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

It is a looker … and all of us here are trying are best to get something like exceptional performance out of it, honestly if you run it the way it ships ( if you get a decent factory paste and pad job ) its a great laptop and MOST people are going to be very happy with it, average joes upgrading from typical past generation gaming laptops ( I was one of those to begin with coming from a Predator Helios 300 ) but this forum woke up the OLD Dave and now I can't stop tinkering with it until its best I can make it.

For people like most of us here it's a beautiful but handicapped child, a few have dumped and ran I can't blame them, but a lot of us here can't leave it all alone.

 

Uncorked in BF5 the CPU hits 100c of course pulling some savage wattage. Max fan of course. The gpu eventually hits 75c and throttles the performance from well above 100fps to 60 average with the GPU clock around 500mhz. It does the same thing running one PSU which I expected.

I’m sure I can dial this in to be acceptable but this definitely throws a wrench in the fan for testing three laptops to do battle against each other. Yeah I know 1st world problems lol.

I’m just shocked. After you see this in person you don’t want its competitors. Then I began to benchmark it and of course it’s fine because, well benchmarks. But gaming in Overwatch after 20 minutes I hit that GPU temp limit before I realized it existed. I thought it was a PSU problem. But a quick GPU-z check revealed the truth. Tried all of the performance settings to see if the limit changed like does on the GT76 followed by the Asus GPU Tweak where I was hopeful.

I had no idea you folks were working with these limits. You’re all saints

 

Yeah it's insane honestly. Shouldn't have to roll back the BIOS to remove the limit but I guess it's what Dell intended. Can say that I don't regret removing the temp limit at all via BIOS rollback but I did restrict the GPU back down to 180w since I decided that I couldn't really notice a difference in stability between the 180w and 200w vBIOS but I did notice a difference in temperature,.

Have played for over a dozen hours now on the older BIOS and I haven't had the 500MHz throttle since, so I'm happy.

 

Yes...its a joke. Hence the inclusion of every cliche attack/compliant of the 51M...

 

That’s where I’m at now rolled back to BIOS 1.5.0 - stayed at VBIOS 180W

Tried VBIOS 200W all it got me was more heat.

I did have to disable G-SYNC otherwise intermittently black screens even though GeForce control sees it’s supported.

No loss at this refresh rate.

Initial conclusion is I’ll stay with this for now and play some games

ALSO as a side note I’m seeing better graphics, I didn’t know 3DMark Time Spy was supposed to have Volumetric fog !

And more particle physics as well in everything, they way they ship this laptop the graphics are seriously impacted.

It should be a crime.


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It is essential to run 1.5 Bios. Anything else cripples it

From my experience the stock VBios is fine. I do not really know what they changed around... but it shouldn't matter much due to Nvidia's 2100 clock limit.

 

I have read every message in this thread, and there are a lot of very knowledgeable and helpful people here, I have learned and relearned a lot with this laptop, Ok here is the way I see it,
Right now the best we can do is Downgrade your BIOS to 1.5.0 (simple procedure) stay with the current 180W VBIOS ( this box can't move enough Air to cool an i9-9900K let alone the RTX2080 at anything close to full tilt ).
Clean install of Windows 10 / disable capsule updates ( to keep Dell from forcing current BIOS back on your machine ).
Go into AWCC ( Alienware command center and DISABLE GPU overclocking ) *IF* you are running an i9-9900K I would recommend DISABLE CPU overclocking as well, only use AWCC to control FANS and LIGHTS.

Install ThrottleStop and undervolt CPU -100mv is a good place to start and works for most / test your cores and see what you can set for TURBO and maintain acceptable CPU Temps,

Install Afterburner and use it to control the GPU, +130 CORE and +100 MEMORY seem to work for me and others your mileage will vary based on silicon lottery.

Bench test ! and confirm stable / if glitch's or lockups / back it off by 10 or so until stable.

*IF* you are lucky enough to have a binnned i9-9900KS ( as I do ) your life will be easier the KS runs WAY cooler than the K and IMO takes some of the load off of the overloaded TIM.

It's a shame the KS was not available and chosen as the main CPU for this laptop during design, IMO with the reduced heat from the KS Alienware engineers would have been able to make this work and crafted a good BIOS for KS and RTX2080 and it would have been the laptop we expected or at least a lot closer to it.

The rest of the folks here will advise if I misspoke or missed anything, but I think that's the gist of it.

It's still a great machine once you tame it, and I don't regret buying it one bit.

Bring on CyberPunk 2077 !!!

 

I just tried the 200W VBIOS tonight and its too hot, 190 will not be much if any cooler IMO stay with the 180W VBIOS and BIOS 1.5.0 it seems to be the sweat spot.

