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

So I got my hands on a brand new DGFF mosfet heat sink for RTX-2070 and RTX-2080 cards for this machine. If somebody wants to upgrade their 2070 or wants to get their hands on a brand new 2080 heat sink, they can ping me.

 

If you don't mind, could you upload some images about new RTX 2080 heatsink, and compared with the old one if possible please? Thanks in advance.

 

There is no difference construction wise however I noticed a rubber like tab against the thermal pad contact line on top of the fins that helps exert extra pressure on the thermal pad contact and makes the card seat more firmly in the chassis. I noticed this right away. Other than this, no difference. I'll post pictures shortly.

 

An engineer should be here in a few hours to replace my screen due to the dead pixel. Anyone had a Dell tech experience in the UK? Read some horror stories but I don't think I have the confidence to replace it myself.

How long is it likely to take to replace?

UPDATE: Been and gone, was a bit heavy handed, but thats maybe just because I'm a soft touch dealing with the machine. Other than that it went well, old screen out and new one in and tested all within 45 mins or so.

 

Whoo, thanks for your information. It's just a minor upgrade so I guess I can live happily with my old heatsink.

 

Mine only arrived last week, hopefully I have the upgrade, whether it makes a difference or not is another question.

 

I have the same issue on my Echo model as well. There are 2 things, one is Kionix freefall driver must be updated to latest UWD driver and another thing might be a little difficult i.e. Reset NVRAM completely by shorting CLRP pin or using AMI BIOS flasher and valid rom by passing P,B and N to reprogram main block and clear NVRAM to factory defaults. Disclaimer: You'll lose your RAID setup and Bootloaders sometimes.

 

I have also been experiencing slow boot times, its really frustrating.
i hate that it does the rainbow puke light show for such a long time before it will post past bios to windows loading screen.

Ive treid a few things to sort it but to little or no avail, and since someone said its normal a few pages back Ive given up trying

 

My booting time:

18 seconds and I'm ready to login on windows.

Boot: samsung 970 pro 1tb.
I don't use raid, but i have also 1 x Samsung 970 EVO Plus (1000GB) and a 860 evo basic 2tb.
This is a 9700k and nvidia 2070 with 32gb ram.

Edit: specs

 

Mines about the same but not a clue how to upload here.

 

That is insane man! By the time you have booted and enjoying your coffee , I would be still staring at the darn Alienware logo

 

Guys, I have yet to play any game on my Alienware Area-51m, but I have a friend with a AREA-51M and anytime he is playing WoW with both chargers connected his battery will also drain down, in like 1hr it will go down from 100% to ~10% and the battery won't start charging until he exits the game, any ideas on this? Is this normal?

His BIOS is 1.7.2

Does this Hybrid Power also apply to the Area-51m with dual adapters? I wouldn't have thought so.

@iunlock @ssj92 @Tim V. @GerhardK @Mr. Fox @Papusan

 

This is completely abnormal in my experience. My 51m's battery doesn't discharge at all. Sounds like a problem. Does he see any performance loss or warnings of only one adapter plugged in? Maybe a bad adapter but even then i dont think it would drain the battery if at least one adapter works

 

Lemme check with him, thanks for your feedback just wanted to make sure this is not normal

 

Strange... Sounds like it's getting enough juice for the computer to run properly but not enough to keep it charged, which would make sense after reading about the hybrid power function.

Ask him to go into the BIOS and see the total available PSU wattage to make sure both PSU's are working. It should be able to detect what type of PSU's he has and provide total available watts. Maybe change the BIOS battery setting to primarily AC use and turn on high performance mode in the windows battery setting, and in the ACC program.

 

Thanks for the feedback, I told him to update his BIOS to 1.7.3 and do another test.

 

Be aware on this... Lunar White seems to struggle if you use microfiber cloths.

This happened while cleaning it with a micro fibre cloth...

Area-51m have Hybrid Boost functionality, but shouldn't drain the battery with both adapters connected. Maybe screwed up power handling. If he still have the problem... Say he can buy a cheap kill-a-watt and measure max power draw from the wall.

 

Here are the pictures of the heat sink:



@Fire Tiger These are upgraded ones from Dell and not aftermarket ones. I am not aware of any aftermarket heat sinks for these GPUs.

 

Mine is much slower to post for some reason ☹️.
It's literally at the rainbow puke stage for 3 times longer, it drives me nuts lol

 

I play WoW alot on my 51m and the battery does not go down while playing. Both with 1 or 2 adapters connected. WoW is one of those games i usually play with 1 adapter because even with 1 the fps is around 100.

 

Thanks for your feedback, I am lost as to what to suggest to him, still waiting on his testing on BIOS 1.7.3

What BIOS are you on?

 

I'm on 1.5.0. Maybe he can try to change the power distribution in the Bios. I'm on the setting mostly AC use.

 

I researched this and it seems the Kionix Free Fall Sensor causes this, however, I can't find it in Device Manager, do you know where it is? The only think under Sensors in Device Manager is an HID Sensor Collection V2 and disabling that changes nothing I don't think that's the free fall sensor

 

If you go under "View" in the device manager you can enable hidden devices to be displayed. Maybe you'll find it.

 

Ive tried disabling / removing / uninstall driver / reinstall driver of the free fall sensor and none of them make any affect

 

Look at this BS guys, I spent the entire day yesterday installing Windows Build 1909, tweaking the heck out of it, every setting, service, you name it, intalled my 100s of apps, all was perfect.

