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

That truly is a shame. Greed is what killed this line in the end.

Do you have any recommendations for good Desktop replacement machines like this? Or should i just wait until alder lake CPU's hit the market

 

Nobody’s knows, however given all laptop rtx3080 are locked at 165watts max or below, there’s no point launching an r3 as performance is limited by power. The 51m r2 with 200 watt 2080s is not far behind the 3080 165w laptop gpus.

None of the other usual manufacturers of desktop replacement laptop have produced a rtx3080 with around 200 watts.

I suspect it’s a Nvidia thing telling manufactures what they can and can’t do.

The 51m was highly popular (look at the amount of comments / interest on this forum about it). I suspect Dell will bring back the 51m but wait for alder lake and potentially rtx3080 super or rtx 4000 series when there will be more meaningful increase in performance. Either way I don’t expect we will see anything until ces 2022 at the earliest.

 

We can only hope, but I most certainly have my doubts.

 

Regardless of the heatsink, the same amount of heat will be produced by the 51M. The heatsink will just make it such that it gets expelled from your 51M to the surrounding air more efficiently, but you’ll still have the same amount of heat flowing out of your PC and into your room.

The problem to solve is not the heat produced by the 51M (no heatsink is going to make it “produce less heat”). The 51M can be “cooled better”, meaning you can pull heat out of it better with a better heatsink or a laptop cooling pad or something. But none of those will make it magically produce less heat overall.

You should look to improve airflow in your room, cooling your room more, or the only actual way to make your system produce less heat is to run it with more aggressive undervolting/underclocking at the expense of performance.

Good luck!

 

I was hoping more along the lines that with the vapor chamber, the air coming out of the laptop wouldn't be as hot, and so my room temperature would be lower (which would in turn also help keep the laptop little cooler too), but what you're saying makes sense. I've already undervolted as far as it will go without blue screening, and I've also disabled turbo boost. Replacing the heatsink was the only thing left that I could think of that would help. I can't really do much to my room either but I guess I'll save the $300 USD if that's the case.

 

100% that’s the case. The laptop might run cooler itself, but the room will be just as hot.

Also, in that sense, the laptop itself is taking in air from its surroundings, so as the room gets hotter, so will your laptop.

Perhaps invest the $300 or a portion of it on a small portable AC unit? You know? Those with wheels and all! All you need with those should be an electrical outlet and a way to dispense water from condensation. That or just a big fan? Maybe several fans? Pushing air into/out of the hot room?

Haha there are ways my friend…

 

Good afternoon. I have a lot of problems with Alienware Command Center, probably because of the OCControls app. Every time I restart the PC I need to reinstall Command Center because it doesn't load the thermal profiles properly. Any guidance?

 

Hi Daniel

I had simular issues with ACC and after troubleshooting for an few hours I found out it was Kaspersky Security Cloud causing the issues on start up!!!!!

If you are using Kaspersky Security Cloud try installing an alternative as this could be your issue like mine.

Also open services on your pc and change AWCCService to automatic start - (not delayed start)

good luck

 

PSA - Latest Nvidia Drivers BIOS 1.5 and Gsync

Just a head's up about what happened to me YMMV,

If you are running BIOS 1.5 and have a Chi Mei display you probably already know about The Gsync issue.

If you are sometimes foolish like me you might update your Video drivers with Nvidia's latest just to see if your missing anything, well they have been working hard to add compatibility for Gsync monitors each update and while it has not been a problem, the latest release changed that for me here.

471.96 Causes the Black screen flickering that you get when you enable Gsync in Nvidia control panel when running BIOS 1.5 with a Chi Mei display WITHOUT Gsync enabled in Nvidia control panel.

So it seems something Nvidia has done has unintentionally enabled some aspect of Gsync at the driver level that affects the display even if Gsync is disabled in Nvidia control panel.

I tried switching to Dellaliensnwares official most recent driver and the problem persisted.

