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

Correct, remember this is a fresh clean install of windows 10 pro and I have administrative policies to stop windows from doing anything I don’t tell it to. I don’t use cortana, no windows account sign in, only local logon account, nothing auto updates, Microsoft store adds and updates blocked, No Dell auto update software.

Nothing changes on this system unless I do it.

Your environment may be different your system may react differently.






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You can still install the 200w vBIOS on this laptop, it just no longer comes from the factory with it. It doesn't play well with the latest BIOS revisions though and causes aggressive throttling. If I were planning on using the 200w variant I'd be rolling back to 1.5.0.

 

That's the way I roll too, but for some reason I'm having issues getting the touchpad working as I would like.

Right now: New LTSC install and I only get PS/2 Compatible mouse.
Even without Lenovo drivers I get the Precision panel but it has no effect until I also install the Dell touchpad driver.
No internet access and nothing plugged in except 1 psu.

If I ask Windows to update Synaptics it just goes back to PS/2 Compatible.

 

Ended up rolling back to the 200w vBIOS as well. Played a lot tonight and wow, didn't know what I was missing. Not sure how much the extra 20w is doing for me particularly but the thermal limit being lifted is a noticeable boon, and not getting throttled out of nowhere feels nice.

Can't believe these newer BIOS options actually exist.

 

Glad to see you're happy with it. Any idea what panel you have or even roughly when you purchased yours?

 

No idea and not sure how to tell. I bought mine at the end of November so it'd be the most recent part theyve sourced I suppose.


Managed to hit #8 on the Firestrike Extreme leaderboard, #1 for Port Royal, and #28 on the Time Spy leaderboard with my max stable clocks (for a 9700k + 2080 notebook). Very happy with that performance and the thermals I'm capping off at when reaching what I think I can reliably push out of my little box of silicone.

 

Curious - was the VBIOS limit for power just for the 2080 or was there also a power reduction for the 2070?

 

G-Sync still definitely works as well? Likely you have the Chi Mei panel. Some excellent results, what OC/UV have you used on both the GPU and CPU?

If you mean the BIOS thermal limit which was set to 75-78c I'm sure its across the board but I could be wrong. If you download GPU-Z and open the 'Advanced' tab, under the Temperature Limit box you should see what the 'current' limit is. If its anything other than 87c then you are probably impacted too.

 

I just happened to have HWInfo up as I responding here after running a Red Dead Redemption 2 Benchmark - and also downloaded GPU-Z after. It appears no thermal limit but a power limit at 120 watts. That being said the GPU clocks hit 1905 max... memory clocks show correctly at 7000x2=14000. GPU-Z shows the GPU clock at 1440 boost, not sure why HWInfo clearly shows the GPU clock hitting 1900+.....

 

Never disappeared in my control panel (I even reinstalled drivers) and the GSYNC pendulum test still detects and activates GSYNC properly, so I'm fairly confident that it's working.

I have several profiles set up at the moment for OC/UV.

1 - Warm Overclock; 5.1GHz, 1.24v, -60mV offset
2 - Cool Overclock; 4.9GHz, 1.12v, -100mV offset
3 - Power Saver Underclock; 4GHz, 1.1v, -100mV offset

I use 2 95% of the time. 1 if I do a stream and play at the same time. 3 for if I leave my PC on overnight to download something and just want it running on as little juice as possible off of 1 brick. Keep in mind this is all through AWCC, which I know is terribly far from ideal, but I really can't be bothered to fuss around with Throttlestop at the moment.

My GPU is running with no thermal limit now, no modifications to voltage, just +185MHz core and +625MHz memory via Afterburner, AWCC turned off for this one.

After the repaste and running on the Performance fan setting, my CPU hits the high 60s~mid 70s in Destiny 2/Final Fantasy XIV over a very extended play session (hours a day, not much else to do when you're unable to work atm). GPU can get toasty at around 75-80C but I'm not concerned with those numbers. Full Speed fans bring it down a little more and keeps things at a more stable, lower temperature, and the noise doesn't bother me much because I wear a headset at all times anyway, but I have a really paranoid thing about fans and I don't want to 'wear the bearings' by running them at full throttle all the time. Probably wrong idea, I know, but I've had a lot of dead fans in the past.

I'm sure if I tweaked things in a more granular manner through Throttlestop and what have you I'd achieve better thermal results, but I'm happy enough with where I'm sitting right now and don't want to play around with settings anymore at the moment.

 

modder ≠ hacker.

 

Excellent nice write-up cheers. I've been messing with my CPU again, currently on 5.0ghz all cores with -110mV. I did have it running for a few days at 5.1ghz with -80mV, however, I had a BSOD whilst gaming (none after several Cinebench or 3DMark tests). So I suspect either the CPU can't hold 5.1ghz or my UV was too low, may need to bring it to around -50 or -60mV similar to yours and re-test for a while.

