*OFFICIAL* "All Powerful" M17x-R2 Edition Owner's Lounge - Part 2

again i had sleep off. it was finally just the screen turning off. when i moved the mouse the screen it just went lighter but still black screen.

but yes the new vbios fixed the issue!

 

my machine finally arrived today, OMG im very impressed with it so far, what a well built machine it is, damn its heavy though.......

 

The weight means it is good

lol

 

i nearly died when i saw it for the first time... totoally massive!

damn nice though

 

You cannot help but be excited lol

And despite the size and weight, they look dam good

 

so I am going to have a 256G SSD as my main drive in my new system, I am debating buying one of those 500G hybred drives with the 4G SSD attached to it as my secondary drive....opinions ?

 

agree

agree

and agree

so i have two questions
#1: i have the CF HD5870 and only scored 6 in WEI does that seem right to you?....i think my old GTX260m scored a 5.9........i think i have CF enabled and its on performance in power options not sure whats up with that tbh

#2 i ha I've somehow selected a theme that changes the toolbar icons etc and the start button to the alienware head, when i first did that i saw lots of different choices, but i cant work out how to get the window up so i can change it to a different one, when i click themes it only gives me windows options.....

so any help with either question is appreciated.

 

You really care about what WEI says?

benchmark fail.....lol

 

WEI is BS. Run Vantage.

 

it wasn't so much what i care about it seems low that's all
i only have a free version of vantage so don't want to run it until i have made sure i have settings right.

 

I was getting 6.7 in WEI and there was a driver mishap with my slave card so only one was operating properly. Just done another run now that it's working and I get 7.2

You probably should have higher than 6 to be honest....just run 3dMark06 and post your score?

 

I don't think WEI uses both cards, so cf should not effect it.

 

Thinking of it you are right, I wonder why I saw my score improve when I sorted the slave driver issue then...

Just shows how unreliable WEI is I guess!

 

It is a pretty inconsistent test. Really should be ignored as it confuses people and makes them think something is wrong with their system

 

It's not so bad as a broad indicator though, if you were running an SSD and it scored a 4.0 when everyone else with the same drive was getting 7.8 you could be pretty sure there was something wrong somewhere...
Variations of 0.X are meaningless though, you can run the test back to back changing nothing and get different scores...

 

+1

I've been nothing but impressed by mine. I've played a bit of BF:BC2, Borderlands, Company of Heroes, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Metro 2033 and Warhammer 40K: Dark Crusade, and the only game I can't run at native res with max graphics is Metro. Everything else runs silky smooth.

My only problem is having too many games to play, and not enough time to play them .

 

Ah finally another FFOW player! Did you notice that when there's a lot of explosions, the frame rate plummets in FFOW? I can't seem to get around that no matter what I do.

 

ok heres my 3dmark06 results....

hopefully that's all the information you need.



and this seems really strange only 6000 in vantage!



on a side note, other than not being sure about its performance yet, its a joy to use, i love the keyboard and the screen gave me a....oh well ummm its nice isn't it.

 

I would expect the 06 to be a little higher. Assuming that you ran PCMark05, that is not that far from what I would expect. Without a SSD and good overclock there is no reason for it to be astronomical. I got 14k with a high overclock and fast ssd

 

anyone know if crossfire is enabled even if i run a game windowed? im playing ff14 beta windowed and i can say performance is rather terrible for my dual 4870s. 1600x1050 all high and im getting 10fps in game which is completely unplayable and 30 fps in cutscenes

 

I haven't noticed any slowdowns yet, but then again I've only done single player so far and I'm only around half-way through. I got it as part of a THQ box set, and as my Alien is the first computer I've had at home in over 18 months it's been hard to play enough of anything to get a good feel.

That being said, from what I've seen so far, FFoW isn't too bad of a game. I can't find any real faults in the gameplay, and I love the remote-controlled drones. However, the devs screwed up big time with the patching system. I had no end of trouble trying to find the right patch to take me from 1.0.0 to 1.1.0, and downloaded several hundred MB of useless files in the process. Why can't they make just one patch for all languages? And why can't they give you a better indication of which language version you've got?

Once I've updated to 1.3.0 I'll have to try some online play, to see what that's like. I might have the chance to see some more explosions, to see what effect they have on the frame rate.

 

Windowed mode always takes a huge toll on hardware, avoid using it if you can.

 

but does crossfire work when in windowed? ff14 beta has this bug when fullscreen any popups or accidental tabbing causes the game to crash so i have not much of a choice.

 

I see no reason it would not work. But do not expect good performance when games are played in window mode compared to full screen.

 

double that. CF 5870 has the same rating as CF 4870 on WEI. i think ratings as pre-rated just by detecting hardware ids.

i never thought of that. well this is interesting. one is for sure. disk rating uses only os drive. at least this was increased for me by 0.3 when i set my ssds to raid0

 

How so ? I play almost 90% of my games windowed.....

