*OFFICIAL* "All Powerful" M17xR2 Edition Owner's Lounge - Part 3

quick question. im quite confused about what the r2's chasis is made of..? is it plastic or a metal alloy...? lets say i wanted to get the space black one, what would the chasis be made of? thanks

 

The R2 is Anodized Aluminum shell around a Magnesium alloy chassis. That is true of all colors

 

wwoods, Acronis works fine, and I have True Image Home and Disk Director. But, the versions I have are not Windows 7 compatible. The bootable rescue disks work fine though, as they are not OS dependent.

I have been using the free home use version of Macrium Reflect for drive imaging for the last couple of years and it works excellent.

 

Here it is, frozenarcticguy: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/474521-installing-ssd-tips-tricks-benchmarks.html

 

Mr. Fox, thank you sir. Repped

 

It was a x86 Vista installation, but I have done similar things with x64 Installations

 

anyone played crysis 2 beta? when i am playing with crsffire 5870 get screen blinking and lines going up and down . i dont have the ame with crossfire disabled. I dont have this issue with other games

is it a ame issue? please help.

 

rename the exe file to rift.exe

happy beta'ing! hanging for the proper release to come out

 

I just bought this guy from the outlet.
I know its not top of the line, but it fits my budget and is way better than my 4 year old laptop. Pls tell me I got a decent deal, its scarey to spend so much money... Cost me about $1700

I7-840QM
17WUXGA RGB
Hard Drive,640GB
Card,Graphics,5870
Dvd+/-Rw And Bd-Rom
8GB,1333MHZ,DDR3,2X4G

 

If it is a single 5870 you should have spent a little more to get a crossfire model. Otherwise is good

My only requirements would be RGBLED, CF 5870s, Maybe BluRay Reader but not a deal breaker

The rest I can take care of myself

 

Nice specs, welcome to the club! What do you plan on doing with it? Gaming, encoding...?

 

Thx!

I'll use it for a little of everything, mostly photoshop, a little gaming - nothing too hardcore, showing slideshows, and wasting time on the internet when I should be working

 

thats a very nice deal... that setup would've costed you easily 1000$ more about a year ago

 

Lol nice, the screen will very helpful to you!

 

I have an M17xR2 with a single 5870. I have been considering upgrading to Crossfire but would like to know if the game I usually play would even benefit from the upgrade. I play Everquest and realize that it is an old game. I can run multiple sessions at the same time but was wondering if the game would take advantage of dual GPUs. Do any of you know if Everquest is setup for Crossfire?

 

Hello all I just recieved my refurbed R2 from Alienware nice solid machine. Anyways trying to setup my regular stuff and I am getting comp freezing whenever I try to run the cpu/gpu temp monitoring programs I have (speedfan and msi afterburner) is this normal or is there anything you guys can suggest I try.

Thanks for any help.

 

fright88
use HWiNFO32 for monitoring your R2.

http://www.hwinfo.com/download32.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...uestions-reports-suggestions-discussions.html

 

Sweet thanks for the quick reply +rep when I get control of my comp from Dell. Apparently they sent me the wrong power cord

 

Your welcome.HWiNFO32 is top notch .I have had problems with msi afterburner freezing my R2 but never investigated it further.HWiNFO32 is all you need.

 

Also the developer of HWInfo32 is on these boards and is very quick to help us add new device support and features

 

FYI.....Windows7 SP1 is out on MSDN and Technet.....

 

Lol this is a record for me day 1 and already spent 2 hours on the phone with Dell support and need a tech on site.

 

Scook, unrelated, but what drivers are you currently running for your 4870's now?

 

Just want to say thanks and you guys are awesome

Between this and the USB 3.0 card thread, I am a happy camper
Who would have know you could get usb 3.0 for about $15

 

It's not a bad deal. I did get a 920xm and CF 5870s with the other specs being about equal (500gb to your 640) and paid 2000.41 after taxes (1850ish pre). This was a refurb and also had a 20% coupon. I am not sure if there is a coupon right now. With that, your system is good. You can always buy a 5870 and CF but it's a bit of a pain.

 

After the coupon expired all the outlet systems magically dropped about 20% in price anyways haha

And for my 4870 drivers I have been using 10.6 mostly. They are stable and give me good performance. I am not playing any newer games so it is not as critical for me. May try 11.2 though since I have heard they are offering good performance in Vantage at least

 

I looked for hours for the 20% off code but they are all expired. I did find a 15% off that seems to still be working.

Edit

Repair man just left now my machine is running like a champ.

Still a little undecided on it's WoW performance though.

 

is there a way to keep running on trial? It only allowed me one run to view my results?

 

Did anyone else notice the M17X R2 went back to the pre-R3 prices this morning. Dell is really milking the consumer as much as possible till the end.

 

yes and they pulled the 740QM and the 1200p rgb from the available options as well ....

 

If its Vantage you mean then no.You have to buy a copy.

