M17x "All Powerful" General Information Thread

nope, tried 3 different nforce drivers and even a fresh install. no options in the bios to change it. no power management settings change it. it's always just bright as hell. the contrast, color and picture is ecellent - probably one of the best i've seen on a laptop, but just too bright for my tastes.

even out the box i couldn't adjust the brightness.

 

the screen dims based on what it is showing, not based on the ambient lighting

For me I first noticed it when looking at emails in outlook with the viewing pane being the majority of the screen. when I had a dark email, it was dim, when I went to another it would brighten again

 

^scook, so you have to have the dimming option on in the Command Center to get the dimming working, right?

 

Jive, sorry to hear this. I know it sucks to send it back and wait for it but dude you gotta do what you need to do to get that fixed. FN keys should be working for dimming the screen... Did you call them? Maybe we're missing something here.

 

are there any measurements to support that? of course if you display a bright page the screen will be bright in contrast to a dark page.

mine shows the bleed at the bottom the same not matter whether a dark or light large window is visible.

it's sad that this laptop doesn't let you control the brightness even though it's got the buttons to make you think you can control the brightness.

heck even the manual says you can. some one screwed up big time in that department.

 

i tried getting in live chat twice today. que'd #2 the first time and when it was my turn all of the sudden no csr's were available.

samething the second time, but i was #1 in the que.

i would have called but i needed to get dinner ready and get my daughter ready for bed.

i'll call tomorrow though. if they say i need to send it in for anything i'll just tell them to take it back and i'll go with a sager/clevo.

i could probably deal with the bright screen, but the rattling fan is a no go. i can replace that myself.

 

I know it was dimming because about 30% of my screen was constant between a light and dark email so I could see the change on that portion

The auto dimming is built into the firmware of the LCD panel and is not configurable anywhere. This is seperate from the FN key dimming or dimming for power settings

 

Hey Jive, my fan was making noises too, today a tech came and replaced the fans, they work perfect now. But like you I cannont dim my screen and it's really annoying at nite. The tech said it was some software conflicting with the dimming feature. Thats all I know.

 

hmm let me get this straight... it is NOT manually dimmable through the FN key? is everyone experiencing this?

Alex

 

I have had no issues manually dimming

 

did they say they'd get it fixed for you?

Alex

 

@scook9 thanks for the response

Alex

 

No, the tech was a contracted person just sent to fix my fan. The dimming he said i'd have to call in.

 

That's too bad... Keep us updated so we know when you fix it. Good luck!

Alex

 

Not sure if this has been posted but it really surprised me when I seen it.
http://samsclub.com/shopping/navigate.do?dest=5&item=441158&pCatg=5860
SamsClub=$2118
Dell/AW= $2574
That's a great deal if you ask me for the same specs.
Must fight the urge to buy.......NNNNNOOOOOOOOO!
I have failed!
I will most likely get one from SAM's soon.

 

Yeah Sam's Club and Best Buy were selling them within a few weeks of launch, shortly after that Microcenter started selling them too.

 

Never seen them at BestBuy and I'm pretty sure they don't sell them there anymore .
I was truly shocked at the savings for the same exact specs when you customize them from DELL/AW.
This is almost too good a deal to pass up.

 

Best Buy doesn't sell them anymore. At least in my neck of the woods.

 

is the tactx kg900 driver for the m17x or is that and external keyboard?

could that fix the dimming issue?

as for the fan they're sending me a new one and they said i can do it myself as long as i have a tech on the phone with me.

just checked seems like the kb is a separate periph...

i think i'll try and reflash the bios (already at a02 though) and then maybe restore from the factory image.

 

scook, just curious, do you have hybrid sli on? i know i turned off the discreet from the get go.

i'm wondering if you can only control the brightness with the 9400.

i'll check it out later tonight. it's my anniversary today, but not much of a celebration since my father in law's dieing from cancer. his birthday is this weekend but we're not sure he'll make it.

 

what I've noticed too was that if i dim the screen while in the bios, the screen will stay dim when windows boots up. But still wont let me dim/undim the screen while in windows.

 

Did you try reinstalling the OSD Software?

 

i reinstalled a from scratch last night after i couldn't get it to work with the factory install nor with dox's video drivers.

 

I have never had to pay attention to it because i was never not able to dim, pretty sure i have done it with 9400m on and off though

 

well, i've got it to work. i enable hybrid sli and discreet graphics in the bios. reinstalled the video drivers. turned on stealth mode and then i could start using the fn f4 and f5 keys. turned off stealth mode and it works in hybrid sli mode.

i haven't turned hybrid and discreet off yet to see if it holds after turning them off.

one thing i have noticed is that scrolling in internet explorer is choppy with the screen refreshing slowly. haven't restarted lately to see if it'll go away.

kinda happy now.

the choppiness went away after restarting ie. so no probs now. and just incase i get flamed for using ie... this is just my 2nd day having the laptop and i haven't gotten to install everything yet, ie firefox

 

nice! good for you! keep us posted!