 

Yeah I found anything much more than -60 to be unstable in some cases of course ymmv and all that. I tried 5.2ghz briefly but my chip can't seem to handle that at all, at least not at a power level I'd ever think about running it at with this cooler.

 

Mine didn't even accept 5.2ghz without UV it just crashes instantly. More than happy with 5ghz if I'm honest.

I might try the BIOS rollback, I'm a bit reluctant due to the potential of losing G-Sync, I understand its not a huge deal due to the spec and panel we have but I'd still like it.

 

Yeah I hear you on that. Paid extra for Gsync and certainly enjoy having it when I'm not hooked up to the external 1440p display. Kinda nutty that their solution to fixing early manufacturing hardware errors was to nerf everyone's machines and call it a day. But I'm late to the party on that criticism.

 

Such an expensive machine. Why would you even overclock it? For a couple of extra FPS Is it worth heating up this laptop which has horrible cooling To begin with? I don’t understand. I have RTX2080ti which I reduce the clock and voltage to help prolong the card.

 

What are your temps like?

 

I'm not likely to be using this thing for 10yrs to begin with, I don't need it to last decades.

These chips are already designed with their hard thermal and voltage limits in mind for a baseline 5 year lifespan at their maximum physically allowed voltages. GPUs in particular can sustain incredible temperatures and still live a long and healthy life.

Most, if not all, of the people in this thread aren't running their A51m's components at full draw to begin with and we're instead getting the highest performance possible out of undervolted components.

Power delivery failures are an entirely different subject but that can be mitigated as well.

Tl;Dr I'm not concerned about the temperatures I'm sustaining and I didn't pay $3000 for this thing to not be able to do what I want to it.

 

Why not overclock it :0 I got my cpu to 4.8 all core, and gpu is at 2000mhz 0.925v and not much heat, have the 190w bios because the 200w seems to make the card get abit to hot tho.

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Would agree with most of whats been said here, I'm not sure who mentioned this as having "horrible cooling", but my temps were never bad, in fact considering the form factor and whats inside I'd say the temps were good. There is always room for improvement from the factory and that's all an overclock and undervolt aims to achieve.

You mentioned downclocking your 2080ti, for me that doesn't make sense as I want my equipment to perform as designed or better from the factory, not worse than base clocks etc. But that's your choice, I'm not going to question it?

 

Yeah honestly I'm probably going to dial back to the 180w vBIOS cause I don't think I'm getting any significant benefit in terms of my max stable boost clock, but 20w is a good amount of needless extra heat.

By the way I think I saw your name on the 3dmark leader boards, nice results.

 

My first thought is hardware, different sourced touchpad panel or just a different revision, but that may or may not be the case, I’ve seen similar issues before on Windows where once a piece of hardware gets a bad driver or wrong driver installed nothing would make it take the correct driver until I manually forced an even older driver onto it.

That’s in effect what this trick is doing ramming an old generic Synaptic driver on to the touchpad and then letting windows update it.

Maybe try looking for a different version of old Synaptic driver and see if you can break it out of its loop.


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Ty :3

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I don’t have this machine but I am
Using a 13r3 with external amp with 2080ti. I undervolted GPU to .793 and set the clock to 1530 and my temps are 56 degrees as suppose to 67 degrees. FPS are still the same and no loss except for temps which is what I am after. I am just wondering why people would overclock it besides those looking for high benchmark numbers. For normal gaming i feel its pretty useless as it only makes components hotter and lessen the duration of the components.

Why are people running these laptops to max on such an expensive laptop is beyond my scope of understanding. If I spent 4-5k on this I would never game with it overclocked

 

Okay. What are the gains you see while
Gaming? I understand for those benchmark junkies but gaming ?

 

I guess you have money to spend like that! For me less heat prolongs components. What gains do you see in terms of FPS? I mean ideally it’s all about FPS. This laptop was introduced for it capabilities of upgrading in the future so many users expect more than 5 years out of
It!!

 

Also just a thought, but you did pick the correct one off the Reddit post right?
There are two drivers listed there and I used the first one.


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There's no blanket answer to how much fps you will get by overclocking. Generally speaking you'll get a measurable performance increase between 3 and 15% depending on the application and magnitude of the overclock.

Additionally, if you were to purchase an a51m under the premise that you'd be upgrading it in the future, you would likely in fact be upgrading it and not using the same parts for over 5 years, otherwise there was little sense buying a machine based on your ability to upgrade it since you decided not to upgrade it.

