.

A buddy has had his 51m, since the first batch when released new and still going strong and he abuses the crap out of it. I have one form the first couple months of release and one from October, both great machines.

 

When you claim the title the World's most powerful you do it to compete.

Not a single word from any of Dell's reps... Now up in 4 pages Area-51m, GPU throttling

 

Still aliveee

Late Feb 2019 over here!

 

Had mine since May and still going strong.

Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk

 

so the new Intel 10900k using Skylake with a different chipset the Z490, its a shame Z390 is very similar to Z490 and thus upgrading to 10900k is impossible now.

Thanks Intel.

Refresh--> Rebrand ---> New mobo?

The good news however, they managed to reduce IHS thickness and increase die area for better cooling. FINALLY they listen.

Ive seen some chinese hack they add a special socket to bypass Pin counts, any thoughts on this?

 

They wouldn't be critical if it weren't deserved in many ways. Sure, everyone has some bias, but I think they have been more than reasonably fair in their criticisms.

I am running the latest GHub software, and yes, its crap, but its been revised several times and is better than before. No battery drain either from using it.

 

Just bought it! Thanks bud.

 

Reduse IHS thickness?

Thinner Die, Fatter IHS
Intel increased the power-to-performance ratio of its 14nm process by over 70% since the first iteration landed five years ago. Still, the company is surely reaching a diminishing point of returns as it enters the sixth or seventh round of optimizations. Recently, Intel has turned to dialing up the clocks and cores in tandem with peak power consumption. As you would imagine from the Core i9's 250W peak power draw at stock settings, boosting heat transfer efficiency to the die is becoming more important, especially if you're overclocking.

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/intel-comet-lake-s-cores-53-ghz-high-power-better-pricing/2

Increase die area will of course be there. But only for the new chips with more cores

 

12/10/2019 Here still going strong, no serious problems as long as I stay on BIOS 1.5.0

I am afraid all of us are getting easily irritated these days because were all sick and tired of COVID, lockdowns, and worrying about our friends and families.

I have to remind myself this is a HOBBIE and its supposed to be FUN, when I get bent out of shape I go play my Switch for a few days and forget about this for a while.

I will find out in September whether or not I've just been lucky, when I crank this laptop up to high speed and try to melt it while I play CyberPunk 2077 for days on end.

If it melts it melts , that's what the warranty is for and Dell can send me a new one

 

One thing you can say about the Area51-M is that you cannot deny the aesthetics of it.

Mine matches the interior leather: https://imgur.com/a/wFXUVFO

 

I have the 32" curved and love it. Just keep in mind the jacks are in an awkward place. I use a powered hub so it's not an issue for me.

 

Sorry for replying now.

I have done what you said (change back to RAID from BIOS) and lags have appeared again while they seem to have stopped while on AHCI mode.

Anyways, while being on RAID mode, I checked with Samsung Magician and it stated that my Samsung 970 SSD .m2 Evo was not properly configured and could not be located. It also stated that both my SSD's health and temperature were NOT AVAILABLE. I downloaded the NVMe driver from Samsung's website and Windows informed me that no NVMe SSD was installed on my system.

So again I changed the BIOS settings back from RAID to AHCI, run the NVMe driver from Samsung's website, and Samsung Magician finally recognized my SSD Samsung 970 Evo .m2 NVMe instaid of mentioning it as "N/A" (Not Available).




Also, the storage Controller is finally present at Device Manager.



Lastly, concerning system "freezes" I haven't YET came across a single system freeze since I've done all these, along with uninstalling Tobii and updating EVERY Intel driver with Intel Driver Support Assistant. All above suggestion were mentioned by other owners of a Dell Alienware Area 51m who had experienced the same issue, and it helped them solve it. As it seems it helped me as well.

PS: Pdf thumbnail generation is also working, finally. I just installed Foxit PDF Reader. Both Acrobat Pro and Acrobat Reader cause mouse lags. With Foxit PDF Reader, everything is perfect in my Dell Alienware, for now.

If anything comes up, I will let you know.

Thank you so much!

 

Is Tobii good for anything? I mean...does anyone use it?

 

It was neat in Star Citizen for 5 min before the game crashed.

 

Still here

 

Oh yeah I completely forgot that Samsung doesn't Officially support RAID to this date while it's being used on many systems now. It's pathetic they force you to use AHCI otherwise their crappy software won't recognize the SSD and you can't install the Samsung NVMe driver.

