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

I think it is, however, the Chi Mei panel was released post 1.5 BIOS and I'm sure someone posted earlier in this forum that when they rolled back to 1.5 from the newer BIOS the Gsync option disappeared. I'm not clued up enough on how/where Gsync is enabled to understand the ins and outs.

EDIT: Searched again and found it straight away: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-owners-lounge.826831/page-1395#post-10933574. Comparing the screen shot in this to the one provided by @DaMafiaGamer, it looks like Gsync is removed on earlier revisions of the BIOS.

 

i think the correct term is that GSync support was never validated for that panel with earlier BIOS revisions due to that panel supplier wasn't initially included in the early days of Area-51m. that Chi mei panel is the new "low blue light" panel which dell used for area-51m recently so it was only added to newer BIOS revisions. it was never removed to begin with.

 

A question....from your experiance ce, at what time period do you expext to see the greatest failure rate? On laptops? Outside of drives, my experience has been the first year of ownership...and then a slow spike after a out 3 years

 

Yeah, exactly what I meant, apologies its just how I phrased it. I assume only Dell/Alienware could edit the old BIOS files to include the new panel?

 

i'm afraid so. the BIOS is encrypted, signed and only dell/alienware is able to issue a validated signature for the BIOS which the laptop will check before allowing it to flash

 

This is very interesting. With the igpu disabled in device manager, the entire TB3 port is disabled for anything more than USB2.0 speeds on my machine. How does your TB3 port work with this CPU installed?

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I'd be more curious to try a 9900KS on this laptop

 

I'm on 1.5.0

The port is working as a USB (I test it with a mouse only) but soon I'll try to find a USB3 external drive to test the transfer rates and I'll let you know.
I didn't try to connect an external display through this port and I am not going to ever need this anyway, I always need the Nvidia GPU for output.

 

I suppose it negates the need to order the Gsync panel with the 2080, if you're planning on rolling back to an earlier BIOS? Unless they are still using the earlier panels.

 

Nice option to have for future though. Could still rollback bios and loose gsync support. Dell May perform a miracle with a new bios eventually. Then you’ll have gsync again if ever needed.

 

In my tests, the GSync never worked with the older BIOS because of nvidia validation missing in the BIOS. However, the performance difference between the newer one and the older one is minimal "in games".

If AW do release a new bios with 2666Mhz RAM support to I think all of us at one point will have to upgrade to the new bios.

Sent from a Galaxy S9+

 

Why? It’s not like 2400-2666 wil make a big difference in games and i rather have the no throttle bios. I do think dell or umar should come with a statement about this.

 

Maybe ask here. Nag them every day (Eddy is also one of the bosses) https://twitter.com/aw_umar/status/1160254411081420800

 

I recently watched a video comparison between several speeds of ram and their CL timings. Two of them were 2400 CL12 and 2666 CL13; the 2666 was an avg of 10 fps higher or so, and from what I saw it really helped the minimum fps as well.

 

@Papusan @Mr. Fox

Have you seen the latest joke from Dell?

 

Well....

Hmmmm....it keeps it from frying, which keeps it performing....so technically....lol

 

Ahh okay, so I'll be stuck with the 1.62 bios then. Oh well. In that case I'll undervolt, repaste, repad, keep the OC light, use the 180W vbios and see if that keeps it under the throttle temp. Honestly, it'll probably still blow anything else out of the water. Maybe they'll release the 2666 ram bios and raise the wattage again in the future, who knows.

 

I still find it weird that people are saying that it will blow things out of the water?!? When the throttle kicks in when i was on 1.6.2 it was slower than a 1060 notebook version. A 2080 running at 300mhz will be on par with a igpu haha.

 

What I meant is, I'm going to try and keep it under the throttle limits so the throttle doesn't happen. I also find it weird that other people have said it only slightly lowers the GPU speed when throttled, and others say it drops like a rock. Not sure what's going on there or why there would be such a difference.

