M17x R2 Bios A07 Discussion Thread

I see that Dell just posted a new BIOS for our notebooks.

Appears to be nothing fancy.

I was hoping to see something about the touchpad ect...


M17xR2 A07 System BIOS
BIOS Information:
BIOS Revision: A07
EC Revision: 15.30

Instructions and comments:
1. To install the BIOS, download the executable and run it in Windows and click on the Flash BIOS button in the WinPhlash utility.

A07 System BIOS Release Notes:
1. Added support for the new Intel® K-0 stepping CPUs.
2. Implemented Intel® EMRR support for K-0 CPUs.

BIOS history:
Please see previous BIOS release for their release notes



Drivers & Downloads - Public Sector

 

So erm.. basically it doesn't add much?
I'll be ok with A06 unless it does bring something for performance.

 

Yea, I am staying where I am at. I am still on A05 and it works good for what I do.

 

Thanks for nothing Dell

 

ummm... this sux! I was expecting this new bios version to contain fixes and some major performance increases for our notebooks? I guess I'm sticking with A05 from here on out....unless there's something that I don't know about A07?

btw, does anyone know if this contains a fix for the flickering issue and or battery issues?

 

I hope that the new vbios comes out soon with support for SLI!!!!

 

Unfortunately they didn't fix anything

 

yeh just added support for CPUs

 

This was just a maintenance release required to support some new processor stepping. The next release should have the touchpad polling rate improvements.

 

Right on Brian, thanks for taking the time to clarify some things. Do you suggest installing this bios version or wait for the next release?

 

How do you tell what Bios version you have?

 

So, if this was special enough to come out with a new BIOS version, then what is a K-0 stepping and what makes it so different than whatever steppings the A06 BIOS already works with?

EDIT: looks like it's only i3- and i5- CPU's...

 

Enter the BIOS, it will be right there on the first screen

 

You can also download CPUZ and it will tell you from within Windows.

 

like i said before, if not for virtualization support i'd stick with A02

 

Thanks Brian!!!

 

Still waiting for the fans on wake/boot to be fixed...

 

One of the reasons I want to come back to A02. I doubt they will ever fix it though..

 

You can also just type dxdiag in the search/run window

 

yay! I think I'm just happy that they're taking the time to add stepping support. I think everyone can agree small updates that show egineering interest in fixing problems even if they're not big ones are better than no updates at all.

ie, probally something to do with the IGP in those processors.

 

It makes you wonder who is in charge of revising the BIOS that rarely engineer anything worthwhile as far fixes and improvements . When Dell realize that the current M17x r2 has a lot of flaws it will change to a M17x r3 or M18 r1.

Dell has a long history of not supporting any system for to long, the more problems the shorter the support.

Can anyone say OPTIPLEX.

The 3 stooges could do better.

 

Thanks for the post. I cant wait for the fix.

 

What about the rest of the problems like the SATA performance and the POST issue? (Did you check the SSD issue btw? it's been a week now, what was the engineering's team response?)

 

+1 on those questions

 

It's still on my list of things to do. I should finally get to it tomorrow. Things have been crazy busy lately.

 

I agree. I didnt realize how much of an issue this was until recently.

 

+++++....... for this! the situation as it is. and for those people that still dont agree they shall see.

well if you think that it may also destroy ssds then the issues are worse. two of my ocz vertex ssds died (both had the os on them one after another) suddenly. Lucky i still have quarantee and got them replaced. i really dont think that two different ssds were both faulty.. lets see if this will happen once again.

 

That would suck if it lead to the destruction of the ssd... I hope that doesnt happen..

 

I have dual gskill falcon 128gb raid0 for my OS.

I have SC2 installed on it.

When playing multiplayer, I always come last in map loading. In fact, last night 2 of my friends played against me, and one had a 5200rpm lappy drive with sc2 on it.
He beat me by about 4 seconds.

Something aint right with this HDD controller in the M17xr2. Something bad.

-Ash

 

Could you run a couple of benchmarks and post the results?
It is really bad if two SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration are slower than a 5.2K HDD on a laptop.

 

Ash,

Did you install the rapid storage utility driver after installing the two ssd's?

 

Yes of course

I did a fresh windows install, then first thing I did was install the RST and run ssd tweaker.

I left prefetch/superfetch on however, as I do believe that ram is faster than ssd (could be wrong there but doubt it).

Anyone that says you get more performance when you turn off superfetch/prefetch no matter what drive/s you run is a fool.

Anyway, yeah what benchmarks do you want me to run? I will do some tonight.

-Ash

EDIT:

My hdtach score for sequential read was 506MB/s average from memory and my burst speed was like, crazy high (2 or 3 gig a second) so I discounted that.
This was when I first installed.

 

it's not a performance thing, more of a saving on reads thing I believe. That being said, I leave it on too. SSD's with 3 year warranty's these days are common, and that's all I expect before I run out of space or get a new laptop.

 

Concentrate on your random 4K random reads and writes, huge sequential reads and writes are pretty much useless unless you transfer GB of data every time all the time. The responsiveness of the system derives from the 4K random reads and writes, the IOPS and the access times whice are what this laptop seriously affects.

 

Yeah thats what I gathered.

Still, my random 4k reads should be higher than a 5200rpm lappy drive.