 

I am an original owner. On bios 1.32 and and the 200w vbios. Still utilizing Gsync on my display. Repasted with Phobya Nanogrease a couple of times. My 9900k and RTX 2080 are running excellent. My Area-51m has been running fine. Some hiccups here and there but nothing major. Will not bother with updating my Bios because I do not see an immediate need. Dell/Alienware seems to be neutering these machines to save on RMAs. These notebooks was supposed to bring Alienware back to enthusiasts level of tuning and performance. If this is the last iteration of this notebook with no path for Ampere GPUs I'm out on Alienware.

 

Here's an interesting benchmark of my SSD, one done on Windows 10 Pro for Workstations and the second done on Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC:

BIOS is in RAID mode for both not AHCI:

Windows 10 Pro for Workstations Build 1909:



Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019 Build 1809:



@tilleroftheearth @Mr. Fox @Papusan @jc_denton @Fire Tiger @etern4l

I don't know what to make of this, the score difference quite noticeable, might be for the fact that Windows 10 Enterprise doesn't have any bloatware?

 

@Fire Tiger you can add the MS Store to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC in 15 seconds via a simple batch file. I'm using the MS Store and all the apps from there just fine.

 

1. Could be variance/impact of background processes?
2. Was the amount of free space similar in both cases?
2. Enterprise edition could be better optimised for I/O?

 

1. Nope, same exact software on both.
2. Same amount of free space.
3. I think it's Enterprise that's making the difference.

 

Would you recommend it then bro? What about the Group Policy tweaks and the likes, assume there are less with it being less bloaty?

 

If its the new one, its a pretty good monitor, I have the original A3418DW and love it, the new one is even better with improved color gamut and response.

 

There is nothing to tweak really. It has no Cortana, no MS Store apps obviously, the only tweaks you may wanna do are cosmetic and setting Telemetry level to 0 (Security)

I definitely recommend it, when you install it you will feel that you just bought a new computer and are using a different OS altogether because of how snappy it is.

Here is the add Microsoft Store script

Don't forget to unblock the ZIP file before extracting it!

Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019 ISO (you need a product key obviously but can install it and try it first before you buy the key and activate it if you wish)

Rufus 3.10

 

Superb @Spartan thanks a lot for this, appreciate it. Might need to go get myself a key now.

 

So, how will you install DCH drivers on Enterprise or LTSC w/o MS Store app? I know you can use appx bundle but for noobs will DCH drivers and LTSC Add Store bat or ps1 file will it be enough to get it working?

 

1) All the drivers installed just fine without the Store.
2) I just added the store to install the apps which I need like nVIDIA Control Panel, Intel Command Center, Thunderbolt Application Center, Alienware Mobile Connect, Alienware Pointing Devices, Alienware OSD Application, Tobbi Experience, Beach Buggy Racing and Despicable Me (for my daughter)
3) Alienware Command Center and OC Controls can be installed from the Windows Store but they also have their own full fledged installer which is what I always use.

PS: Regarding your comment earlier about the Crucial MX100 512GB, I just took that from my wife's 5 year old Dell Vostro 5470 and gave her the Firecuda 2TB. I just moved my huge movies library to my 2TB portable Samsung T5. This SSD is solid man! still performs the same as the day I bought it and it was dirt cheap. Crucial makes solid SSDs and their Crucial Storage Executive software works even in RAID mode and detects the SSD and is able to maintain it with stuff like overprovisioning, health status, firmware updates, etc. unlike Samsung which to this date only works in AHCI mode even though RAID setups are very common nowadays.

I couldn't wait to swap these drives man because when I leave my system idle for a few minutes, if I were to access anything on D: which was the Seagate Firecuda, the system will hang for a couple of seconds until the drive spins up! Now all that misery is gone!

 

So far its more gimmick then useful unfortunately.

 

Best 4 bucks I've spent

 

Ηε

I think it's a total waste..

I forgot to mention than no Logitech device is connected to my Alienware. I only have a Razer Viper mouse connected.

