330 Watt laptop PSU for the m17X? Or extra power input?

Well I've been overclocking and benching this laptop out and I think I've kinda hit the powerwall for it. I don't think the 240watt is supply is giving it enough power to run stable 1ghz+clocks along with TPD cpu overclocking.
I pushed the TPD limits up 10+more watts and I don't think the laptop is getting enough power.
can I buy the M18X 330watt psu and use it for the m17x r4? I need more power.

OR alternatively can I use 2 PSU's for this? like is there an adaptor, I can use a combo of PSU's together to allow it to have enough power for the overclocking I intend to push it? I've got my m14x and m11X charger's still. an extra 60 watts would be great.

How would I go about getting more power for my laptop?

 

FranBunnyFFXII, first plug your laptop into one of the Kill-A-Watt power meters, for instance, run the laptop to max performance in a benchmark or whatever, and see if you're maxing out the 240W supply. Make sure your battery is already fully charged and installed in the machine while running this experiment.

If you ARE maxing out the supply, then people have used the 330W supply and, alternately, two coupled 240W supplies with various models of the M17x. I wouldn't couple the 240W supply with a lower-wattage supply, because there's no realiable way to stop the laptop from drawing too much power from the lower-wattage supply and overloading it.

Anyway, the 330W supply won't just plug into the M17x, and requires mods to do so. Combining two 240W supplies is probably the simpler approach, and requires circuitry to prevent the two supplies from feeding power into each other. For more info, Google:

"imsolidstate" "StamatisX"

I'd like to see a right-angle power supply connector that plugs into the back of the laptop and includes the id chip. That would circumvent all the issues people have had with the 240W power supply not conveying its id to the laptop. Plus that right-angle connector would provide strain relief. Plus you would then be able to plug the 330W supply directly into that connector, and use that supply with the M17x with no additional fuss.

BTW, I would run on a cooler. Also, nice job on the graphics for the decal.

Good luck!

 

It's definitely power. I dropped the OC's voltage down significantly and its stable at 1ghz now. the video card is drawing a lot of power and the TDP is overclocked on my CPU so when they oc together they draw too much power and crash the card. But I pulled the voltage down to minimum for stable OC and I've been stress testing and gaming on the new 1ghz OC all day, its stable
But i'll definitely be looking into getting 2 new 240watt m17x PSUs and building a dual psu box for the laptop so I can push higher overclocks.

 

how electronic savy are you?

if it were me, i would go with the 330w mod. in a nutshell, you are gonna be taking the id chip on the 240w psu and putting it on the 330w psu and grounding another pin. with imsolidstate's fix he outputs around 400w without the notebook shutting down.

more info from imsolidstate Always improving things… » imsolidstate

if u insist on the dual psu, you will be needing to make a diode bridge. from what i've heard, it doesnt actually output 480watts

all of these were tested on a r2, so im assuming it's the same for the r4. however dont take my word for it.

 

I'd just buy one, then connect the second supply to the box via an M17x DC power jack ($7 on ebay). Beware, the new Alienware M17 uses a DIFFERENT 240W supply, so don't buy that.

A single-GPU laptop like the R4 should catch fire long before it draws 480W, so if that happens, please make a video.

 

Would this work with the new m17 model?

330 Watt AC Adapter for Dell Alienware X51 Desktop / M18X Laptop : Computer Accessories | Dell

 

What stops the laptop from just over drawing to much power from this kind of PSU design? Are the mods designed to only allow the laptop to receive a certain amount or ? Am I not even on the right track?

 

link to the item? I couldn't find anything online about dual power supplies in a laptop that wasn't about building one.

 

I also haven't come across anything officially from Dell or otherwise for Alienware laptops and connecting "the second supply to the box via an M17x DC power jack" doesn't make any sense at all. If he means connecting the second PSU to the first PSU by modding the DC jack into it somehow that would mean running them in series and the only way to run dual PSU's are in a parallel config.

That said, I know Clevo make a dual PSU adapter for their 300W PSU. Although you would still need to mod it to accept the Dell connectors. And the prices of Clevo parts as you can see from the links are a bit ridiculous. That would not be the end of it as you would have to mod the 240W ID chip in there as well.

The simplest method imho would be to get the Dell 330W and create an adapter of sorts with the 240W ID chip. That's what my plans are... if my 330W ever arrives That would be the be all and end all to power mods for your system as its been reported to provide up to 440W before tripping.

Also worth noting is that these 240W PSU's are underated. I managed to pull around 285W from it while benching without shutting down and that's with two 7970M's overclocked and a 920XM @ 90 TDP. The GPU's were undervolted to 0.975v though.

 

The amount of power the laptop draws is limited mainly by how much power the processors can draw before they become overheated. The video card and cpu are the largest single consumers of power within the laptop. And virtually all of that power is converted into heat, which must then be dissipated by the laptop's cooling system. The faster the processors run, the more power they draw, and the more heat they generate.