 

Jeah the weird part is it keeps running 300mhz altough it reaches 40 degrees in like 10 seconds but yet takes 4-5 minutes to boost the gpu again. This can't be by design

 

In Dell logic a throttled system performs better than one with a fried GPU

 

The panel is quite good, no relevant backlight bleed, good contrast and black level. It is 144Hz with gsync. But I am on 1.5.0 to avoid throttling and on the 200W vbios 1.0.0.3. With this combination I get artifacting when enabling gsync (screen turns black every couple of seconds). Maybe this would not be the case with the newest bios and vbios but at least for me this is not an option.

This is the best looking notebook I have ever owned and performes quite well if not on the latest bios. But how can DELL cripple this "bad boy" with every new bios iteration and the 2400Mz ram problem is absolutely ridiculous on a Z390 platform. Then the cheaping out on the retail heatsink... If DELL wouldn´t have made theese failures this could have been the perfect laptop.

BTW: which 2400 DDR4 is recommended with the best latency. I read somewhile ago Kingston HyperX, but which model exactly?

 

Hmmmm..any one see the 17 R4 blowout? If I did not have the 51m ordered this would be hard to say no too....

 

Many Jokes from Dell. This with bad interrupt latencies is a ongoing problem at least for the XPS models... And I have seen some said Area also isn't good for music production due same/similar problem. See... Popping sound this through 3 laptops in a row.


Could you or other with the Area run LatencyMon for 15 min? Link to the software follow here https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon Thanks

 

Started right now, will report back after 15 mins

Question: Which power input is regarded the primary (the inner or outer one?).

BTW: My unit came primarily with the Delta 330W psu and not the Liteon

 

There are different kinds of jokes. Good (funny) jokes, corny (stupid) jokes, dirty (mean) jokes and nasty (off-color, NSFW,) jokes. Neither one of the jokes mention above is funny. But, they are all the other kinds of jokes rolled into one.

 

Does indeed not seem suitable for music:


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Yeah. Dell struggle with this.
What OS version you run? Latency should be better with one of the latest patch for (1903).

Edit. The old lady from 2015. And not newest fancy drivers. New doesn't always mean better.

 

Just got laptop back from dell repair. Called up to see what was done. Case handler is going to ask if he can send me the internal report. Apparently a lot of stuff was wrong and a lot of components were replaced...


Temps seem to be much higher than before but oddly it's not throttling a whole lot??

Firestrike At 5ghz custom perf setting in bios, max fan speed:
102C package temp
99c max core temp
https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/38525959?

So far speakers seem fixed ...

BUT:

Messed up screw was left and in fact never screwed in all the way in the returned unit

Bottom panel never popped all the way in in returned unit

Will post more (and hopefully some pics) in a followup.

@hmscott

 

I am on 1903 with latest patches but I was surfing the web during test run in the background. Performing right now another test run with no background activity. Looks good atm.

What was wrong with the speakers? Mine sound terrible and the left one seems to vibrate from time to time.

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Looks much better now without chrome running in the background

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Much better But your pagefault increased from below 500 to +13K

Edit. Forgot. Thanks for testing. +rep

 

Pondering about which pads to get for repadding: Gelid extreme or the slightly higher rated Panasonic which are more expensive. Both seem to be very soft compared to Fujipoly/alpha cool Eisschicht.

Did run windows update which installed something and put the fans on high. Now page fault does better. What does this value indicate?

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Everything is well explained in the link I posted... https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

"Hard pagefaults are a very common but often overlooked cause of audio dropouts, clicks and pops. They especially occur often with audio software that uses a lot of memory such as samplers. Solutions for avoiding hard pagefaults are increasing the working set of the audio application, increasing the amount of RAM or disabling the pagefile altogether"

 

Gelid are great. Can't beat the price to performance imo.

 

That's exactly what was wrong. Mine buzzed a lot even at low volume. New speakers seem to be working better thus far. Only tested for a few minutes though

 

Always set Swap/Page file to a fixed value. I always assign 4GB PF when RAM is more than 8GB. Not that its needed but in low memory situations 4GB swap file on SSD really helps.

