M14X Shuts Down on Battery

Holy cow! Can anyone confirm the above??? This wud b impressive if it works!

 

This is what also Dell did.

9 Set (Graphic Processor State) Nvidia Graphic Settings to Balanced for Battery

I would like to see some more reference regarding performance.

Playing on battery while the Nvidia chipset is on balanced never was a problem.

SteveXowens 'forces' the CPU to constantly give more power. The lower end being 90% rather than 5%.

7. Set PROCESSOR POWER MANAGEMENT TO MINIMUM 90 AND MAXIMUM 90 PERCENT FOR BATTERY. (For Steady FPS)

While his workaround have uses, Dell could have made a better one... Dell are the one making money on this computer.

 

What we are doing wrong is that we wanted to play games with the Nvidia chipset was on highperformance, or speaking for myself atleast at higher performance than balansed settings gives.

The post I made above, the one I deleted, was a try from my side to see if there was a sweet spot where it still would have been possible to run Nvidia on high performance and the CPU at a lower rate.
It was futile so I deleted it. I did not matter if I set the CPU at 50%, when I ran a GPU stress test the computer still shut down. My conclusion was that the GPU alone is enough to stress the battery to the point it shuts off.

(I would suspect that it would be possible to run the GPU somewhere beetween balanced and high settings.)

 

It sucks that we have to literally change the options of the game every time we unplug the laptop. It's kinda like having 2 different laptops. But I have a question, which might sound pretty dumb, but how can laptops like Asus G53SW with a 6-cell battery and a GTX460M not have a problem like this and the M14 with an 8-cell and GT555 literally give way when under load? I mean I guess it's in the motherboard design or something since it's a 14" laptop? Sorry if it's a stupid question. Thanks.

 

cause the G53SW properly locked down the GPU to underclock when on the battery. The m14x didn't properly lock down the GPU with the older BIOSs, and some m14x owners tried to force the GPU to run at full speeds on the battery - causing it to well... you know

 

So does this mean that the G53(or any other gaming laptop on battery) will also experience these massive drops in fps when on battery? I mean now that the A03 BIOS fix was released with the downclocked GPU on battery, there are reports of massive drops in fps..Is this the case for other gaming laptops when gaming on battery?

 

An ACER for ½ the price will outperform M14x when you run on battery. If I was in charge of the development of M14x I would feel ashamed, honestly.

 

Yes. But please do read on.

This is the crux of the problem.

As mentioned previously by the good folks here, it is not uncommon, or rather a necessity, for gaming laptops to downclock the GPU while on battery. This obviously causes a decrease in gaming performance. The asus G53 does this, Sager does this, but that is not the issue of contention with Dell. The issue is that the bios update by Dell for the M14x cripples the GPU so much so that, as erephus and many others have kindly pointed out, an Acer (or any old/new other brand name laptop with substantially lower specs) for half the price of M14x can outperform the M14x on battery. If somebody really wants to game on the go on battery, M14x is not the laptop to buy. He or she can get better performance on the go by buying another cheaper laptop.

This renders the tagline by Dell "Annihilate from Anywhere" and thus the biggest selling point of the M14x obsolete.

 

Wont link the thread since I didn't realize the dude was banned here but he scores a 1392 in 3dmark11 on the battery balanced profile. Is this not higher than the m11x in any form?

 

Does this really mean that people like me who are looking to buy the m14x are in for trouble because of the massive frame drops the new bios update brings??

If yes, then officially the m14x is not worth it anymore.

 

I honestly don't see this as too much of a big deal. I mean who's really going to game hardcore for just an hour or less? Chances are you'll be plugged in anyways. I already turned off charging and kept my battery at 45% since I'll only be gaming on AC. I mean the ability to game on battery would be cool but for anyone saying that they got screwed over because they can't game for 1 hour is just crazy. If there's a time when I won't be on AC is when I'm at school, and I'm certain that I won't be gaming when i should be taking notes. If you can find a 14 inch laptop that games better on battery then props to you. But will it game the same when plugged in? If I never read this thread, I probably wouldn't even know about the problem since I don't even dare try to have a Starcraft 2 match or enter a raid with a short battery life.

Obsolete applies to every slogan from every company that overestimates their product. People shouldn't be buying a product off a tagline in the first place.

 

But the tagline sure is misleading if you look from the customer point of view.

 

You can't just point out the shut down issue then, the screen is really reflective so you can't be gaming in the park during a nice warm summer day either. Either way, to me this is a moot point as if I'm anywhere besides a friend's house, hotel, or my home, then I won't even be carrying this thinking that I can game everywhere. Even if I planned to game on battery, I wouldn't do it without my AC adapter nearby.

 

How about a four hour plane trip? No options for plugging it in, imagine you're gaming and the computer shuts off. No screwdriver to dis/reconnect the battery as TSA would probably consider it a weapon, no outlet, so you'd be left w/out your computer for the rest of the day till you can get to an outlet.

Honestly it's not a huge deal for me since I do most of my gaming at home, but the fact of the matter is that it was advertised to game anywhere, yet it's incapable of being even a decent gaming machine unless it's plugged.