Anyway, just a heads up for the old guard like me that still have a functioning Area 51M and are running BIOS 1.5, you might want to think twice before updating your video drivers to version 471.96 YMMV.

 

Can you elaborate?

 

Maybe Dell could go with an Area 51m Advantage Edition. The RX6800m on my Strix G15 does spike to 180W+. Just imagine the performance of a laptop with an 5900X and a RX6800m that could run at 200W all the time.

Enviado desde mi GM1913 mediante Tapatalk

 

So I set my battery to charge to only 80% in the Bios.
I have it plugged in and not used for a few months.
Turning on today the battery reads 63%???
Is this normal and when will it charge to 80%?

 

Doesn't this mean it is not a driver issue since you reverted to an earlier version and the problem persisted? Perhaps your display is going bad?

 

I’m thinking the same as @Tweak155 . I updated yesterday and haven’t checked for flickering though :S

Will report back.

Edit: wait, if I have a launch 51M (received Feb 2019) do I have a Chi Mei panel? lol, can’t remember.

 

Use the search feature at top right corner or just use Google. But here we go http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-owners-lounge.826831/page-1549#post-10952097

 

More likely a result of being lazy not doing the complete strip of the drivers and reinstall, whatever changes were left behind, I just can't be bothered with it right now, my temp solution was to update BIOS to 1.73 and enable Gsync. .... it's fixed that problem for now, but definitely lower performance on 1.73 vs 1.50 .... if I get bored ill probably go back to 1.50 and do it the right way and strip all the drivers off.

 

Check in HwInfo64 it will show under Monitor.

 

Under Custom battery charge there are settings for Top charge AND bottom charge / double check your settings in BIOS. Mine is set for start charge at 50% and only charge to 90%.

 

Your correct after Google search.... is down to 63% after a couple of months off but connected to power....
I'm sure it will charge when down to 50%

 

So Windows did a big update today on turning on .... now the weather shows in taskbar..... do you turn this off?
Anything to check out, turn off after this big update?
Powering off has a blue screen as shutting down.

 

Selling my alienware area 51m. 9700k and rtx 2080 with vapor heatsink. Also selling another vapor heatsink for $200.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/165076320627?hash=item266f50c173:g:ETIAAOSwcrlhQ~R9

 

Right click on the taskbar, mouse over to News And Interests, then click Turn Off.

 

I am sure most people knew about this on here, but I was surprised I did not. I have the newer panel on my R1, but the difference in video color was improved no question:

I can't honestly say I see a difference with regular desktop and games, but pictures and video is greatly improved.

 

Anyone using a graphics amp? I have a 3080 ti in mine and I typically have to restart my laptop once to get the external monitors to work. On cold boot it uses the laptop monitor.

Thoughts?

 

Anyone get a fix for the missing graphics in Alienware Control Center? It update months ago and the graphics for the actual laptop (e.g. the illustrations) disappeared. So far AWCC hasn’t updated and fixed it for me. Anyone have a fix? It’s ugly AF to look at.

 

The last working version here for me is Alienware-Command-Center-Application_X9C8Y_WIN_5.2.100.0_A00, with Alienware-OC-Controls-Application_1DWH6_WIN64_1.3.11.1300_A00

I just rolled back to this a week or so ago, works fine.

Follow the instructions to remove ACC first and delete remains at various %appdata% locations, reboot then remove OC Controls, reboot.
Install ACC first, then OC Controls, then immediately go into regedit and set the current version of ACC to the most recent one 5.3.2.0 I believe,
then if M$ store still installed on your machine, open store and go settings / turn off auto download M$ store apps.

Also download and replace the Profiles.zip uploaded here by Spartan and replace the one in your Alienware / ACC/ OCControlservice folder to get back the ability to adjust thermal.

