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

First, when I started this "fight" about this problem, I posted several tweets mentioning them on twitter and asking for a solution and the message me. We are talking through messages since then

 

What's the Twitter page

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To talk to them about the problem;
Tweet them to: https://twitter.com/AlienwareTech

And reply on Dell forum;
https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware/GPU-Throttling-Area-51m/td-p/7422671

 

I see here's where things line up:

"I decided to lap the die on my 9900K as the temperatures were at the limit when benching at 5Ghz. For instance, when benching CBR15 temps were hitting 92c and that was with low ambient."

Basically you had the same issue as many of us with your 9900K + P870 series CPU stock. This is what I was also trying to say earlier.

It doesn't matter whether you have P870, Area-51m, GT76, they will all run hot at stock.

This is also why I am telling people here, if they want low temps, they will basically need to do what you did. Even then under regular ambient temps, regular fans (we don't game on open window/max fans, at least I don't) it will be hot.

So basically, same issue as 1.7.3 then? At least that's what it's sounding like.

Unfortunate, wish they would have just left it alone.

Btw, not all mitigation relate to Hyper-threading. Although non HT definitely has less performance hit.

I'm pretty sure they are just saying this and won't do anything. Just mu opinion.

 

So let me ask - given the new socket coming for Intel and the BIOS restrictions issues, what do you consider the sell points on the R1 Area 51M? My first take of course is the power of the desktop components, the flexibility to still change memory, wifi card, and more drive space. Assuming there will be at least one generation of video card in DGFF(sp) format, what would tell someone is the key selling point right now? What would you tell yourself or someone who asked why you continue to opt onto an Area 51 R1 now?

 

What was the selling point of your M17xR2 and M14XR2? They never received CPU upgrades either. R1 users couldn't update to the Ivy bridge CPUs while desktop did.

Area-51m has the best design (IMO) over the other competitors.

It has the Amplifier port which is fun to play with (I ran Titan X & Radeon VII on mine) but it also provides GPU future proofing if DGFF ever EOL'd (I'm confident that next gen DGFF will work in our machines, not so sure 2-3 generations from now)

Keyboard (IMO) is best on Area-51m from competitors

Customer support (IMO) is best on Area-51m compared to competitors

I'm also confident we are screwed because of Intel's socket change. I don't expect anything until Q2 2020 at the earliest though. It will add a 10-core CPU. I definitely wanna see how they tame that. Chassis will most likely stay the same.

If someone is willing to wait at least 6 months, I'd say skip the R1 and wait for R2. 6 months is a long time though.

If you can't wait that long or don't care for 10-cores and maybe 2080 SUPER cards (rumor has it, 3000 series are delayed cause AMD can't compete) then get the Area-51m. Lots of sales and there's also refurbished models too.

User Replaceable CPUs, GPUs, RAM, SSDs, Wi-Fi card are some points. You don't HAVE to upgrade. If one part fails you can always replace it. Much better than BGA.

The Area-51m when released had decent performance (BIOS 1.3.2 and 1.5.0 actually increased power limits) but 1.6.2+ brought out a GPU throttle at 79C+

There's no telling how the R2 will perform at launch with all these new limitations.

Just my opinion on the matter.

 

Why is Dell making the GPU throttling at 79°C? That seems a pretty low temperature for a laptop's GPU. Plus 200W GPU will peak around 85°C when full power is needed.

Were the Dell gtx 2080 burning over 80°C?

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As you can see from the post in the same Tech forum. Dell tech Support seems to avoid touching this topic. And not the first time I have seen this.



Btw. Have Dell locked out undervolt totally for the none K processors?
Undervolting Area-51m, help needed

 

The initial high temps were due to poor contact pressure on the TM1 heatsink. Mentioned in p1 of the writeup.
I lost the lottery on that heatsink and had to do several mods in order to achieve proper contact pressure.

Make no mistake, it does not come out this way out the box. It took a lot of work to get to this point, and this is pretty much as good as it gets. My goal is to show what is possible, and why we should hold companies, who offer this kind of hardware, to a higher standart. They should not get a free pass for pumping out crippled garbage that runs 100c out the box, for a premium price.

