M17xR3 First Impression

Briefly. Mainly just the bclk.

 

So you gonna get the R3 again once this shenanigans is over?

I can't do the same as you and do a full refund, cuz I'm afraid that I can't get the aafes price again.

 

i see. it doesnt look too promising though. Usshellfire said the max long term duration was in seconds and i doubt there is an option for 3600 seconds. if they wanted to let us extend the long term duration it would have been in minutes. The TDC tweaking is nice but i see little use in having a 100w TDC if it was only for 56 seconds....outside of benchmarking i guess.

EDIT: only other hope is the XM series and the possiblity of more bios options

 

We'll see. Lots can change by then.

 

I'm hoping so too.

 

I predict Mandrake's "M18x First Impressions" thread in the summer.

 

3600 seconds is an hour.....that is reasonably long in my book

 

The problem is it didn't give him that option - that was just a hypothetical. The option he actually had was like 57 seconds.

 

Awesome review Mandrake
+rep

P.S That beast made me drool,literally

 

Mandrake, your system is cool, congratulations !
The problem with the game is realy annoying, but, the most annoying and shoking thing is the flexible keyboard, what you gonna do to face it?, can they replace it or the desing is like that

 

If you read a bit more he's sending his back for a refund

 

Thanks, very long thread, i itried to read all but there is a lot of questions and i'm sure i missed that. Too bad about the refund :/

 

Thankfully his M15x is awesome, so this shouldn't be too big of a loss for him. That and he'll be able to re-order in a few months. I'm jealous - I'll have to wait until next semester (August-ish) to order my M17xR3. Luckily I too will have an M15x to use until then, though.

 

That' not too far from now I unfortunately sold my gaming laptop because i was planning on getting one this week, now I'm stuck with some Dell Inspiron that can't play any games

Thanks for the thread Mandrake, much appreciated.

 

That keyboard flex is terrible.

I would rather have an R2 if it supported the new video cards. An XM with two 470m in SLI would be very sweet.

 

Well. I dont have the notebook and so far no one has really confirmed how the bios overclocking is limited. But Usshellfire did say the time limit was in SECONDS. This in itself doesnt really limit anything because i suppose i could punch in 3600 seconds and get an hour. But that is highly unlikely, though not entirely out of the question.

Actually i might ask Usshellfire in the other thread what the upper limit is.

 

EDIT: see below

 

So far there are 3 options for me as far as CPU overclocking goes, 1 of them for some reason doesn't seem to work right on my 2630.
1)Change the TDP to allow the CPU to boost for longer, increasable to 100w
2)Change the duration of the TurboBoost, from default to 56 seconds
3)Change the BCLK in mhz increments, don't know what the max is default is 99.80mhz, for some reason I can't get this one to work. Don't know if I'm doing the changes incorreectly or if it won't work with the 2630

 

That's odd, my shipped bclk was 100.00. When I disabled OCing, it went down to 99.67mhz. I wanted to get up to 99.70, since it clearly says 10mhz increments. the closest I could get was 99.74 - otherwise it would reset on me.

To get it to work, find out what increment your board+chip actually want you to work with. Set it. Change setting to apply permanently. restart.


I'll go play with it right now. Where's my camera....

 

Sorry, it's 10 khz increments
To get it to work, pick a frequency and then "Apply new bus clock frequency" -> immediately -> immediately
if it's successful, it will say so. Then change the option to "Apply permanently (restart)" or it wont save.
If not successful, the frequency will revert.

my current base
BIOS OC?

Look what happens when I try to set it to 100.10mhz

Again at 100.20mhz




Wow that was pretty bad for my CPU.
Temps went up to 83 before I stopped prime95

 

Is all the stuff you've done in this post done solely through the BIOS? If yes, then COOL BEANZ! I'm glad that I wouldn't have to go through a 3rd party app/program to do fancy stuff like OCing

 

Not really.
Increasing bclk +0.3mhz * 25x turbo multiplier = +7.5mhz

 

I wonder if it's also increasing the voltage?

The 2.0Ghz that thing runs at is pretty fast at stock, at least.

 

it didn't actualy increase temps - my mistake - this is just a bad paste job and I never noticed until now haha.