You may still get some weirdness for the first several boots such as spinning and not loading fully then it will want to update such and such, let it (it does not seem to change the version installed just updates some various modules)

Been working fine here for several weeks, with an occasional glitch but I am running multiple users and I have ACC installed on both users and working, yes it was a pain to figure that out, Dell says it can't be done, suck it Dell.

 

Thank you kind sir!!!!!!

 

That is very weird.... I mean you are hooking it up with the laptop off then turning it on right?

 

I'm using RTX 3070 in my Area-51m R1. No issues with having to restart. Make sure the connections are all snug. Try reversing the amp wire to laptop as well.

I run both RTX 2080 (internal) and RTX 3070 (external) and put load on both, never have issues having to restart.

 

Edit*

Nevermind was asking If I could flash a 2080 to 2070 vbios and giving reason as to why (the thermal throttling and undervolts, etc that I have to do a 2070 Is probably better performance) but I doubt anyone would know for certain.

Cheers all.

 

Yes the laptop was and is off whenever I attach the graphics amp cord. I honestly have only disconnected it once and the oddity still persists.

I'll try and switch the cable ends between the amp and the laptop. I'll be SHOCKED if that's the answer, but stranger things have happened....

 

Tried these suggestions and no luck. Any other thoughts anyone?

 

On cold boot, do you first power up the external Monitor and give it time to come up? When the laptop powers up it runs post and checks ports for devices it *might* be that it's not seeing the external monitors if for example you wake laptop from sleep.
If you do usually use sleep try hard shutdowns instead and make sure monitors are fully up before powering up the laptop, in theory external devices should be detected at every reboot however keyboard and monitor detection are very early in post, if the devices are not fully powered up they will not be detected.

You may already know all of this so if I am covering old ground move along nothing to see here

 

Is anyone aware of THIS?!?!
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/...pu-throttling-issue-after-long-periods-of-use

And apparently we got a new BIOS?!
https://www.dell.com/support/home/e...wt64a&productcode=alienware-17-area51m-laptop

Did anyone tried it yet?! I am curious on your results On my end so far everything looks stellar! No more stupid massive throttling and good temps.
I didn't run through the whole testing suite just yet But share your results ^_^

EDIT:
Here are my results on the latest Bios 1.15 and the 200W VBios as before (as expected the CPU got a hit from all the Intel "anti-malware" updates).
I am also using the latest Nvidia driver, so it's pretty hard to compare apples to apples
In any case! Same Laptop, with vapor chamber, same 3DMark test (they did push quite a few updates in between ^_^).
This time I WENT WITH Performance FANS - instead of FULL BLAST! So, far - on the vapor chamber - I got to 76Celsius and no hard throttling or any issues like before!? Oo)



My previous "record" on this laptop are here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-owners-lounge.826831/page-2372#post-11077485
It's the same hardware and SAME profiles and overclocks were applied between then and the new Bios and RUN!

So not Sure if Alienware or Dell is even reading this.. but I am very glad that even after 2 years we actually got the thing we always wanted - performance-wise! And I am very glad to be able to use this to it's maximum (I am sure not everyone thinks the same ^_-) But.. hey! I think this is a beast of a machine in a Laptop format!

Kudos Alienware/DELL for fixing this... AT LAST!!!!
Cheers!

 

Howdy, it's been a while, do your saying you get no throttling anymore now with BIOS 1.15.1 even after long play sessions ?
That would be a major miracle, I am going to need to see others reporting the same as YOUR machine could just be blessed

But I am glad it's working well for you.

 

Just updated and played some Destiny 2. CPU temps seemed to be a lot lower than before on the same overclock settings. I didn't raise the GPU temp slider yet though.

 

That's good to hear, hopefully some more brave souls will give it a try and supply further evidence that things have improved enough to move off of BIOS 1.5.0.

 

This is exciting, I came here to see if anyone has found any issues with Windows 11 yet, as I'm planning the reinstall shortly, and I see this . . . I'm still on 1.5 - hoping to hear of some heros that take the plunge and confirm it is good

 

Yes, so far hammering it with Metro Exodus at 2560x1440p (via DSR). I tried both 200W and 180W VBioses.

