M17x-R4 (video) Disassembly to Optical, DIY SSD/MEM/Optical, Performance ScreenShots

-------------------------------------------------CPU ReTIM---------------------------------------------------

I reTIMed the cpu (3610qm) and got a double digit improvement on load temps. The temps were always higher than I was used to with cpus and I wrote it off as Ivy, but they were getting worse and I was given a heads up to really look at them. If anyone is interested to see what the factory paste was like, it is at the 0:30 second mark. A little more tim came out of the tube than I wanted, but I sealed it up and temps were great. A few hours later, I wanted to do it again with less tim. Pulling it showed an excellent thorough spread. This time I made a longer, skinny line and temps are as good, but now I'm sure there is less spillover.

Even though gpu temps have always been great and remain the same, I'm itching to reTIM that just to see if I can reduce high speed fan usage.

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-------------------------------------------------Original OP---------------------------------------------------

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Hello again to the best laptop community. Here is my first video with a new toy. I ordered it as a special deal with an i7-3610qm and 7970m @ 1920x1080. Only a single 750GB spinner, 8GB mem and DVD Optical because I planned on DIY Plextor 256MB SSD, 4x4GB Corsair Vengeance and Sony BD writer.

I found everything about the dis/assembly in the downloadable pdf manual which is well done and informative. Research and some other valuable info was of course found here. A tip of the hat to SlickDude80 and Batboy, but more are getting +rep for their efforts. great community here that I started in with being one of the first to purchase the G73JH back in Feb 2010.

I plan on some gaming vids down the road. I'll just post the Youtube description from here about this laptop and preliminary performance info below it:

Selectable up to 1080p. Some might say I went to the darkside, I see it as they came to the light. I love the soft black feel and look of the R4 (same as the G73), no more loud colors, even the lighted Alien head on top is subdued. Put it together with this beastly 7970m and IB and the price I was able to get, well, here I am.

In this video I introduce my M17x to the tune of "Black" feat. Norah Jones and if any of you just finished Season 4 of "Breaking Bad" like I did, you'll know where I heard it. I point out a couple of cool features, show 2 separate bootup - program open - and shutdown sequences in real time. Then post screen shots of the DIY installed Plextor SSD I scored a good deal on for $200 after MIR and the OEM equipped i7-3610qm. Then screenshots of the 7970m running Heaven 3.0 and 3D Mark11 Performance and Xtreme settings with the stock 850/1200 and OC 950/1450 clocks.

Then I bust the puppy open showing how I disassembled it all the way to the optical drive to replace it and add the inexpensive 16GB of Corsair Vengeance memory I found for $100. The Vengeance memory is well reviewed to work in the M17x (learn more at NoteBookReview.com Forums), so go ahead and save some $ and get the minimum installed by AW and buy these 2x4GB sets and DIY. I actually speak through the disassembly and not text you to death like I used to. Use my vid as a supplement if you'd like, but don't use it as your only guide as I don't show you every step, connector and screw to remove. The keyboard and screens screws aren't so much torqued like I say, they have thread compound on them that help secure it.

The downloadable pdf manual for disassembly of the R4 is well detailed and all I used to do this. You'll need to get it (link provided below) and become very familiar with it. My video really just shows a few good tips and gives you another visual aid to the manual.

I am very impressed with the build quality of this laptop. It is effeciently designed imo, the cable routing is very good. The performance is also impressive. The IB does run hotter on heavy loads than I would of hoped for (but I guess it's an IB thing, so I read), but the 7970m fan kicks into high gear at 68C and I mostly game between 65-68C. I haven't seen it above 68C yet.

A tip of the hat to BatBoy and SlickDude80 at NoteBookReview.com forums (the place to be for laptop community imo) for their posts. Never needed to ask any questions about setup, oc'ing, assembly and testing. All the info is out there and I'm providing links to much of it here for you.

This is the first video I edited and rendered on this laptop and it is considerably better than my previous G73JH for that and gaming. My X 3D Mark11 score here is just a little under my P score on the G73.

Any questions, feel free to ask. I'm not sure that I will go all out making gaming videos for this laptop like I did the G73JH, but I will make some in the future.

M17x-R4 Manual: Alienware: Online Documentation

Unlock 7970m OC'ing in Afterburner by SlickDude80: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...-mobility-7970-m17x-r3-illustrated-guide.html

Plextor M3 Series PX-256M3 2.5" 256GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) Newegg.com - Plextor M3 Series PX-256M3 2.5" 256GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Laptop Memory Model CMSX8GX3M2A1600C9 Newegg.com - CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Laptop Memory Model CMSX8GX3M2A1600C9

Sony Optiarc Black 6X BD-R 2X BD-RE 8X DVD+R 5X DVD-RAM 6X BD-ROM 5.8MB Cache SATA 12.7mm Slot Blu-ray Writer BD-5850H-01 Newegg.com - Sony Optiarc Black 6X BD-R 2X BD-RE 8X DVD+R 5X DVD-RAM 6X BD-ROM 5.8MB Cache SATA 12.7mm Slot Blu-ray Writer BD-5850H-01



3D Mark11 Scores:
850/1200 Clocks P5798 X1802
950/1450 Clocks P6402 X2015

Heaven 3.0:
850/1200 Clocks 1364 MIN 34.8 MAX 115.7 AVG 54.2
950/1450 Clocks 1552 MIN 28.9 MAX 137.2 AVG 61.6

We'll see you around

 

Very good! I can see a LOT of people feeling more confident with pulling their machine apart . And so nice to see something other than a broken machine - Dell sales reps should be made to watch this to understand their customers.