As I was troubleshooting this slow boot issue, I opened up Autoruns.exe and typed fall then I saw the Free Fall Sensor driver, i unticked it and rebooted to see if it improves the boot time and BOOM, Windows would no longer boot, wouldn't get into Safe Mode, nada. I had to reformat a gain! This has got to be one of the most sensitive OSes in history, one small mistake and it's a format!

@Mr. Fox @Papusan

yeah this time I formatted and didn't even install the driver, still boots slow as a computer from 10 years ago.

 

Which drive ? 970 Evo Plus ?

 

It's in my sig: 2x SK Hynix 512GB SSD NVMe PC400 [RAID 0]

My previous Samsung 960 PRO 2TB was no better

 

If you have raid, it's going to take extra time to initialize that as well. 4 sticks of DDR4 and raid is bound to lead to longer boot times. Are you sure your single 960 pro wasn't any faster?

 

100%, tried with single drive AHCI. Now that you mention it, I think I shot myself in the foot ordering this laptop with 128GB when I only use 7GB - 8GB at max

Do you think it's worth it to try and remove 2 sticks?

Where was the proof link that @Papusan once showed us that 128GB is slower to boot than 64GB?

 

Its not hard to remove 2 sticks and give it a try. If you do that, I would give it at least one boot up (to detect the change in memory amount) before you make any judgements. In my server there is a noticeable difference between 2 and 4 sticks of ram.

 

my system is not set up for raid and only has two sticks of ram but im experiencing super slow boot like ultra male

 

darn! and I got excited there for a bit

 

still may be worth a try on your system so we can as the least rule out that check.
we could have different issues with same symptoms.

 

ok lemme do that

 

Really unfortunate, but expected. I've pretty much given up any hope on the Windoze OS X slop bucket ever actually improving. That is a ludicrous notion at this point. Almost every change the Redmond Retards make to it sucks. There will be no performance improvements. That's not even on their radar any more. Their focus is data harvesting, adding bloat that they think the kiddos will like (they hope that will make them want to keep using it) and making the Windoze experience more like a smartphone than a PC.

If I were you I'd get an Enterprise LTSC 2019 product key on eBay, clean install and be done with it. As an extra bonus you won't have any UWP app filth contamination. You might lose some functionality with the fluffy UWP rubbish the Dell crash test dummies software engineers have decided to tether to the $tore, but it's only going to be a matter of time before they stop providing support for their proprietary app crap. Might as well cut the digital umbilical cord now and get it over with. When they have a shiny new toy to sell, it will be EOL soon enough and that will be the end of any compatibility updates for the ever-changing, unstable Windoze OS X environment.

 

@raza1983 @custom90gt @iunlock @ssj92 @Fire Tiger @Papusan @Mr. Fox @nkc

So here is my boot time testing

4 sticks of Samsung M471A4G43MB1 128GB 2666 MHz DDR4 RAM = 25.47 seconds (full power off, from the moment of pressing the power button till seeing the Windows desktop)
2 sticks of Samsung M471A4G43MB1 128GB 2666 MHz DDR4 RAM = Failed to boot and I couldn't bother troubleshooting
4 sticks of Kingston KCRXJ6-MIE 64GB 2666MHz DDR4 RAM = 19.8 seconds / 14.8 seconds Fast Boot (hybrid shutdown) (full power off, from the moment of pressing the power button till seeing the Windows desktop)

The four 16GB Kingston sticks is what shipped with the laptop

 

Maybe try with 2 of the kingston sticks? Have them in the proper slots (sadly I don't recall off of the top of my head).

 

the left ones are DIMM 1 and 2, the right ones are DIMM 3 and 4 (near the Wifi Card)

 

It should be in the bottom slots on both sides IIRC.

 

Tried mine, and it was 15 seconds until I was logged in and usable from a shutdown. 25 seconds seems excessive.

 

as another reference my boot is approx 22 sec with 16gb (2 x 8gb samsung
M471A1K43DB1-CTD)

 

Looking at pictures online it may be the bottom one near the wifi and the top on the other side? Sad I've already forgotten.

 

Maybe mines is long? Mine was about 22 secs from pressing power to reaching login? I thought that was ok, then again I came from a 6 year old Asus G750.

I have 2x8GB sticks of Hyperx and 2x1TB M.2's in Raid0. I'm sure my sticks are in slots 1 and 3, as they were from Dell.

 

Just tried it again to confirm and it was actually quicker at 13.8 seconds to logged in (auto log in) and use-able, and about 10.5 until the windows screen. Why is mine so much faster?

 

What are your specs (number of memory modules, number/type of SSDs, bios version, etc)

 

I'll need to try turning off the login options and see if its quicker to land straight at Windows.

 

Bios 1.73, i7 9700k, 16GBx2 HyperX DDR4 2666 CL15 (I know it runs at 2400), stock single 256GB nvme SSD and hybrid drive (havnt swapped them yet). Also turned on all possible high performance battery and/or power settings I could find in the bios and in windows 10/ACC.

 

20 secs boot , from button press to typing my 4digit login to windows
15 if I start from when Alienware logo shows up after button press

I guess that’s the norm

 

Ok guys, I recevied my replacement unit but I mistakenly ordered a QWERTY version (I'm from France using AZERTY).
I can't send it back.
Is there any place I can find replacement pieces for the Aera 51M ?

Thank you !