 

Oh thank god.

Is it pathetic that I'm excited to re-paste my M15x? Never tried anything from IC yet, I'm curious to see how good it works

 

some of this doesnt make sense

1)changing the TDP wont allow you to boost longer because you are limited by the 56 seconds duration. And you cant change the multiplier so you cant even have a higher frequency even within the 56 seconds. so pretty much pointless.

2)Ushellfire just confirmed that no matter how you set the duration in bios. It is still stuck at 56 seconds when running turbo. again pretty much pointless. unless you want to DECREASE the duration, i guess that might work

3) anything less than 15mhz overclock via BLK isnt worth it in my opinion. and so far no one has gone beyond a couple mhz. in your case it was .2 mhz.


so in conclusion. CPU over clocking on a sandy bridge chip is pretty much not going to happen. at least until we see what the XM chips might bring. Im hoping the long duration will be changeable. But it doesnt look like dell will let you change the multiplier.

 

How would you compare the build quality to your M15X? I've never used an M17X R1.

 

It's similar. I compared it to the original M17 not the M17x because of the plastic/rubbery feel of it.

 

Speaking of which, I just got my M15x and I love it.

 

Hey Mandrake, this is kinda a bump from the dead at this point but I had a question for you about the keyboard. I recall you saying there was just an open hole over your ram under your keyboard, right? Mine has a plate over it and has very little flex, especially nowhere near what yours was so I'm wondering if that component was missing from yours.

 

I think earlier in this thread, He said he had taken that off. I forgot why.

 

Nope, I didn't have that plate but I know what you're talking about because my other AW systems had it.

 

I took it off on my previous systems. My R3 never had it.

 

If you ever decide to take your laptop apart, do you mind taking a picture? Just in case someone else has the problem they will know what the part looks like. Of course it might just be blatantly obvious, lol.

 

it's pretty easy to notice.
if you can see the 2 top-side DIMMs after removing keyboard, the part is missing.

 

Yeah I can do that the next time I disassemble it which may be this weekend as I may redo the paste/pads and it's not too hard to get to it once you have the bottom opened up. There is definitely a metal plate already there on mine, when I put the other 2 dimms in the top(under the keyboard) I was surprised to see one.

 

wow.....there's a R3 version eh? amazing....

 

^^^ Huh? Is that a joke or having you been living under a rock somewhere away from technology and laptops lol? There's kind of a R3, about 50 of them made it out of the factory before they stopped putting them out due to the Intel chipset fiasco, and 43 of those 50 were sent back to AW lol. Now we just hope the reclusive beast appears again soon

 

Your system will end up being a "limited edition" M17x. lol

 

step 3: profit?

 

I am looking at getting the same ram as Drake. (Kingston HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Laptop Memory Model KHX1600C9S3K2/8GX) Because they are 1600MHz are they only compatible with the upgraded CPU on the R3 or would they also work with the base CPU? If they are compatible with the base CPU would they run at 1600MHz or get knocked down to 1333MHz? Thanks this will help me when I place my order when the R3 becomes available. Cheers!

 

They will run at 1600mhz if you use the XMP profiles in the BIOS, the 2720/2820qm are the only ones that support 1600mhz natively.

 

What do you do, which would genuinely benefit from 1600MHz RAM?

 

Its been said 30000x over.

Benchmarking

 

Even then it's not a huge benefit on the R3 as the FSB/BCLK aren't something you can change much on the SB cpu's and without that it's only like a 50-100 pt difference on benchmarks. I'm sure it will have it's place in the future but right now there's not much of a benefit to be seen over 1333 ram.

 

Does it run hotter than 1333Mhz? Will it perform the same perfomance as in the 2720,2820 that performs it natively rather than the 2630?

 

The performance of the memory is influenced by the performance of the CPU more than anything else.

 

Isn't there a 4GB limit to DDR1600 ram on SB laptop processors? I recall Sager's having some limit like that.

 

just an FYI. The ram is back in stock at Newegg.
Newegg.com - Kingston HyperX 8GB (2 x 4GB) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Laptop Memory Model KHX1600C9S3K2/8GX

 

Nope.
I frequently run over 4gb with the rest in cache (superfetch)