 

Apples and oranges I suppose, but, I just thought it interesting that the 2060 default temp limit is 87c

 

I just had a strange shower thought, what if all this gpu tomfoolery done by dell is just a subtle way of encouraging users to buy the graphics amplifier and use a desktop card?

 

I seriously think without a doubt its because 51m's were blowing up left and right and they had to do something about it. As for my recent post about the laptop performance being sub par i recently checked my mother board and it seem that i have the 1.0 revision. First batch area 51m's had revision 0.2 that was made by the same manufacturer:tripod. My best guess is that this new motherboard revision is somehow responsible for the performance loss in the current batch of area 51m's. I can almost guarantee that if i had my hands on one of those earlier motherboard revisions id see my performance sky rocket. Also this motherboard has the NIKOS mosfets as opposed to the AON ones which were deemed to be faulty.

 

Yup, not a total n00b.
1.- My touchpad will not work w/ the Lenovo driver.
2.- When I update the driver via windows internet search, it gets the default Dell one, and then the Precision panel has no effect on the touchpad.
3.- HWID is:
HID\VEN_DELL&DEV_08C4&Col01
HID\DELL08C4&Col01
HID\*DELL08C4&Col01
HID\VID_06CB&UP:0001_U:0002
HID_DEVICE_SYSTEM_MOUSE
HID_DEVICE_UP:0001_U:0002
HID_DEVICE

 

Looking forward to the review @B0B it will be good to share with Umar and the others on Twitter to let them see how aggressively this throttles with the thermal limits on the newer BIOS'.

 

Also mention in your smackdown that Dell won’t give out support for last chips for Z390 chipset.... http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...-owners-lounge.826831/page-1773#post-10981723

 

Man, i feel for you guys, i've read alot of these threads, and from what i can see, i am very glad i didn't go with the 9900K + 2080 Combo.

When i first bought mine my first initial thoughts was, how the hell are they gonna handle the heat with that combo, and i just didn't believe it, so i opted out for a 8700K + 2070 Combo, and i have had zero issues. I run a -126mv undervolt and even if i max stress test with furmark 100% GPU/CPU Pegged, for 10 min, with Performance Fan mode enabled, GPU never goes higher than 65c and CPU never goes higher than 80c ... In normal AAA games, i am usually around CPU - 72c and GPU 58c while running them.

But what brought me here tonight is a question lol, so i did see a VBIOS update for the RTX2070, which i am now thinking that its probably an adjustment for the same voltage/heat issue with the 2080, im guessing for those folks that did a 9900K + 2070 combo.

Should i just leave my VBIOS alone? what was the factory VBIOS for voltage? 200w or 180w ? for the RTX2070 that is.

Currently running 1.7.3 BIOS and RTX 2070 VBIOS is whatever the hell it first came loaded with when it first released.

Also i hope Dell fixes this issue for you guys stuck with this throttle gpu issue, does sound like for you 1.5.0 is best ... Good Luck Gents ! appricaite the time.

 

I can't remember what the stock vBIOS was for the 2070, but I do know that changing the vBIOS won't change your thermal limit, that comes as part of the BIOS.

 

Ok, good to know, i suppose i will just leave my VBIOS alone, If it aint broke dont fix it i guess LOL thanks for the reply man !

 

So I lied, I ended up playing with Throttlestop after all. Recorded a bunch of test results. Not the most scientific tests ever but interesting to look at nonetheless.

I set up several profiles at increasing frequencies and power levels. Tunes each until it was unstable then dialed it back until I got no errors in any of my tests. Tests included the built in test in Throttlestop, Cinebench 20, Firestrike Extreme, Port Royal, and Time Spy (3 runs of each per frequency, averaging the results). Aside from Time Spy, none of the 3D mark tests use the CPU all that much (Port Royal is practically a GPU only test), but I added them for at least some synthetic look at performance impact of CPU clock speed in games. I also recorded the GPU temperatures to see if there was any noticeable difference in GPU temps as the heatsink becomes saturated with heat. Will be using these profiles as I play over the next while and monitoring for further performance inconsistencies or instability; real world results will likely be different from the benchmarks. In any case, here's what I've got.