I look forward to the gaming tests

 

Question to you: why did you not go with the 1866mhz ram?? does it not work with ivy bridge?

Reason Im asking is because Im deciding whether or not to buy it...

 

good effort Dude! +

 

Thanks MickyD! lol @ the sales reps, at least someone was thinking of user modding imo, because the manual is very detailed I'll get some game vids going soon.

Cost and timing diff isn't worth 266MHz imo. With that being so clear to me, I didn't have to put in any research to consider them.

Thanks Slick! I very much appreciate your super thread and efforts around this forum.

 

Great video! +1

 

This speakers at 12:33....wonder if they will be a straight swap to the R3...they are suppose to be much better.

 

Wow great video, thanks for the effort dude! +rep!

 

Thank you Frank! +rep to you for being an active rep in the forums

I'm impressed with this machine!

Sorry I don't have a frame of reference, however, I can say they do produce excellent sound.

Thanks Warden! Send a raven if you need more troops at the wall





I started the Gaming Videos Thread for anyone interested. It's for any and all Alienware laptops.

Q

 

nice movie, i did the same but installed msata card and 2ssd, 32gb ram and same sony!
quite an experience it was.

rep!

 

Nice! Stripe the SSDs? OS on mSATA? Spared no expense, solid rig man.

Ppl asked me about the mSATA and your posts (pg 28,29) in the owners thread helped me answer, +rep coming your way when NBR allows me to give it out Thanks.

 

no triple striped it. 3 ssd raid 0.

 

cool, can you run crystaldisk Mark for us?

 

Good job and thanks for taking the time to make this! +rep!

 

see owners and benchmark thread, atto and as ssd benchmarks.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...3-r4-owners-lounge-thread-11.html#post8553799

running 2 disks on SATA3 gives me 200 mb/s more read speed but also 180 mb/s write less.

WEI of my system:


ATTO:


AS SSD:

 

Thanks! Rep'd. Though you have to dmit for SATA2 those are good scores!

Thanks to quagmire, i just realized the eyes of the alienware head blink =). I thought it was a new feature or the R4 or something only to see mine did the same.

 

Funny you mentioned that long2905! I didn't know it blinked either!! Thanks quagmire for pointing this out!!

 

+rep for your Great work dude!! I see this video being very very helpful to many people.

 

What a considerate 1st post. Welcome to the forums and thanks Herd!

Much appreciate bigT!

 

256MB SSD? That sucks!

But besides the troll, nice video and information

 

I reTIMed the cpu (3610qm) and got a double digit improvement on load temps. The temps were always higher than I was used to with cpus and I wrote it off as Ivy, but they were getting worse and I was given a heads up to really look at them. If anyone is interested to see what the factory paste was like, it is at the 0:30 second mark. A little more tim came out of the tube than I wanted, but I sealed it up and temps were great. A few hours later, I wanted to do it again with less tim. Pulling it showed an excellent thorough spread. This time I made a longer, skinny line and temps are as good, but now I'm sure there is less spillover.

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Quag you still running your 7970 overclocked at 950/1450? If so any chance we would get a guide on this? Do you recommend a reTIM for this or recommend overclocking at all for that matter?

 

Foam, I do not game with an oc'd mobile gpu unless there is a clear need and/or advantage, I only showed oc'd performance in some early videos for enthusiasts that wanted the info. One year later now with the 7970m and I haven't seen a need or advantage to run the hardware above stock on any game I've played (keep in mind though I'm a casual gamer, to me there isn't any difference between 55fps and 60fps).

I am firmly in the camp of no oc unless it gives you something worthy of potentially reducing hardware life span (this is not the case for full cover watercooled gpus though, I kept those oc'd due to a whole different world with temps over air cooled). I am also firmly in the camp of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", so I do not recommend repasting until there is a clear need. My cpu clearly needed a reTIM as the temps were well above the consensus. My gpu still rarely crosses the 69C threshold (as it did from day 1), so I am unlikely to reTIM that until it does or my fan decides to fly away from the lappy It seems to run faster, but since I never found a reliable rpm reading for it in the beginning, I couldn't be sure.

Sorry, I don't teach oc'ing as I don't want to hear any complaints of fried hardware, however this guy's video explains it correctly. It's about doing the core and mem one at a time in small increments until you see instability (crashing, freezing) or artifacting, then you back off a fair bit from that. Once you have the highest individuals, time to see what combining them will do, likely unstable, if so, favor the core oc and reduce the mem as you typically get more performance from a core oc than mem. (lol, I guess I just taught a little).

Have fun, be careful, it's your money and potential down time.

 

Thank you for the good advice! I have just heard overclocking the M17x's can be much more difficult than simply tweaking in afterburner. Is that what you used?

 

You're welcome. Oc'ing an AW is no more or less difficult and not done any differently than any other laptop I know of. Yes, you still may need to unlock it for the 7970m. Here is SlickDude's guide, it's #10. You shouldn't need to worry about the atipldxx.dll file.

 

My temps on CPU are hitting 77 C, what do you think Quag? My GPU stays pretty good though never going over 62 C.

 

Sounds like you're in good shape Foam. Do you have an R4?

 

Yea I have an R4. At what temps did you decide to repaste CPU?

 

High 80s on full load, sometimes touching 90C even during a game. If you have anymore questions, shoot me a PM instead of us upping this thread each time. Cheers.