I myself just wanted a powerful workhorse that can adequately replace a desktop system for my current needs, and that's what I've got. It'll last far longer than the hardware in it will remain relevant and I haven't got any fear of it exploding any more so than I would any other pc component that I've ever purchased. Electronics are increasingly complex as the years go buy, thousands of points of failure. They'll fail. Running my card at a few degrees higher temp isn't likely to appreciably decrease the lifespan of my hardware to the point where I'm concerned. As I've said, these things are designed by engineers whose entire job revolves around making a product as powerful and efficient as they can with the tools they have available. They're designed with a number of baseline specifications in mind and those baselines are often measured under the worst case scenario that a majority of end users will not be running their hardware near. Heat and voltage surely affect the life span of a pc component, but after a certain point it becomes a question of how long you actually intend on riding out a single piece of hardware, and how much time you can squeeze out of it before the software becomes too demanding and your experience suffers as a result.

It's not like I've got unlimited funds to throw around to replace my stuff all the time either, I just buy my computer parts with the understanding that anything can happen with these things and set my expectations accordingly.

As for your situation in particular, 67C is well below the recommended operating temperature of any modern graphics card and you have no reason to fear having that thing burn out on you by running at that temperature. It's likely that the reason you're not noticing a difference in performance is due to those egpu enclosures saturating the overall performance of a gpu as a consequence of the way they work. 500mhz would absolutely be noticeable and at the very least measurable in a typical desktop or laptop scenario.

That said your solution is your own and I will not question your desire to do things as you wish. It's your graphics card and ultimately your decision as to what you'd like to do with it. For me, I'd like to get as high a clock speed as I can on as little voltage as possible and leave it there.

 

Okay guys I need help. So I got home from work and wanted to relax and play some games, started playing Car Mechanic Sim 2018 and fps would go from 150 to around 30. Didn't think anything of it, I've heard its not optimized the best, whatever. Then I move onto the Witcher 3, and the same exact thing would happen get around 130 fps and then seriously drop to around 15-30 and stay there. I have a 9900k with 2080, 32gb RAM and the latest BIOS also a .5 undervolt to the CPU. I have no idea. Thank you.

 

Quite honestly, because you can and Dell has made it to support overclocking. I mean I understand your point, but like someone said, you won't keep it 10 years, and I have never ever had a OC' CPU fail in 20 years.... I moved on before then. If it did, hell replace it for a few hundred because by then they are cheap to replace anyhow...

 

Its likely that your GPU is reaching 75c and due to being on the latest BIOS it will thermally throttle the GPU until your temps reach 50c then it will normalise the clocks.

You can download Asus GPU Tweak and increase the limit to 80c, or you can roll back to BIOS 1.5.0 which will remove this thermal limit and throttling.

 

Some folks have experienced problems with both PSU's not being detected correctly always, try remove PSU plugs from the back one at a time so the laptop goes to battery / do a hard shut down on battery / wait 30 seconds / plug both PSU plugs back in and power it up, see if that changes anything.

ALSO.... if that's does nothing two more things to check... Nvidia control panel / manage 3D settings / power management mode / set to Adaptive

And GeForce experience Turn off Whisper Mode.

 

Is there any guide on how to rollback to the bios? I am very Noob when it comes to this type of stuff.

 

As mentioned by @Lopt just double check power supplies are definitely connected, failing that you can rollback the BIOS. I haven't done it yet so no idea how hard it is. The guide is below and was put together by @S.K

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ny-alienware-to-locked-lower-versions.829542/

 

Is Asus GPU Tweak a run once and forget it thing? or do you need to set a task and have it reset the GPU limit at each boot ?

 

So ive had this laptop for a month now and from the benchmarks ive been seeing online ive been playing my games on it without worry but about a week ago i tried benchmarking this beast and i was sorely dissapointed. Between numerous online benchmarks ive seen online and on this thread my 51m has been severely under performing. Now dont get me started about downgrading my bios cause i already have and I was quite surprised that when i forced downgrade it to 1.3.2 that the 9700k it came with was not supported and yes i disabled capsule updates on the bios. I spent a good portion of my day last weekend trying to fix this thing cause it wouldnt post and the led malfunction light was telling me that it wasnt detecting a cpu. So i installed the 8700k from my desktop on there and thank god it worked. I though i just bricked my $4000 laptop.

Ive also installed the 200W vbios for the 2080 on it and still the performance was awful. Comparing it to a desktop rtx2080 from online benchmarks put it at around a 20% deficit compared to its desktop brethren. And no gents it is not thermal throttling the 8700k I installed in this puppy has been delided and has liquid metal applied to it. Im seriously thinking of selling this monstrosity that dell calls a desktop replacement. Im running on the latest nvidia drivers too.