Alex

 

after about an hour of testing it seems that for the brightness adjustment to work the 9400 has to be involved - at least with my set up and the driver i'm using.

turning off hybrid and using only discreet (disabling the sli in bios) i could control the brightness.

turn on hybrid and enabling discreet allowed me to control the brightness.

turning of the discreet completely and i lose the option to control the brightnes.

i had to reinstall the driver each time i enable or disabled the discreet/hybrid.

so i think i'll keep hybrid sli on just so i can control the brightness - so long as my gaming doesn't suffer from any side effects of the hybrid.

 

^Happy for you. You don't have to send it in anymore!

 

yep, i'm keeping it. the only bad thing is the huge amout of backlight bleed at the bottom of the screen. i don't notice it in games though so no real biggie. just a little disappointed since this is the most expensive notebook i've bought so far and the only one with this amount of light bleeding.

 

you will never find a lcd that is not led and has no bleed.....

 

yeah i know. but this one is the worst i've ever seen. even worse than the cheap vizio tv my wife bought.

now led... man i bought a sxps 13 with the led and that's the best screen i've ever seen.

 

the blead on the M17x is not noticeable unless you are looking at an all black screen.....how often do you actually do this? Other than the Windows Loading screen I never have all black...and I can live with that

 

Just read this on the UK AW site in a review on the M17x:

I hadn't heard of this funtion before... Is it really that much of an issue for people that play games like F3 or l4d?

 

109 pages of M17x LCD talk:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=391325

And the Auto-Dimming thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=414091

 

you are starting to look like Moo, Marvie. Next step is just posting the search bar haha

 

im just going crazy


sorry again for my rudeness lately i have let my emotions get the better of me.



But the LCD dimming is no issue and i play a decent amount of games and i never notice it

 

the dimming has not bothered me either

Take a break some Moo, you got a very nice toy to play with now in the desktop world

 

Does anyone know if the m17x crossfire will have a displayport? It mentioned that it has both HDMI and Displayport in AMD website. I wouldn't mine having the displayport though.

 

the display port is there no matter what the card is....it is built into the laptop chassis/motherboard and is independent of the GPU used

All of the GPUs offered support display port and make it useable however

 

Scook9,

Displayport, not display port. The displayport as the one that came with the new m15x. It has a faster transfer rate of, I believe 8 gbs and has at least 8 channels of audio with video output. HDMI has about 400 mbs transfer rate. I'm not sure about the numbers, but it's close.

I know for sure that m17x has HDMI, but not sure if they will also include a Displayport.

 

M17x has both DisplayPort and HDMI connectors on every model, its part of the chassis/motherboard, this is what Scook was saying.

There is no semantics in what you're saying, both models come with that connection, M15x doesn't have HDMI, however.
See the "Peripherals Ports" section of my post here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=423002

 

what Marvie said

Your own sig picture shows a displayport on a M17x.....3rd plug from the back (left)

 

Thats cool to know. I didn't even know that. The reason I asked was that on the m15x thread, everyone was complaining that they did not get HDMI and got Displayport only, so I assume that since m17x has HDMI, it probably didn't come with a Displayport.

About the sig: I randomly save the image when googling. And my eyes aren't that great and could not distinguise between all those ports. lol Thanks guys.

 

np, glad to help

The issue is that you need costly adapters to make displayport adapt to hdmi/dvi which are MUCH more commonly used right now

 

i did a search, but did not come up with much... can a few people check to see if their m17x defaults to 59hz coming out of games? I can set mine to 60hz, but it keeps bumping it back down to 59hz. not a huge issue and i have read about this "bug" happening in windows 7, but i am in vista. i am on sp2 which is basically windows 7, but that is another topic. i never noticed this before, but it was causing some probles with vsync in call of juarez... anyone else with this issue? i tried riva tuner to fix it, but i sees that 60 hz is already there so it would not set it as an exception...

 

^Yup. I'm on the stock drivers and same thing happens to me sadly.

 

I have had it go to 59Hz in both vista and win 7

 

will be playing call of juarez at a lan this weekend. will see what happens
on your other note, Vista SP2 = Win7....on what planet?

 

Has anyone tried powering the M17X on a plane yet? Do we know if we can use one of the adapters and power this, or does it need more juice than the plane can push out?

Thanks in advance!

 

Vista SP2 runs just as well as Win 7

I have actually not been able to get Windows 7 to use as little ram as I was able to get Windows Vista to use (less than 1 GB for Vista - cant get Windows 7 to go below 1.1 GB)