 

anyone tried ati 11.20 mobility drivers on 5870s? i am getting strange graphics behaviour on games. Thus with 10. 12 drives i may or may not get a vertical line when crossfire is enabled . Dont know if theres something wrong with my secondary gpu.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...st-11-2-mobility-released-get-yours-here.html

 

thanks but i didnt ask for the drivers (i tried them) but if anyone knows if there something wrong with my machine for the reasons i said

 

Might have posted in the wrong thread but I am not logging into my desktop. It has me signed in as admin but I have no programs that I installed or my theme. I am on a basic desktop. I have no idea what is going on? I haven't changed a thing since I shutdown after my gaming session.

edit: This is bizzare. I restarted for the 3rd time and now I have a theme but still no programs. The LAST thing I did was change my theme in AlienFX. When I load and the facial recognition comes on, it immediately recognizes (which doesn't happen) and it says "preparing your desktop".....I really am stumped.

 

I have had that before where it said preparing your desktop. It generates a default profile I believe. Your regular setup should still be intact though. Tried a Windows Repair?

 

for some reason my system restore is OFF...I just re-enabled. How do I get my desktop back?!

 

under system properties with the Advanced selected I can see the profiles. It looks like I have a 4.4gig profile and a 1.5mb profile that I seem to be launched on. But there is no way to disable or delete that profile or even switch.

edit: tried running cmd sfc/scannow and not finding any errors. Last thing I did before teh problem was run alienFX. I have no restore points. how can I access my main partition/profile. I am running off an account with 1.58mb of information and cant seem to find a way to select my main 5gig profile. Any workarounds?

 

backup the profile on external hdd and reinstall, or create a new profile, copy all info over from old profile (might not work flawlesly, for appdata and such)

Oh and if your crashed profile is password or facial recogniscion protected you might need to take owenership of the files before you can acces them (right click folder, properties, security)

Edit: backup and reinstall is the best route to go imo, might wanna do a scan on your hdd as well for bad blocks

 

thanks psyloid. I will have to do that probably as a last resort. Does anyone else have a suggestion? I have to think that there is something easier to fix this? Again, last program I ran was alienFx and changed the color scheme. Didn't download or do anything but play a game. When I rebooted the system an hour later it is loading a basic version of my desktop. All my programs and files are assessible and I am loaded as "admin" it is not my actual desktop and isn't the way I have my desktop and all my shortcuts and files are hidden (but accessible if i manually load). Almost looks like a safe mode boot but more functionality

 

Hi Aristotel... Happy Saturday to you.

I'm running 11.2 drivers and have no issues such as those you are describing. The drivers seem to be very stable on my computer. However, I'm not sure that there is something wrong with your system hardware. It's more likely to be software related. Have you uninstalled all ATI/AMD software, booted into Safe Mode and run Driver Sweeper, followed by CCleaner? It's absolutely amazing how much dross gets left behind in the registry and your system files that can corrupt new driver updates. If you did not take this approach, then I would suggest doing all the above, then reinstall your 11.2 drivers and see if the problems are fixed.

For me there was no discernible advantage to installing 11.2 drivers from the previous 10's and 11.1 versions. There's the new CCC GUI, of course, but zero performance improvement. My benchmark scores are essentially unchanged.

On another subject... AHCI versus RAID0

I'm sharing this so nobody else wastes their time with this unworthy endeavor...

I had taken my system out of RAID0 a while back. I decided this week to put it back into RAID0 for improved performance. What a PITA this was.

My system was unbootable after restoring the factory RAID0 image I had created. I tried doing a BCD/MBR repair with Windows 7 disc. I wasted a couple of hours on this trying to avoid having to spend more time reinstalling all my games and apps. Nothing worked. So, I finally gave up and did a clean OS install on the RAID0 and had no problems with that. After doing so, I found a negligible change in performance. In fact, there was no noticeable difference in the perception of system responsiveness during normal use. What a waste of time that was.

To avoid wasting any more time, I took the system out of RAID0 again and reinstalled the non-RAID image with all of my games and apps installed. Thank goodness for drive imaging and USB external drives.

 

For something on the lighthearted side, with an Alien theme, check this out... PAUL | In Theaters March 18, 2011 (just stumbled across this and had not seen any previews before today)

 

Looks pretty funny, we also have Cowboys vs. Aliens coming up for alien movies (serious lol, Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig)

 

any of you r2 owners know of ways to getting xbox 360 to use R2 as "monitor"? that requires HDMI in (the one r3 has, still sad about it being canceled for me...), maybe there's some external thing that can do it? sort of "external hdmi in" .

 

well i did a clean OS installation using ATI 11.20 drivers. i dont get the issues on some games i used to (crysis 2 beta, medla of honor etc) but i still get it on others like cod mw2 and test drive unlimited 2. I am really confused if its only driver issue or second gpu static charge or something else. I think its hardware but the fact that this doesnt occur on all games makes me believe it may be a driver issue- conflict maybe. I may have to say sometimes my alien mouse stops working for 2 -3 seconds and then back . This happens on cod mw2

 

On to the subject of the evil stealth mode....

Is there any way to disable the stealth mode button on the touch panel ? I know I can remove OSD, but I want the other functions of OSD....

Ideas please.....

 

Hmm, I just never have OSD installed. The only buttons I use are the FF, RW, play and volume buttons, and without OSD installed, they stll work in itunes, So i'm assuming the same holds true for other programs. I know the volume works in games as well.

 

This is your best bet, component input is the best I have seen for a capture device so far. Nothing with HDMI that I know of

Newegg.com - Hauppauge HD PVR High Definition Personal Video Recorder 1212 USB 2.0 Interface

 

Yea... two concerns about that: a) not portable b) not cheap thanks for the idea though.

 

That is the only realistic solution....you are looking for something that does not exist