 

four hours? I am flying from europe to asia that is 10 hours!
Luckily I shopped around and find a flight with Airbus A380, power outlet is standard on every seat

 

10 hours is rough...10 hours with a power outlet, not so much have a nice flight

 

Well really what I actually wanted to know was that should I go forward and buy this system?

Or wait till a more potent solution comes out? (Highly doubtful)

 

Don't plan on gaming plugged in on an aircraft. In my experience most of the outlets on planes shut down if you try to draw more than 40 or 60 watts. I usually have to turn off battery charging (in bios) to prevent the circuit breaker going off. On most of them now the circuit breaker resets automatically if you do exceed the current - 150 watts or 180 watts? Forget it.

 

game on IGP? My m11xr2 did fine on nVidia GPU...

 

Even with an M11x, you can only game for a maximum of 2 hours, now in my experience I have been able to "satisfy" my gaming hunger in this time, but really the battery option for me is mostly when you have to browse when your lying down in bed (if you know what I mean. Kidding ) and when in school which really means I won't be gaming. Sometimes though, when I'm too lazy to unpack the AC adapter, I do game on battery and when it runs out, then i plug it in lol, that's probably the only case when I do actually game on battery. According to some posts here, all gaming laptops (which are all 15.6" above, not including M11x of course) "power down" when on battery, it just so happened that our 14" gaming laptop loses too much juice. Personally there's so much more to the M14x than the performance alone (which isn't bad at all), so I don't see the gaming on battery issue a big enough factor to reconsider getting one of these. It was a bug that Dell fixed quite quickly, well at least they did something right?

 

So I'm wondering if you all are having this same experience with the battery in the M14x. When I have my laptop unplugged and completely off (shut down not suspend or hibernate), the battery will discharge slowly over time. It was fully charged last night and this morning I woke up to it being 95%. I didn't power it up for a day after having it fully charged and it powered up with only 75% charge. I can't seem to remember any of my other laptops discharging this quickly before. At least not when they are completely off. If I leave them suspended then they would.

 

I was wondering if the bios fix solved the issue with the refresh rate changing to 40hz when on batter or do you manually have to change it to 60 hz still ?

 

Get the latest Intel graphics driver and it fixes that...

I must of mentioned that like 100 X on this forums lol

 

LOL. Must have missed it. Thanks a lot for the info. I'll have to update mines when i have the time.

 

wow this sux I just made had this happen to me with CIV5 this is bad so I have to update the drivers right?

 

Do you guys recommend installing all the new drivers? I think I read somewhere that the new drivers make things worse in some occasions?

 

Im thinking about getting this laptop for potability however im not looking to play games on battery. My question is what if the AC adapter came unplugged? Would the performance drop until I plugged it back in or stay bad even after plugging back in the adapter?

 

It should go back to high performance after plugging back in. I've done that once and didn't realize the performance stutter too much til after a while. I thought that the computer wasn't really able to handle some parts of the game at first. I accidentally pulled my computer too far from the plugs reach. Trying out that APB Reloaded haha.

 

If your gaming then yeh. It will drop to regular battery mode. If your doing stuff like photoshop and stuff like that on battery, you won't notice anything. It's just gaming you'll notice the sudden drop in fps. I have this laptop and I do normal stuff on battery like photoshop, youtube, and internet browsing and it's perfect.

 

So, the M14x has been shutting down because of too much power draw on the battery? I see that Alienware has added an option for an i5 processor, which draws 10W less than the i7s (~35W vs. ~45W). Is this enough of a difference to prevent a crash while playing on the battery, without downclocking the GPU a whole bunch? And what about turning off other power-hungry options, such as screen brightness or 3G/Bluetooth?

Thanks in advance.

 

I think someone asked almost the same question a while back. And the answer is that the GT555M at 100% itself is enough to overpower the battery. I believe changing the processor to an i5 still isn't enough to balance things out..I think someone with an i5-GT555M setup was still experiencing these problems, forgot the laptop he was using though..The GT555M is just too power hungry for the battery to handle. I doubt tweaking settings such as the brightness or anything will help, you can try it though.

Hope this helps. Cheers.

 

thx for the post

 

If u manually set the clock speed to a lower speed then it won't shut down. I had successes with 450Mhz.

More here

 

How are fps on 450Mhz compared to the Dell fix which is 200Mhz or something?

 

Didn't run it on battery too much but I did run 3DMark11 on it and here are the results

 

How and where can I see my actual BIOS?

 

Now this is an old thread but I just received my M14x just over a week ago and have had many problems with the drivers. I got that mostly sorted out, and i'm sitting on my laptop unplugged browsing the internet and it shuts off!
Have not had a single problem like this yet, and the battery wasn't dead.
Suggestions?
I'm going to recharge battery and try again, but I have no clue what would have caused this as it was working perfectly fine unplugged for over a week.

 

Check to see what BIOS you are running. After A01 the issue was resolved.

 

Running A08, what came with it when I received it.