So don't take this as critique of the 51m, but as what these companies should strive towards.

 

No this is good. I appreciate the time and thought put into the answer. I do have the AGA as well, and it is very useful when you need that extra push or just want to keep temps down for one reason or another.

I will say the clincher argument is that the individual components can be repaired or replaced; there is still a lot to be said for this even today. The keyboard is great, the screen is decent enough (later panel at least) and its flexible across roles (gaming, productivity, etc). The socket change is the worst, but considering even a lowly 9700K is ... 8 cores, I think its liveable lol.

Dumb question possibly: is the issue of loss of GPU clocks due to thermal throttling only affecting 9900K +2080 GPU Area 51Ms? So far in searches I am not seeing anyone with a 2070, 2060, etc reporting this...

 

Just ordered an Area 51m from the outlet with the help of my friend Quad comes with the i9 9900 non k variant and 2070 my question it's there any throttling on this kind of configuration ?

I am very familiar with liquid metal and delidding but I hope there's no need for lapping the die lol anyhow it's been like 5 years since i posted here I see there's still some familiar faces around.

 

What mods did you do?

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this had actually been suggested here weeks ago for people who didn't want to downgrade from 1.7.3. i have been running my GPU overclock with a 78 temp limit ever since then with no issues. it's no different on 1.8.1 than it was on 1.7.3. i actually mentioned it again a few pages back for someone else who didn't want to downgrade from 1.7.3 because their G-sync. i'm not one to care about running benchmarks, but game performance on games like Metro Exodus on ultra settings with Ray Tracing on high have been great with the 78 deg gpu limit. i've been running 150 core and 200 clock with no issues (180vbios). without the 78 deg temp limit i was getting the frame drops.

 

Mine gets like 83c

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Welcome back, love the 51m.. Youll have fun

 

@ssj92
I agree 100%. Some can get great performance out of the 9900k in the area51m. But the majority will be disappointed because it runs hot and throttles. I've owned alot of laptops and the a51m has the best all around package. It seems to me they should be able to come up with something better than traditional heatsinks for laptops. Let's hope the r2 has some magic heatsink that can be transplanted into the r1.

 

So far I haven't had any throttling with an i7-9700K at 5.1 Ghz with the 2070 in the unit I picked up in any 3dMark stress tests yet, its helpd to like 98.1 or better frame rate consistency.... does the i9-9900 run hotter than the i7-9700k?

 

Thanks good to hear I'm gonna do the usual testing and if it's too hot probably just repaste GPU and CPU

Thanks I can't wait to get it

 

I may have exaggerated that a bit. Cut that measurement in half.

 

So in doing some back reading on the situation with the BIOS and vBIOS changes over time, the Area 51M at one point had quite a spread where the 2070 seriously was under-performing by like 30-40% against the 2080. Now, after the latest vBIOS's what would you guys put the difference in performance at? The down-clocking to 1215 on the 2070 makes it clear now why I am not seeing throttling. With the gimping of the 2080, just curious what the spread appears now between the 2 cards.

EDIT: In doing some testing, it appears at idle the card is at 1215, but running under load I have seen it as high as 2010 with Spytest Extreme stress test (97% score confirmed), and average around 1500 or so. From what I read this is pretty much what a desktop does but OTOH I read that the Area 51M 2070 cards were well under the desktop - what am I missing here? Was the card and cooling revised at some point and yielding better performance now than say in March/April?

 

Update on the BIOS 1.8.1 install problem. So my laptop started after draining its battery, I had to drain it since I couldn't use the power of button. Everything worked fine, but I wasn't happy with the performance so for the first time I actually downgraded my BIOS. Since everyone have been talking about 1.5.0 I did go for that. Yes, G-sync stopped working but the GPU in particular raised its levels by 15%. I can also confirm that it's possible to downgrade directly from 1.8.1 to 1.5.0. Just forgot one setting so the laptop updated itself to 1.7.3 without giving me a chance to stop it. Will downgrade again tonight.

Is it just the built in screen that will loose its G-sync feature? Im hooked up to a monitor most of the time so it feels ok to loose the feature on the inbuilt display

 

Yeah the gpu performance definitely is better with 1.5.0 and I have a USB ready to go if I ever need to downgrade lol..

