Newest owner of an M17x R3/Technical help

Just bought myself an R3 and giving my R1 to a friend. The R1 served me well! I even unscrewed my custom name plate from Alienware.

Anyway, there has been so many things I have been working on.

Here is a HWINFO64 report with pretty much everything there is to know about the machine. Please let me know if you see anything amiss, ala old drivers.

I have encountered some issues. My SSD is running at 3 gb/s. I looked up some info and tried it in both HDD bays. No luck on getting it to go to 6 gb/s. Then I saw that Alienware in early 2012 stated the R3 did not support 6gb/s, even though it had. Has this issue ever been resolved? I saw some info about switching BIOS. However, many of the resources are all scattered and random dates so it's hard to figure out what is current. The stickies are useful, but lacking in some of the specific issues.

That is all that is bothering me for now. Even though this is benchmarking lower than my R1, realistic performance is not comparable. The future of this machine is also still bright, especially with the 780m and future cards coming.

When I opened the back panel up, I saw an empty plug. I'll take a picture if that isn't a decent enough description. Also, I don't have the WiHD or anything like that AFAIK, so how can I utilize that DMC port for something, and what would you suggest?

Lastly, I was informed this is out of warranty, but only a bit over a year old. Am I able to buy another warranty?

Any help is appreciated. So what do I do with this beast?

 

here is the link for the a12 modded bios by svl7 that keeps the sata 3 speeds. Downloads
I have had it on my machine since it came out and haven't had any issues with it at all.

 

Still the only port that would run at SATA III speed would be HDD 0, make sure your SSD is in that port.

 

That is awesome! I'll try that out very soon. I appreciate that. Strange that on A08 it had to be in HDD 1 and on this, HDD 0. No problem switching them though!

 

actually it does have to be in HDD1

 

Yeah, thanks. Kind of just figured that out when I had put it in HDD0 and still got 3gb/s. Haha, going to switch them again now. The new bios is so full of options, one of the most full featured bios I've dealt with. Anything I should be doing with it?

edit: running 6gb/s. Thanks so much!

 

I haven't actually done a whole lot of playing around with the bios, but I think there are a few threads from guys that have been experimenting with the unlocked bios.

 

In regard to your warranty, if you update your dell account to have the service tag registered on there, you should be able to purchase warranty that way.

Mine ran out and i didnt notice, so purchased another one some 3 months after it expired, then the MoBo went about 3 weeks later, thank god i purchased it.

 

That's definitely something good to do to have some protection for your little baby.