-Ash

 

cystalmark is what you I and several other people have used so far to measure it. I think my Sanforce1200 managed ~ 18-19mb/s and you had the highest with ~ 22mb/s

 

People have to realize that they pay for a very expensive laptop, invest on an equally expensive SSD and they don't get the performance they paid for. All they have to do is to demand from Dell to fix it.
On the other hand, if that's ok with most of the R2 owners here, trust me it will more than OK with Dell...
At least those who read this forum should reconsider before buying an R2 and plan to get an SSD. They can either avoid the R2 for now or buy a cheaper SSD(since they won't see any difference)/ stick with an HDD untill this issue is addressed properly.

 

I would love to call Dell and complain.

But I live in Australia.

Dell Australia has no power, say, authority, or knowledge over any issues or solutions.

Over here, dell is still refusing to give free PSU's to XPS16 owners that got a 90w brick with their laptop.

They are utterly and totally clueless.

And thats if you are lucky enough to talk to someone in australia.

Most of the time, you get connected to a callcentre in india or some other country where english is their 3rd or 4th language, and not only dont know what you are talking about, they dont understand your words.

If they ARE able to escalate the issue... well, they are an outsourced call center company. They dont have dell people on site or dell contacts who can do anything about it anyway (dell australia - no power, no idea).

Unless you are in USA, complaining is useless. Dell Australia are happy to make a sale (NO DISCOUNT FOR ALIENWARE MIND YOU!) but thats it.
From there on, you gotta hope someone in USA has the same issues as you, or it aint getting fixed.

I am personally used to such treatment when it comes to customer support. Every single I.T. supply company in this country blatantly does not follow fair trade law.

When something is faulty out of box, you can walk back into the store the same day and ask for your money back or an exchange (the customer's choice which). Thats the law.
What the companies do?
They send the part to the country of destination and refuse to give you your refund or a replacement. You have to wait 6+ weeks for the repaired part to come back.

And the law just isnt interested in making them follow the rules.

Simply put, Australia sucks for any kind of support. So we hope you guys in USA can do it for us.

-Ash

 

Ashtefere, run a couple of benchmarks and post them here and on the link below:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/19340601/19727976.aspx#19727976 (That's the official Dell support forum)

Calling Dell and report the issue may not give you an instant or short term solution but at least it will be reported/recorded and there is a good chance to be taken into consideration and get fixed eventually. In the very end send an email to a representative.
If everybody waits for someone else to do the job for him/her nothing will ever be fixed.
There are many ways to catch Dell's attention, (other popular forums/sites, press, etc) all it takes is someone to become active and not stay passive.

In the very end, all you ask is to get what you paid for, nothing more nothing less.

 

was it you or someone else that mentioned the drive performance issue to brian? either way he says he's going to start working on it, which is all we can expect

 

Was just about to post that Lozz. I cant remember which thread it is in but I do remember seeing a post from him about tracking down an SSD and working on this? StamatisX? I'll search for it in a bit. I know he posted something about SSDs.

In addition to making it easier on everyone in locating the BIOS threads to post, I stickied the recent BIOS threads for each model so Brian and caes2004 did not have to search (visibility is key, right?)

I'm sure he will be along...

 

After some quick reading, it looks to me that its more an intel thing than Dell/HP/Lenovo.

I think we are best contacting intel and showing them the issues with the PM55 raid controller.

Personally, I think its probably a speed limitation when it comes to IOPS and I dont think any driver update can fix that.

PM55 probably uses a really slow (iops wise) controller to save power.
This is why we need expresscard raid controllers

Still, worth a shot, but knowing dells past efforts - we probably wont even get a response from dell in that thread.

-Ash

EDIT:

Just had a thought.

If someone is game, if they could resector their drives to 4k sector size and re-run that benchmark... if the numbers increase a LOT... we know that the controller is just hitting an IOPS cap.

-Ash

 

It was me, and this issue is reported to 3 different people from Dell, on the official Dell forum you can see:

I was told that it was forwarded to the engineering team. They had 13 days to simply take a look and confirm or deny the existence of the problem. To run a couple of benchmarks, it won't take more than an hour max.

To see the difference take a look at those screenshots:
---------R1------------------R2-----------


Check the total score, the 4K random reads/writes and the access times.
Almost 3x slower the read access time on the R2 and 3.5x slower the write access times compared to the R1. If that isn't an issue I don't know what would it be.

*EDIT*
This is what I found about the chipset's design defects (errata)
http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/specupdate/322170.pdf

 

Not as infamous as the uber-expensive XPS 730X Gaming PC that was wrought with issues, and subsequently dropped like a bad habit. A few simple BIOS tweaks would have fixed the major issues (other makers like ASUS, MSI, etc., patched their BIOS for similar intel-related issues), but Dell, instead, just dropped the unit and stopped (and I mean completely stopped) doing updates in any way. Faulty liquid cooling pumps. Computers that would not wake from sleep. Flakey RAM compatiblity. A mess... Many people with $3000+ PC's are left holding the bag.

Never an official statement of any kind from Dell.

(And now, back to our normal programming...)

 

the same happens to me with cod mw2!

 

And same problem with BFBC2... I'm always last in map loading (although I have far better harware than my buddies)... weird

 

On different games do you still see the same slow performance? I am trying to figure out if it is because of the game or because of the laptop.

 

because of the laptop. maps consist of small files loading during multiplayer. in other words the 4K reading.

 

I went to dig into the SSD issue today and I can't seem to find the link where everyone is discussing the issue. Can someone please PM it to me again and I'll dig into it right away? Apologies for the delay...

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...marks-brands-news-advice-603.html#post6548910
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/t/19340601.aspx