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Is it possible to downgrade from bios 1.5.0 to 1.3.2 without special procedures?

 

Disabling Hyper Threading will always reduce performance. The thing is that Intel CPUs have security vulnerabilities related to Hyper Threading, and new microcode updates to combat these vulnerabilities reduce performance.



The odds of us getting support for the 9900KS look slim, guess we just have to ask for this nicely.

Do you use MSI Afterburner to do you GPU OC or do you use Alienware Command Center instead?

Yes, direct downgrade is possible.

 

By special procedure, I believe you mean the use of a thumb drive as outline? I don't believe so, going down is generally not what they want you to do to promote adoption : /

Is this done by any means other than a USB drive? Sorry getting back into all this its been awhile. I didn't figure Dell would promote any method to go backwards outside of that.

 

All the steps are here - http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ny-alienware-to-locked-lower-versions.829542/

 

Dell tech support called me today to tell me that he has been speaking to his boss and this boss to some other upper bosses and that they spoke with alienware support about my tweets and blablabla.

They told me that the GPU Throttling is an issue and it's being worked on but we need to wait for a future update that "probably" will come in January, but they can tell me yet. They even offered me a "new machine or a full refund but they know this won't solve anything because everyone has this problem".

So...we need to keep waiting

 

Audio (7.1) Thought I would share this list I found showing "a list containing PC games, the API or middleware used for their audio processing" (updated 2019).

I was looking for games that support 7.1 as I've done before, but this list stood out because of the detail, plus it's clean retro style, and LACK OF ads and endless DNS queries. Peace... https://satsun.org/audio/ (no affiliation)

 

For what purpose though? When I tested these two, performance was identical. 1.5.0 is newer too.

 

I think the update they told you about is the R2 version. Not much hope for the R1 A51m.

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I know what it means. Something like this.

 

A few months ago I posted a question here about adding a new SSD to my system. The advice was to just plug it in and it should be recognized. I just got a Samsung 860 EVO 4TB and did just that. And Windows only recognizes it as a 111 MB drive, and Samsung Magician only recognizes it as a Samsung 850 EVO (also just 111 MB) instead of an 860. I saw that there was an option in Magician to update the firmware, so I did that, and it didn't fix anything.

Have I borked this drive now by (I guess?) installing an 850 EVO firmware on it? Does anyone know how I can get it working properly recognized and working in my system?

 

Test it in another machine or plug it in an usb box to see if it will change.

 

For some weird reason that we may never know, it may have a 111MB partition on it.

Did you already run a "clean" operation with diskpart on it? If not, try that, then initialize the disk by opening the Windows Disk Management utility and create a new partition.

Before doing anything, open Windows Disk Management and look at the drive. Do you see a 111MB partition with a lot of unallocated space? If so, do what I suggested above (diskpart clean).

 

Thanks both. I did do a clean on it. Initialize wasn't an option (I mean, it never showed up for me as a menu option in Disk Management), but I had done a format on it. In all cases, including in Disk Management, it showed up as a 111 MB partition with another 111 MB unallocated. Deleting it and trying again only yielded an option to again format it as 111 MB.

I'm going to do a replacement with Amazon and see if it happens with the new one (should have it by Friday or Monday). If it does, I might just have Samsung tech support (or Alienware tech support?) walk me through the software side of the installation.

Almost everything I turned up online was for cases of replacing a drive (i.e., requiring some lengthy backup-creation/migration process) or adding a boot drive—I don't want to do anything superfluous; I just want to add this as an additional storage/non-boot drive and leave my NVMe's as the boot drive.

 

Is it possible you have a fake SSD? Did you buy directly from Amazon or through a market place seller?