All the benchmarks ive tested ran with the games ultra preset. What really concerns me is that the AC odyssey and Total war: Three Kingdoms result were really sub par compared to a desktop RTX 2080. The AC dyssey benchmark is equal to a 2080 max q and the Total War benchmark isnt even in the same ball park as a 2080. A desktop 2080 gets about 85-90 fps avg on the battle benchmark and im getting around 60 which equates to a desktop 1070.

Ive checked the DGFF graphics card and it has the updated mosfets in it. Ive also disassembled the laptop and reattached the power brick inlets because i thought that it might have had a loose connection. Even after all that the performance just wasnt there. As a last ditch effort ive come here to voice my complaints hoping that other people out there might be able to fix my issue. Maybe its just me and i was expecting way too much out of this laptop but this is not the desktop replacement weve been promised. Worse comes to worse im just gonna contact dell and ask for a replacement; good thing i bought that premium plus warranty... smh...

EDIT: the 8700k is running at 4.7ghz and the 2080 is overclocked at 125/750 on core and mem which equates to a 2ghz turbo boost while running these benchmarks.



here are some screen shots of some of the benchmarks ive ran:

 

You can set a profile and then change the app settings to run when Windows starts and thats it. Similar to how HWInfo64 works etc.

 

Hi there guys i just choked down 4000 for a 9900k 2080, was wondering what at this point the best bios-vbios combo would be in regards to optimal temp-performance in your direct opinions? 1.5.0B/vB190w?

 

On mine I set the GPU temp limit to 80 however it actually only got me to 75 in tests and in game it did do something never seen 75 before, which BIOS and VBIOS you run these days?


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Of course I could have done it wrong, never used GPU Tweak before.

 

I'm on the latest 180w vBIOS and BIOS 1.7.3.

Have you checked using GPU-Z to make sure the 80c limit is recognised there?

What I've noticed is that if I set it to 80c HWInfo64 never shows it hitting 80c but instead it'll show 79c at which point I assume the throttling kicks in.

 

If you revert back to BIOS 1.5.0 then 190w or 200w are probably best in terms of performance. However, as @Docsteel mentioned a few pages back, there isn't a great deal of performance difference between the 180w and 200w vBIOS' on the 1.5.0 BIOS, certainly not enough of an upgrade to warrant the heat thats associated with the additional wattage.

 

Ok so it sounds like a possible project rollback to 1.5.0 and don't worry about the VBIOS I imagine I am on the 180 I think that's the latest.

 

Yeah rollback to 1.5.0 what what i was thinking maybe try out the 190w and meet in the middle and see how it goes, thanks

 

Just be aware of potentially losing G-Sync, if you have a Chi Mei panel. This happens as the newer panel wasn't part of the Dell inventory when the 1.5.0 BIOS was released.

Yeah, good starting point and you can then mix and match if needed to find the best performing vBIOS for your use case.

 

What’s the process for downgrade the VBIOS ?

Anyone tried 190 VBIOS with BIOS 1.8.1 yet ?




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There isn't a process for the vBIOS change, its just a case of running the .exe or whatever it is.

 

Testing the 51m now. Is this laptop really this gimped?

9900k and 2080 LM on both.

Bios 1.8.1

Chi Mei display CMN175F

gpu wattage 180w

GPU temp limit at 75c? That’s sad and Asus GPU Tweak II doesn’t want to bypass it either.

Is this the current state of this aesthetically gorgeous machine?

 

Welcome to the party B0b, and yes sadly.

 

The thing that I keep coming back to as I think this through is this.... the limits I am hitting on BIOS 1.8.1 and VBIOS 180w are POWER and VOLTAGE limits …. not Temp thanks to the gimped BIOS, if you add more power to BIOS 1.8.1 using 200w VBIOS ( I just tried this ) you hit hard throttle and GPU drops, now I understand that BIOS 1.5.1 does not throttle TEMP … but with 200w BIOS we all already know this box can't cool it's self fast enough to keep from hitting TEMP throttle at 200w or possible burning the card / so rolling back to 1.5.1 with 200w is sounding like a no go worst of both situations, so with 1.5.1 and 180w VBIOS GPU can get hot if it wants but will still hit POWER and VOLTAGE limits I assume ….. is that about how we see it ?

I can't decide which bad choice I want to make today LOL

 

Wow I’m surprised this hasn’t blown up my email and comment section.

Alright I’m going to very likely have some critical things to say in the Smackdown review coming up. I don’t like to rip something apart but these aren’t cheap and the GT76 I reviewed I had several comments on how the AW51 was so much better.

Honestly, it was love at first site, but this isn’t much more than a pretty face and I’ve come across too many of those in my youth.

Just look at it!!