Concerning RAID vs AHCI, as we can see in this article ( https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-15-9550-AHCI-or-RAID-config-for-EVO-970-upgrade/td-p/6128388) AHCI is the better option anyway. You cannot use Samsung Magician in RAID mode. Also, If you'll be doing a clean install of Windows 10 on A Samsung SSD Pro/EVO/Evo Plus, then AHCI is the ONLY way to go. The only exception would be if you planned to install Windows 7, in which case you'd want to go with RAID because Windows 7 doesn't natively support NVMe, and using RAID mode allows the Intel RST controller to abstract the physical storage interface from the OS, which means that by installing the Intel RST driver in that configuration, you can run Windows 7 from an NVMe device. That's partly why Dell has historically defaulted to RAID mode on systems in the past, but now that Windows 7 has gone away, I hope this may change.

 

Hello to our wonderful community.

I am wondering if others here are having the same touchpad problems (mouse lags/repositions while dragging a file) that I am experiencing..

Touchpad performance is so lame while dragging and dropping files from one place to another, that I ended up uninstalling the driver. Now no lags appear, however the touchpad recognizes less DPI of the laptops screen, so it needs to be used 2 or 3 times more in order to cover the same area that it covered before the uninstallation of the driver.

Of course, after I uninstalled the driver, the leds of my touchpad also stopped working.

Can anyone help me solve this?

 

German AW-Forum: RAID on vs. AHCI (translated via google)

 

Wife and I have had ours (9700K/2070) since release. Mine came with a faulty GPU, once I replaced it, no issues since.

 

My point exactly!

 

Try disabling tobii eyetracker

 

mine is one of the first shipped out in February of last year, it's still going and i still love it. no performance issues at all.

i do have 1 issue that bugs me and one other small issue but they don't affect performance. my keyboard lighting has been slightly buggy ever since the last 2 command center updates and full removal and re installs of AWCC won't fix the issue so i have learned to live with it for now. 2 updates ago my keyboard would default to factory blue after waking up from sleep until i opened AWCC and clicked on any random tab then it would go back to my normal red theme. then after this last AWCC update it wakes up red except for the h key which is purple until i open AWCC and click on any random tab. i just said F it for now and just made the home row keys all purple and kept the rest red so it doesn't look stupid. hopefully the next AWCC update will fix it. the other issue is windows fails to update from 1809 to 1909, but i don't really care about that.

 

Already done that but to no avail. Uninstalling TOBII of course helps, but it doesn't solve the problem 100%.

It's a known issue of Area51m to have a malfunctioning touchpad driver. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/azltej/the_most_disappointing_thing_about_the_alienware/)

Has anyone came up with a solution?

 

I install the Synaptic Pointing Device drivers from Lenovo

 

You can run Windows 7 on NVMe without RAID using AHCI. I've been doing so since NVMe SSDs first appeared, around 2015. You simply add the required support to the ISO and viola... good to go. Same for USB 3.0.

Long Cut: [Guide] Installing Windows 7 on an NVME SSD (from a USB 3.0 thumbdrive) | Notebook Review Forum
(Use this method if you want to feed your inner geek...)

Short Cut: Use ASUS EZ Installer ( Download from ASUS or Mr. Fox's Google Drive) - works with any Windows 7 ISO, and doesn't need to be used on an ASUS product.
(Use this method when your inner geek says, ain't nobody got time for that...)

ASUS EZ Installer Setup Guide (PDF) - See "Method 3: Using ASUS EZ Installer" on page 3.
Use the ASUS EZ Installer to create a modified Windows® 7 installation source.

 

Exactly. Raid On is not demanded in any way apart from RAID 0/1/5 situations.

Can you send us a link? Did it work for you?

 

Yup, works awesome for me tbh. Use the link in this guy's video and its a tutorial on installation:

 

I will try Synaptics and get back!

 

i have no issues at all and i have everything installed minus the dell and alienware support trash. i dont think its the tobii as i have that installed and use it quite regularly for the auto dimming feature

 

I came to recommend this, I rarely use my touchpad but its far better since installing Synaptic drivers.

 

I tried your method using Synaptics drivers.

Is your touchpad's led working after the setup? In device manager what does it mention?

Yes it seems to be better indeed. Let's see if it's stable too. Only time will tell.

Apart from leds not working anymore, the touchpad seems EXTREMELY stable. If the leds is the sacrifice I have to make then so be it..

Do your touchpad leds work or not after installing the Synaptics driver? Is this the only price to pay for installing these drivers?