New AW 17 R3, have questions

I'm loving this machine (i7 6700hq, gtx 965m, 16gb ram, 1tb HGST HTS7k1000 HDD, windows 10 home 64-bit), and i have a couple of inquiries.

1. The HDD makes a weird low volume high-ish pitched buzzing during some activities/processes (namely a game like planetside 2 and when copying/updating some programs), the sound is high enough to be heard over fans running at 3/4 max rpm but not high enough to be heard at a distance, it's a 7200rpm hdd so idk if that is normal or not since i never had one, should i rma it??

2. I opened up the BIOS and there are two settings under performance options (check attachment), what happens exactly if i set these two options to "Enabled"?? (Note: Turbo boost is already enabled)

http://postimg.org/image/oqjgyt12z/

3. My current BIOS is A02, is there a benefit to flashing to A03 or A04?

 

To be honest, my answers to your queries are my opinion as I don't have first hand experience with the AW17 R3.

1- I have owned 2 7200rpm hard-drives in the past, granted in desktop pc's and both were quite noisy. I wouldn't be surprised if that was your problem as well. The 7k1000 was said to be on the quiet side though, something which can be easily checked in reviews...

2- I recommend you take a look at this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/alienware-15-r2-cpu-throttle-fix.783371/
Sounds like enabling CPU performance mode would help with CPU temps and throttling issues. Just keep fan mode disabled as it looks like it increases fan noise dramatically. You could always experiment a bit, nothing bad should happen... (emphasis on "should" ;-) )

3- I always tend to flash to the latest bios and firmware for all my devices. Of course if you go through the release notes for the new BIOS and don't find anything that could have a (positive) impact on your general usage of the laptop, then you can always ignore it....
Just a small warning, I DID read some horror stories on these very forums where some people weren't able to boot after updating the BIOS. I have personally NEVER faced such an issue or even witnessed such a case, and I work in IT... But I feel like you should be aware of this as this is not as simple as say, updating the driver of a Graphic Card. If things go wrong, it is much much more difficult to fix. I am not trying to scare you, but you know, in technology sometimes things do NOT go according to plan.

 

Thank you for your reply

1. That's a useful opinion thank you.

2. I'm not experiencing throttling issues, that was a problem with the r2 and the Haswell/Broadwell cpus, the skylake is quite cooler and more efficient so it doesn't throttle, espeically in my setup.

3. Well the BIOS update notes don't really say anything about particular optimizations, but there are some as0ects which are not really mentioned like fan profiles that can provide better overall performance.

 

Anybody else?