Underclock
Frequency: 3600MHz
Voltage: 1.0601V
Offset: -150.4mV
Cinebench: 2588 (54°C)
Firestrike Extreme: 11447 (41“C CPU/66“C GPU)
Port Royal: 6560 (41“C CPU/69“C GPU)
Time Spy: 9894 (51“C CPU/71“C GPU)

Overclock Cool
Frequency: 4800MHz
Voltage: 1.0771V
Offset: -165.0mV
Cinebench: 3648 (82°C)
Firestrike Extreme: 11791 (67“C CPU/66“C GPU)
Port Royal: 6573 (51“C CPU/70“C GPU)
Time Spy: 10321 (74“C CPU/72“C GPU)

Overclock Warm
Frequency: 5000MHz
Voltage: 1.1055V
Offset: -100.6mV
Cinebench: 3758 (97°C)
Firestrike Extreme: 11736 (77“C CPU/68“C GPU)
Port Royal: 6570 (51“C CPU/71“C GPU)
Time Spy: 10394 (84“C CPU/72“C GPU)

Overclock Hot
Frequency: 5100MHz
Voltage: 1.1895V
Offset: -65.4mV
Cinebench: 3769 (>100°C)
Firestrike Extreme: 11921 (86“C CPU/69“C GPU)
Port Royal: 6575 (54“C CPU/71“C GPU)
Time Spy: 10457 (94“C CPU/72“C GPU)

A few interesting things to draw from this (at least, for my machine in my environment with the thermal solution that is currently being used on and in my system):
-For my particular chip, getting to 5100MHz is basically impossible and maintaining it is absolutely impossible with my current TIM. It hits 100C and chokes itself to stay alive in the Cinebench test,.causing it to run at 4700~4800MHz for most of the test despite having significantly higher temperatures than the 4800MHz profile.
-Generally speaking, the increased heat and power draw isn't worth the performance gained by going from 4800MHz to 5000MHz or 5100MHz even in CPU intensive tasks.
-My particular 9700k is greedy, requiring quite a lot of extra juice to eke out an extra 100MHz near the end. Not unusual for CPUs.
-GPU temperature, at least at this level of saturation and this GPU temperature, doesn't seem to be heavily affected by CPU temperature.
-Surprisingly to absolutely no one, DX12 makes much better use of your CPU than previous iterations. Not news, but interesting to see the numbers for this machine.

I'll likely be running my system on the Cool profile most of the time, though if I'm being honest the Underclock profile is tempting for any games or applications that don't draw a lot of power from the CPU to begin with (and it may even be worth it in those that do. I'll get some real world numbers over time). It's an absolutely enormous difference in temperature going from 4800MHz down to 3600MHz, and the loss in synthetic benchmark performance (sans CPU heavy workloads like rendering) is not congruent with said difference in temperature. This doesn't really matter a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, however I certainly wouldn't be running the Hot preset in any scenario outside of these benchmarks, and in fact I may delete it altogether in favor of a chillier 4.5 or 4.6GHz option between 3600MHz and 4800MHz.

I stand by my thoughts on GPU overclocking: get as much as possible out of the GPU without forcing it to throttle heavily and it's off to the races, but this has caused me to reassess my strategy going forward for the CPU.

 

No worries at all and yeah if you're happy there is no reason to change it

 

Excellent post mate, thanks for the input, I might give mine a similar run out.

Do you run static voltages or is that just the average voltages being pulled during testing?

 

That's just the baseline I have it set to in Throttlestop. Still set to adaptive. It will draw more power than that however lowering the voltage this way made a measurable difference in the maximum it would draw. Played with that and the offset to find the best thermals I could at a stable frequency, which ended up having better results than adjusting the offset alone.

Maybe a placebo, but it certainly didn't hurt to play with it.

 

You're running a 2080 correct? I mean those temps look pretty darn good even at the top.... I understand that while benchmarking is fun and fine in and of itself, eking a few hundred points out doesn't make for any significant difference in frame rates... you are running a 2080 though and it doesn't look like any throttling - I thought these were cooking up and throttling almost immediately in any stress test....

While I have a 9700K+2070 and thermals aren't an issue, I wonder how bad it would be throttling-wise with a move to a 2080 down the line. My sincere (and almost certainy in vain) hope is Dell will do the right thing and support the R1 with at least one round of 3000-series Ampere cards which in theory might run cooler...

 

Yeah I'm running a 2080. I can't complain too much about the thermals since I applied nanogrease.

 

That's pretty impressive then - how much did it lower the temps would you guess, and were you experiencing throttling before?

 

I'm not too sure honestly. I was running the 75/78C throttle BIOS before so I haven't got a great frame of reference. It did hit my 75 and 77C targets pretty much constantly when playing Destiny 2 though and throttled considerably.

It's also worth noting that these tests were done on full throttle for the fans. Prolly gain an extra few degrees by using Performance, and I don't think I'd ever game on Balanced.

 

Well, on balanced it pulls power and thus heat down... so I would think its kind of a tradeoff..

 

Does it? I was under the impression that it just affected the fan curve. Interesting

 

Yeah, I thought it was only the cool and quiet profiles that reduced power to the components. I'll need to double check that.

