I am officially a new owner of a brand new 17 !!! :) I need some questions answered !!

I went to another FutureShop and they did a price match with the web site AlienWare.ca so I am now a proud owner of a 17 !!!

I have some questions for you guys:
-I have the 750Gb hd + 64gb mSATA SSD caching: I am really not sure what it actually does, where can I find info for that ?
-Can I change that caching SSD and use it as a standard SSD (install my OS on it)
-I tried playing a little bit of Diablo3 during the night and I notice that every time I would hit a group of mob, the laptop would lag 1 or 2 sec which is REALLY annoying. Do you think I need to update the NVIDIA driver ? (I didnt update anything yet)

All in all, that laptop is just great but to be honest, the lag it does every now and then is so anoying that if I can't get rid of it I might just return that machine, which would be really a shame !!!

Thank you for you help !

 

Few things,
the 64gb ssd can be used as your OS drive if you want. You just need to go into either the intel control panel ctrl+i at start up and change it, or its under the intel control panel in windows (bottom right corner arrow thing next to the clock)
The cache drive is actually pretty neat, it takes all the things you use the most and puts them automatically on the ssd. That way you dont have to pick and choose what you can fit on there.
As for the lag, the 17 is a beast, and in order for it to play well you have to plugged into a wall. THe system downclocks everything on battery as it pulls too much power to run on battery while gaming.

 

Thank you, you just confirm what I just read, that the caching works great (which would explain why I have incredibly fast booting time for a mechanical drive !! LOL) so I will keep it that way. Thank you.

For my lag, I am always playing with the laptop plugged in. It was...

But from what I understand, there is some update for the BIOS and probably NVIDIA driver and first things first, I will update every drivers I can before playing with it again this afternoon !! (Yes, I took the afternoon off to "test" my monster !!! LOL)

 

Also, make sure you really are using the gtx780 and not the integrated graphics card. Sometimes it doesn't do the autorecognizing of games correctly and you have to manually create the profile so it knows which graphic card to use.


John

 

You need to update everything, including the BIOS.

 

Thank you guys !

 

Here is how you set-up the games for them to always run on the nVidia.

 

I'm in the same boat on the nividia driver should we go to dell web site or nividia site?

 

If you are having hardware issues I'd troubleshoot with the dell driver. For gaming and everything else, use the Latest Nvidia Driver.