 

Why would that be, I get fine performance windowed.

 

In most games it still works, but it will tax the cards more. Just is something I have noticed in the past (try it with crysis to see a clear comparison since the fps are generally lower anyways, makes the differences more obvious)

 

That's hilarious :-D

I'd assume it's because it's having to also handle the entire Windows desktop. Would take more RAM and processing power, versus being able to dump some of that stuff out. I don't really know how big of a deal it is though, since normally most games are full screen.

 

I think windowed mode mainly takes a toll when things like Aero are enabled.

 

Has anyone had the personallized plate on the bottom become discolored? I have a large streak down the middle of mine and was wondering what I could do about it. I haven't tried to clean it off with anything yet. It looks oxidized and I'm not sure anything can fix that.

Any thoughts?

 

That is the edge of the alien head I believe...it has annoyed me too lol

Post a picture and we can be sure

 

When you run a game windowed, the graphics driver has to do more work because you're combining a largely 2D desktop with a full 3D game window. The GPU and driver then need to stitch these two together to form an image that you can then spit out to the monitor.

It's for this reason that Crossfire won't work with windowed apps. The driver knows that you're not doing full-screen 3D, and it needs to reserve some capacity on the primary card to render the rest of the screen. Because it can't guess how much capacity you need, it stops using the second card.

If you're worried about games performance, simply run the game at a lower than native resolution. You could run at 1366x768 resolution, which only has 45% of the pixels of 1920x1200, and so should get around around twice the frame rate.

 

anyone ever had an issue with vivid red color flashing?

edit: it seems to be related with the saturation as set in CCC. on my 4870s i had it at 85. how should that be on the 5870s?

anyone help on this?

 

Recieved my 2nd M17x-R2 today from FedEx....

 

Congratz! Is it a refurb or a new one?

 

Was a refurb, but got a great deal on it, its the second on in my sig. Wife has the 1st one now.

 

How much damage?

 

Hope your wife appreciates what you are doing for her

 

got a question mfractal, I followed your SSD guide and all seems well, but I am wondering, how can I monitor my SSD to make sure performance stays good,

Also I see you vreccomend turning off defrag, which I did, BUT I have 2 drives.....do you then reccomend manually reccomend defraging the 2nd drive ?

Also, regarding moving /users, I was wondering, maby not move ALL /users, but only the highly used dirs, like My Documents where outlook data is stored etc.....what ya think ?

 

well, run the occasional Crystal Disk Mark bench, and see that the numbers stay good.
Also, make sure you try the tweak you see here http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-full-advantage-fast-ssds-51.html#post6685000

 

I took a lot at that thread, are the tweeks consolidated somewhere ?

I do see where you post:

•powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR 06cadf0e-64ed-448a-8927-ce7bf90eb35d -ATTRIB_HIDE
•powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR 12a0ab44-fe28-4fa9-b3bd-4b64f44960a6 -ATTRIB_HIDE
•powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR 40fbefc7-2e9d-4d25-a185-0cfd8574bac6 -ATTRIB_HIDE
•powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR 4b92d758-5a24-4851-a470-815d78aee119 -ATTRIB_HIDE
•powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR 7b224883-b3cc-4d79-819f-8374152cbe7c -ATTRIB_HIDE
•powercfg -attributes SUB_PROCESSOR 943c8cb6-6f93-4227-ad87-e9a3feec08d1 -ATTRIB_HIDE

is this what you are now running ?

Also, since I have 2hd's C=ssd and d=normal hd, would it be possible to have system restore off on the ssd and on on for the normal HD ? That way my system restore would be kept on the normal hd ?

 

those commands that you run are only enabling access to those advanced options in the registry.
Once you run those, you should select the high perf. power plan, then go ahead and change the settings according to the post i linked to.

I think system restore works on the drive where windows in installed, and that would be the ssd, so that won't work.

 

OK I already run high perf though...so how would that effect me ?

 

that's great, just make sure you set the parameters as described under Processor Power Management and see the performance of your SSD improve

 

I noticed that my browser became unstable after I applied those SSD tweaks. Now that I reverted them back, it's 100% stable again.

 

Just applied them, and will see how goes.

Well so far, I only applied to powered on, BTW, not on batt, anyway , small temp increase, maby 2-3 degrees, no biggie....cant say I am seeing any noticible performance increase in games though.

 

Joker what tweaks did you apply?

 

and what browser?

i personally didnt see difference on performance with the tweaks. ok maybe 2mb/sec more if thats enough

do you use the windows default drivers for ide?

 

regarding an issues i had before a few weeks with external e-sata case not being recognized, well i bought an other-different one and it works. this one is certified for win7 and works flawlessly. so the previous one didnt work due to drivers conflict and not hardware issues. I am happy for this