 

Your concerns are valid and common, but it my case it works out... here are some reasons why:

- I do not always need the GPU performance, but I always need the cpu performance. With the AGA I am offloading all the GPU heat and power draw, letting the CPU more easily stretch its legs, while remaining less audible.
- The GPU in the AGA is not limited by Dell's unfortunate see-saw of vBIOSes and throttle temperature caps and wattage reductions... it just runs flat out at whatever spec 2080+ you decide to buy and put in. I do a lot of VR with a Oculus Rift S and big throttling dips are killer to the experience... can make you feel sick quickly.
- I am unable to spend what it costs for the 2080/9900k model as a single purchase, but I can spend enough for the lower spec, and then buy the other items separately. In the end yes it is more expensive... but it is a matter of "single item max pricing" that I am dealing with. #CapitalPurchases
- I like the USB ports on the AGA so i can connect a few less cables each time I plug in. The basic devices I use with them don't steal any noticeable bandwidth.
- Even though it is only PCIe x4, it has the bandwidth needed for a 2080 (and even higher end) it seems according to the AGA owners thread and their experiences there. Since I use external monitors with it, there is no "send-the-display-back-to-the-laptop-panel" bandwidth lost.

...More I think... its a fun accessory!

Another user just stated that getting the 9700k and the 2070 gets the best cooling hardware. I can't confirm the CPU portion, but on HID's site it says that 2060 and below have the smaller sinks. They also allow you to buy the heatsink upgrade for lower hardware builds... THAT may be my ticket right there!

 

Really to me the price is prohibitive but as you stated you want less upfront cost and not total cost. It seems by that standard you should do what makes you comfortable.

I will ask though. Why not purchase a 9980hk equipped m15r2 or m17r2 with a 2060? Cpu performance can be decent if you properly cool the cpu. I only ask because it seems you would be better served by a less powerful laptop with an AGA option or a desktop. The a51m is not very mobile in my opinion and can be upgraded likely to the 3000 series when it comes out. It is self enclosed. I understand you worry about throttling but my 2080 doesn't throttle at any temp on 1.5.0 bios and so on.

To each their own mind you. I don't have a dog in the fight. I personally am super wasteful. I own an a51m an m15r2 and a 1080 ti fully watercooled desktop.

 

Sorry, but it ain't gonna happen.

 

I bet if someone was to give same treatment to their 9900K in the 51m, they'd also raise the thermal ceiling drastically.

Spoiler

 

The AGA is a great option and AW has the best external gpu implementation. You loose 8-10% performance of it being in a actually desktop which in reality isn’t bad. It really extends the life of the laptop beyond other manufacturers if your willing to use external monitor.

 

Ehhhhhhhh.... Clevo

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What about Clevo? Have had several. What does it have to do with my post about the AGA?

 

Of course if they keep to this it means you lose all security updates post 1.5.0. It really is a bad situation to cover their failure of design

If it can't properly handle 2080 desktop CPU (and i9) then don't put one in...

 

Since some of you have entered into dialogue with the support team, and they are responding to critique.
I'd pressure them on the ram speeds as well, as they did have ~3000Mhz benches up back in May.
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/7113782

 

5.2GHz o on a 9900k... This was surely a test to see how far the motherboard goes, and to test the endurance and stability of the components.

EDIT: This Shaggy is a professional overclocker, wondering if Dell gave him an A51m with the secret sauce so he could set a record.

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I doubt that it held 5.2Ghz during that run, as physics score is too low: 12363
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/7113782

Here's my 5.1Ghz Clevo: physics 12938
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/9517879

 

It's a record for an Alienware and the only one with a valid score in the top 10. With Pascal and Turing vBIOS cancer it is hard impossible to keep the clocks from dropping even when the GPU is nowhere even remotely close to being too hot. This sad situation with cursed firmware affects all mobile and desktop owners. More likely than not, ShaggySVK was using cold air (or something similar) to keep the CPU and GPU clocks from imploding due to heat. The next highest run with an Alienware is spot #13 at 11664 by @iunlock. Everything else in the Time Spy top 20 for 9900K and 1x 2080 notebook is a Clevo.

 

Heck, you don't even need the external monitor

 

They gave me the exact same response via Twitter, more or less it is what it is, move to 1.5.0 if you don't like it.

I did watch a video last night about the new Asus Mothership and I'm sure @B0B mentioned it having a 75c limit under load. Might need to re-watch it to confirm but almost certain thats what he said.

EDIT: it has been confirmed the Asus Mothership runs with a 75c GPU limit only via the silent mode.