New Outlet m17x r3. Observations and bios/driver suggestions?

Woohooo! Its here!

So far so good, physically its in top notch condition aside from missing one of the feet and a slight scratch to the battery lock switch on the underside. It fired up no problem and i've been adding and tweaking it for my needs. I haven't yet run any benches or investigated heavily into the drivers/bios versions. Although I did notice it has the A04 Bios.

Can someone confirm this has the blue ray drive? Device manager lists it as "HL-DT-ST DVDRWBD CA30N" - The BD is blue ray right?

No surprises with the hardware config if so, its the i7 2720qm, 8Gb 1333 Ram, Momentus 500Gb Hybrid, 2gb GTX580m, blue ray and 1920x1080 fhd screen.

I have noticed that the 17" display means a lot of the display is not in immediate view... Sounds weird right, but its due to the proximity of the laptop to me. Versus my desktop 24" display which is normally about twice the distance away. Why do I mention it? Well purely as an observation really. I wonder if I'll miss things in fps as its effectively out of my field of view and it may cause more eye strain.

The other thing is that the fan ramps up occasionally for 1 second then back down again and thats in a cool room just browsing and installing software.... Will be interesting to see how it fairs in games! Real temp has recorded 70C on core 2 with this low usage... seems warm to me.


So, anyone have ideas as to the best Bioses and drivers to install to get this thing up to date? Any particular order of install? Also, any Bios changes I should make? What do i need to know about controlling the GTX580m throttling if I encounter it (I'm still downloading BF3!?)

 

Hi

For the bios you got a method of blind flashing that worked great for me.
I flash the original vbios of my 580 to have a 0.92 voltage (more o/c).
Actually playing BF3 with the latest driver, no pb at all (285.xx).

The last bios for our computer is the A08

 

CONGRATZ on the new machine

The first thing that i would do is to repaste both the CPU and GPU with a quality thermal paste.

Next, flash the vbios on the 580m. You WILL encounter throttling if you don't do this...plus the repaste will keep your temps down which will help in avoiding throttling:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...idia-geforce-460m-580m-560m-see-post-1-a.html

Thirdly, you can increase your turbo speeds to advertised if you increase your TDP. This is the best kind of overclocking that you can do on a locked multiplier Sandy Bridge cpu. You can use the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) for this. I've experimented on mine it works really well

Let me know if you need any help...repasting has made a huge impact on my temps

 

Ta, will do that at some point. I have some mx3 lying around somewhere. So far temps only up to 77 with no visible throttling playing bf3. Core 2 is 2-3C higher than the others so a repaste may help.

 

i just got my 17x r3 from the outlet in recently. I plan to tear it down using some of the guides and replace the entire chasis because it came with a few minor blemishes which annoy the hell out of me. either way though its still worth the HUGE savings i got on it considering i also used a 25 percent off coupon. I wonder though if that will void my warrently.. I mean.. how would they know?