Here are my quick results:
- on the 180W Vbios - with the older AWC profile that allow you put the max temp to 87C, I never get above 74 C while y GPU is fully stuck at 180W TDP. Believe it not this on BALANCED fans ) (Same overlock as before -100mV 5.0Ghz on 6 cores, 4.7Ghz on last 2 cores) + 130hz on GPU + 500Vram.
- on the 200W Vbios - with the older AWC profile that allow you put the max temp to 87C, I managed to reach 80 Celsius! At the point the severe throttling started! BUT! I was amazed it only lasted 3 seconds! And then my GPU was back up kicking! Again BALANCED fans! (For the record on Full fans or even Performance I never managed to get it to throttle at all!)

However, keep in mind, I am using a Vapor Chamber in the laptop and NOT the original Heatsink! Still, I see major improvements with this Bios!

As for the 180W vs 200W VBios.... after LOOTS of testing - you know actual games and such - there is at best 1-2FPS difference! So, I would only stay or flash the 200W for benchmarking and stay on the 180W VBios. It seems this one actually gives better performance for the W from my testing (by capping the GPU at certain Wattages and measuring the performance)

So... Finally, I don't need to apply the HWInfo 64 hack anymore )))

Cheers!

 

That's really encouraging, I wonder if if all the BIOS up to this point since 1.5.0 have just had really poor formula for controlling the GPU ?
I am surprised that a simple BIOS upgrade could result in such a significant improvement.

 

Anyone tried on stock machine with no overclock and current AWC profile?

 

Is this with stock RTX 2080 & 9900K ? If not can you run stock settings?

I ran a quick one using 1.5.0 bios and 200w vBIOS:

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/23439000

And this is a old stock run: https://www.3dmark.com/spy/7167290

OC run from a long time ago: https://www.3dmark.com/spy/7167581

 

Nice. New doesn't mean better https://www.3dmark.com/compare/spy/23439000/spy/7167290

 

So, objectively speaking…

Stay on 1.5.0 or make the jump? I’m thinking I stay…

Sounds like there isn’t a compelling reason why to go beyond 1.5.0 still.

Mind you I’m on a launch unit with Gsync working etc etc, the only thing “I don’t have” is running my RAM faster than 2400 MHz

 

I'm gonna stay on 1.5.0

Need to see stock performance of new 1.15 bios. 1.5.0 has no issues

 

I'm right there with you. 1.5.0 has not given me any issues and no reason to move forward. Been stable for nearly two years on this BIOS now.

 

I am now running W11 ISO. No issues so far, throttlestop seems to be good too, some people were reporting it wasn't working, but its good with me.

 

Could you share a link or guide? How did you get around the TPM sillyness? A USB key or something?

 

That wasn't a "stock" version. That was a pretty nicely overclock on top of things (mostly GPU - as the CPU got a bit lower with all the Intel Advisory fixes -_-)
Define "stock" values and I can run a test.

I can run both the CPU & GPU at AWC stock/default values, but since I pushed them UP before, I wanted it to compare with older overclocks and older BIOSes ^_^

Don't get me wrong! This is a BEAST of a machine STILL, and the new bios only makes the stupid HARD throttle take longer (still happens at 79C, but for like 3-5 seconds instead of 30?!) Also the CPU and GPU seem to run cooler! Again on Balanced Fans. (Performance and Full Blast doesn't get near 79C - but I am also running a VAPOUR chamber upgrade - which way better than the stock cooling solution! Unfortunately, I can't run the stock cooler anymore as you can see )

Cheers

 

Disable TPM, Secure Boot and RAM requirements for Windows 11 with the latest Rufus beta

But why install it? Apple design and lower performance can't be so appealing. Or can it? Nope.