 

I just disable it! 48gb ram is more than enough. XD

 

Yes but still I'd leave a little bit on there. I have 64 gigs on my machine but still I've run out of memory twice (although my case isn't average gaming scenario). For usual games and stuff, anything above 32 gigs, no pagefile needed.

It depends upon how much RAM you have and how often memory pages are being swapped from physical memory to virtual memory. The higher ram you have, the lesser page faults. Although it will be more noticeable in terms of speed if you have a mechanical hard drive. If you're running a fast NVMe drive, page faults won't slow things down as drastically, but there is still a time latency involved none the less.

 

Today it happened again. I have saved the event log (errors/warning only). I get 15 entries, but I cannot really say how to read it. Nothing really seem fatal IMO. :-/

 

I ran out of memory 16GB on Windows 10 when I was trying ML/AI samples and then tried the same things on Linux which used only 8-12GB and ran like a boss.
I'd suggest using 800MB which will assist you in debugging BSOD otherwise there'll be no logs whatsoever.

 

If there is no critical error then that means it is a hardware issue (motherboard is the most likely culprit). Get yourself a replacement motherboard.

 

I'll check again to make sure. Do you mean I should contact Dell about replacing it under warranty? Methinks it'll be hard to convince them about a error even I have a hard time to reproduce. :-/

One thing I noticed thou, not sure if it makes any difference - every time I have gotten these freezes it has been when torrenting and using a VPN software (always overnight or when afk for a long time). Could this have any significance? I kinda suspected Tobii for a while also, but I dunno...

 

No need to reproduce. Just show them the reboot logs where it tells after next boot that previous shutdown was not clean. They'll replace it.

 

Is this you?

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware/Area-51m-intermittent-freezing/td-p/7354642

 

Nope. Not me!

 

If only i was living in the UK. Sadly my residence is located in Estonia. Today i got the computer working for the first time, yay! Just cleaned some components and connectors with alcohol and that seemed to do the trick.

Now i wanted to do a BIOS update ASAP to give it more stability. An error said it requires a battery installed aswell. Unfortunately the laptop shipped without internal battery cable which connects it to the motherboard... this means im stuck with 1.2.0 bios for a while. Not sure i even want to use the laptop and risk burning the chips.. im stuck in one of the stupidest scenarios right now.

Have you got the part number for the battery connector cable? Where could i get something like that?

Also, you have any idea where the computers originated from? Like who would cut the tobbi eye tracker cable, remove the battery cable and then sell the laptop as not working (without the cpu) on ebay. That's just beyond wierd for me.

On last notice, i thought i'd keep the i9, as long as i upgrade the thermal paste along with thermal pads to something better (was looking at some phobya's Liquid metal paste and 7W pads):
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Phobya-1-5...187945&hash=item1c35b14bb0:g:9dwAAOxy1NxSDO0P
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Phobya-LM-...816808&hash=item56c396c5cb:g:EqsAAOSwTUdcrGzb.

I think i should be good with those? (ofc id need the thermal pads to be separate thicknesses for different components)

 

I played Assassin's Creeds Unity for the first time on the 51m i9/2080.
And something strange happen.
During the first minutes the GPU follow a "normal" throttling rule, dropping around 1500mhz when the overall PC temperature increase.



After around 3 to 5 minutes the gpu clock drop a lot and stay at 600-800, even if the gpu run below 75°C. It remain playable.
If I leave the game windows (not closing it) for a moment and come back, the clock returns to its high value and a few minutes after, it drop again.

It look like a huge trotthling, but without high temperatures.
As you can see the gpu is kinda cool at 54°C, but the clock speed stay low


Maybe because its a "old" game?

It doesnt happen while playing division 2 (the game is less GPU/CPU intensive compared to ACU)

 

The Area 51M Resurrects from Slumber

 

it seems that my unit has no latency problem:

 

I started a support claim. Let's see what happens...