If the cooling system can't keep up, then the processor temperatures rise. Once the temperatures reach a certain level, throttling (reduction of processor speed) occurs to reduce a processor's power consumption, and thus its temperature. If the throttling process fails to limit processor temperatures for whatever reason, then a processor can reach a critical temperature, causing a thermal shutdown in which the computer abrubtly turns itself off to prevent processor damage. So, one way or another, processor overheating will always place a cap on how much power the laptop can draw from the supply.

It wouldn't be unusual for an overclocked laptop with dual GPUs to draw 500 watts, for example, if the power supply can deliver that much power. To provide a sense of how much that is, if you instead tried to draw that much power from a typical 85Wh laptop battery (you can't, because the battery would overheat), you'd have a battery life of about ten minutes. So an overclocked R4, being a single-GPU laptop, will probably draw something less than 400W.

What I meant was that you already have the 240W supply that came with your M17x, so you can just buy one new 240W supply for the M17x instead of buying two of them. Cut the new supply's DC cable, strip the wires on the two resulting ends, and those two ends will go into the box that you're building. Mount a female DC power jack on the box that you're building, just like the jack at the rear of your laptop. Now, inside the box, you'll install the circuitry (diodes) that connects the two stripped cable ends and the female DC power jack. The diodes operate in a particular direction, so be sure not to install them backwards within the circuit. Do the google search I mentioned earlier to get the details of that circuitry. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, even after reading the details from the google search, then don't do what I'm describing -- only follow instructions that you understand.

If you do the above, then you'll have the new 240W supply with a box that you've built installed on its DC cable. It can function as a normal 240W power supply. You'll also have your original 240W power supply, completely intact. If you then want a ~480W supply, just plug the DC plug of your laptop's original 240W supply into the box that you just built, and plug both supplies into AC outlets. Done.

You're still putting the two supplies in parallel, using the same diode circuitry that everyone else uses to couple the two 240W supplies. But you're only butchering one supply to do it instead of butchering two supplies. That's what mounting the $7 female DC power jack on the box does for you. What the diodes do is stop power from flowing from one supply into the other supply, which is otherwise what will happen if you connect two power supplies in parallel with each other. And you get a small voltage drop across the diodes which will reduce the power available from the supply, as pinoy_92 mentions, although it shouldn't make any difference to an R4 since it has a single GPU instead of dual GPUs, and thus probably won't draw over 400W anyway.

Or you can take the other approach of transplanting the ID chip into a 330W supply, as people have mentioned. Just be sure not to damage the chip from the 240W supply while you're de-soldering it and re-soldering it, or you'll end up buying another 240W supply in additon to the 330W supply.

As I explained in my response to Hackintoshihope, you'll probably end up drawing 400W or less with the R4. So if you're coupling two 240W supplies, then that's 200W per supply, so you're running both supplies below their ratings (make sure that both supplies feel equally warm -- if one is substantially warmer than the other, then that indicates that one of the supplies is shouldering too much of the power, and those two particular supplies should not be used together, which is called a load-balancing problem). If you instead draw 400W from a 330W supply, then you're overloading its specified ratings by about 20%. So it will run hot, and likely have a shorter lifespan as a result, with a greater risk of catching fire. Being a computer/electrical engineer, I wouldn't do that, nor would I recommend it. I have a niece whose laptop charger once caught fire, it was a very serious situation, she was very lucky to unplug it before it did significant damage, and that is nothing to mess with.

And, BTW, nothing described in this thread is officially from Dell, obviously. You're on your own, operating at your own risk, potentially voiding your warranty, potentially damaging your laptop, and potentially damaging the power supplies and incurring all the risk that can entail. And running your processors at higher temperatures will likely reduce their lifespan. So you're operating waaaay outside the rails by doing any of this stuff, and don't hold me responsible if you do any of the things described in this thread. I'm personally much more focused on reliability than extreme performance, plus I want to keep my warranty intact, so this is not something that I would do to my R4. Do I recommend that anyone do these things? Nope, but the question was asked so I answered, and it's a technically interesting discussion. If any of this stuff scares you, or you don't understand it, or don't understand the directions people give online for doing it, or you don't feel that you have the skills with soldering, etc., to do it, then you certainly shouldn't do it!

 

I mean to the d/c jack/diodes.
I get all of what you said already and that was sorta the plan.

 

Thanks for the explanation on the power draw of the system. So when doing this your turning the computer into mostly a full fledged desktop? I'm following now.

 

I would recommend checking the power draw with a Kill-o-watt meter as mentioned above. You could be putting too much voltage in the card and causing instability, it may not be a power draw thing. It very well could be but before getting into modding power supplies i would check out the basics. I've seen the killowatt meters at Lowes and Home Depot for around $30.

To me it sounds like you need to graduate to an m18x for more POWER!