 

Nice temps man, is there any way you can bench odyssey or ghost recon wild lands? Im curious what kind of fps you get

 

One more thing that may or may not matter, my current Windows 10 Pro install was done using a recovery USB and through recovery boot options / wipe and repartition / as opposed to a normal install from media or download.

It’s possible that basic touchpad driver could be different

I’ll check the HWID in a bit when I get back.

ok here it is : ID HID\DELL08C4&COL01

To ME I can't think of any reason why you should not be able to install this driver, other then Windows already having a preconceived idea of what the driver should be, I also do NOT have any Dell update software installed, maybe some Dell ID hooks are still in your registry ?


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I don’t know if anyone watches this guy. He does some great tutorials and explaining. This one is great about installing and tweaking Nvidia gpu/drivers and tweaks.

 

I seem to recall that in reading, and my benchmarks seem to bear that out.

This morning I casually ran Timespy benchmarks with the following results (2700K at 5.1 Ghz, 2070 no OC, power on performance, 1.8.1 BIOS, latest VBIOS):

Balanced-----: 8046 (GPU:8122, CPU:7641)

Performance: 8142 (GPU:8224, CPU:7709)

Full----------: 8177 (GPU:8245, CPU:7813)

My best ever was right after I got the unit back on December 5th using 9/5 BIOS:

Full----------: 8303 (GPU:8401, CPU:7792)

I'd have to dig around, but IIRC Balanced pulls power.... its not throttling from what HWInfo indicates.

 

Since Dell didn’t spend any time tuning the FAN profiles well, the power curves are probably a mess as well, didn’t I see a post or two way back about these profiles being pretty well borked ?


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Definitely looking forward to your tweaking wizardry on this laptop @B0B. Hopefully you can talk some sense into the dell techs as they seem to more or less ignore us.

 

well prepare to be a little disappointed since this is a SmackDown review and not an individual review. I can’t afford to spend all this time with heavy tweaks on one laptop because I have to do it to the other two. The last SmackDown review had 60 hours worth of work and made less than $20 and I have no affiliation with anything so that’s all the money I make and it’s a very poor way to spend your time when you’re my age and have wife and kids

Edit: by “no affiliation with anything” I meant that I have no money coming in from any 3rd party company or laptop manufacturer to influence what I speak.

 

If you're willing to lose G-Sync for a bit...

Downgrade to 1.5.0 and flash 200W vBIOS.

Then unleash the beast..

https://valid.x86.fr/9brbj6

 

How are you at 5.3ghz? I thought you said you cant get past 4.7 without heat up time?

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I'll just leave this here area 51m with 4k panel from ebay

 

AC Cooling.

Do tell me more as I am a fan of 4K displays of the high quality variant

 

Actually not for the faint of heart since it requires some hacking oh and it's an AUO panel 100% RGB

 

Tutorial in the pipeline?

 

You leave ac cooling all times? Lol

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That’s definitely not worth your time then. You’d be better off playing some games or enjoying a family picnic.

 

I rather not but pm if you're interested and I can share details.

 

Need Eagle eyes for that resolution lol

 

Likely only for benching. Unless you like seeing the wall meter spin really fast

 

I was reading all recent posts on this thread about the 200w vBios vs the 180w one.

My area51m is currently running 1.5.x bios and 200w vbios.

Hitting the 86°c after a while... sometimes throttling to 1800+ MHZ instead of 1900+ but not too bad..

I'm thinking of "updating" vBios to the 180w one IF the ONLY thing I get with the 200w vBios is : more heat...

If it can run the same way but with some °c less that will be enough to change the vBios.

What do you think guys ?

 

I’ve tested the 2080 at 150w, 180w and 200w. The performance is close to the same unless you mess the the Voltage Curve Editor. Even then it’s not really anything.

I have the P775 with 150w, AW51m with 180w and the GT76 with 200w. The performance is basically identical. I have all three here right now.

 

Enjoy everyone. I compiled all the stuff needed to drag and drop onto a USB and downgrade your BIOS:

AC Cooling only for benching. I run 4.7Ghz (stock) for 24/7 usage.

Can you PM me the details

 

I've given up, even tried changing the registry.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTP\Defaults\3FingerGestures]
"PlugInID4"="Syntp"
"ActionID4"=dword:00000011

Action 4 seems to be middle click, well at least it is in the 2Finger options and then just replacing all "3FingerTapAction" values w/ a 4 and ensure all 3FingerGestures has an ActionID4, but still the crap opens Cortana.

This is just my OCD trying to get a new build perfect, w/ no Errors in the event log, customized to my preference and performing optimally.