*OFFICIAL* Alienware 17 and M17x Benchmark Thread - Part 4

+1 on that!
I had the same discussion yesterday with some guys over a french forum also about the same thing. It seemed that they didn't understand how unlocked the 920xm can be but I think numbers speak for themselves. DR650SE knows about it too as I asked for his results.
side note: I'm not french myself.

 

Mr. Fox........Benching != gaming

The only reason to get a 920/940 is benching. I am not sure how many more people need to say it but you will see LITTLE TO NO gain in games from it. Only spend that money if you are really enthusiastic about benching......Big differences in benchmarks do not mean much in games - that is the point of synthetic benches, to make any differences more obvious.You will literally get 95-99% of the same experience with the CPU that cost about 1/3 as much. Only get the extreme chip if you want to bench. Your battery life and thermals will all be better with the 820/840

 

scook, can't wait to see bench scores of your M18x

 

Have not had the time I would like to bench it yet

Beast of a machine though. Been re-playing Halo Combat Evolved haha (maxed out!!!)

Trying it out with mouse and keyboard but I think I will end up using the 360 controller again, Halo just feels wrong without it lol

 

I'm living in France right now and I could read french a lil bit, if you could link me to the guy who wants exchange 920/940 -> 820/840 I would be so happy and appreciated ...

 

You guys all thought I was telling BS, well here you go:

P4G / [VDS] Intel Core i7 920xm (OEM).

In this thread, TS was selling a 840QM, then he exchanged it with a 920XM, and decided to sell the 920XM instead.

If you want to know why it's quite simple, the 840QM is a better CPU than the 920XM in every situation but benching, same performance, more battery life but less heat and thus noise, that is actually better.

Oh and Mr Fox, the highest frequency of ALL i7 quad cores is on a single core, and don't think you can't OC a 840, you can.

 

Cygoris, I've been able to OC a 920XM and 940XM to just over 4GHz and run it at 4GHz on all cores. Plus, granted the 820/840 may be a good chip, but keep in mind that this is the M17x Benchmarking thread, hence the preferance of the XM CPU. Just keep that in mind. You are welcome to your own opinion, but it doesn't mean that we are wrong just because we share a differance of opinions. We can all agree to disagree.

Personally I perfer the XM chip because it can be run at 90 Watt TDP for everyday use. I have real temp boot upon startup which changes the TDP, so I don't have to mess with anything on startup. Works perfect for my needs.

EDIT: One thing I may have overlooked which may cause the miscommunication on the 920/940XM. Other manufactures may have locked the XM chip to only turbo up on one or two cores. A while back dell released a Bios for the M17x R2 which did the same. I think it was A07. But when we provided some benchmarks to a Dell liason, it was relayed back to engineers who removed this limit in the Bios. None the less, rest assured, that the 920/940XM will turbo boost on ALL cores, given adequete TDP. Run a test for your self. If there is any proof you need or would like, let me know and I'll be willing to provide any proof upon your request.

 

@ALL

Benchmarking Leaderboards have been updated.

Congrats to Basilownzyou for the following score
Basilownzyou - M17x R3 - 22462

He was able to crack into the top M17x "All Powerful" overall leaderboard at the 4th place spot, competing against R1/R2 XM CPU's. Quite an accomplisment. He was able to knock out Scook9 out of the ranking, which was the last remaining and hardest Push M17x R1. Congrats to Scook9 for hanging in there so long. Lets all see you continue benching, and I will be better with updating the scores.

I had to scrub 35+ pages for all your hard work and top scores. I will maintain this thread much more often Push those systems, I will join in the fun soon as I plan to have 6970M X-fire in my R2 in the next few weeks. Looking forward to pushing those babies! Perhaps even play games other than benches Although benches still win in the fun catagory.

 

yes 840qm is good processor for gaming, but people with 920/940xm achieve in games higher FPS, that's for sure. don't know about the heat/noise level

 

It's a gaming system afterall so "if you don't like gaming systems with large fans then buy a pink macbook and be done with it"

 

I feel like a legend haha

Rockstar status

 

haha you and your freezer will be the stuff of legends.

wow surprised that my vantage took first, not bad for a 2720.

 

Awesome, thanks dude. For the mention and for updating the scores, I imagine it can be annoying scanning so many pages.

 

Cygoris, I never once said you were telling BS. You have stated your opinions and provided reasonable information for me to research and arrive at my own purchasing decision based on what I am looking for in a CPU upgrade. I expressed my appreciation for your thoughts a couple of times and it was sincere. I hope you're not offended by the fact that I am not clinging to every word you type as the "Gospel" as I tend to verify everything I read and hear before I arrive at my own informed conclusions. Rest assured that I fully intend to look into the gaming and benchmark performance differences between these CPUs before spending a dime of my hard earned cash.

I welcome you to provide additional links to documentation and more information that you feel might be useful to me or anyone else reading this thread. There's no need to defend the information you share, just share it and everyone will benefit from it.

It seems like you were not noticing my questions and comments highlighted an interest in achieving improved benchmark scores with my R2, not so much about in-game experience. The scores in my forum signature are additional clues that benchmarking is of interest to me. I'm actually pleased with the in-game experience that I have with my OC'd 720QM and OC'd 5870's and do not need more CPU/GPU power for all of my games to achieve good playable framerates at a high display resolution.

If I choose the Extreme CPU in the end, it won't be because I think your opinions are wrong. It will only be because my definition of "Best CPU" turned out to be different in my situation after looking at all of the information.

That's way too funny, katalin. +1 back to you.

 

You definitely are an NBR legend, buddy.

DR650SE - thanks for scrubbing the board for the scores.

Basilownzyou - awesome job, dude. Congrats.

 

Thanks Fox

Hey DR650SE, not trying to be a pain or anything. I just noticed that on the R3 Vantage board you put 2720 for my cpu, it's 2820 though.

 

No problem, it definately helps to have another set of eyes on it, changes made.

THanks guys for the feedback.

@Scook9 Defaintely legendary with that freezer Ashamed about the mem bandwith nose diving though or you would still be up there.


On another note: I put in an order for a pair of 6970M GPU's so in a few weeks, well see how and if the M17x R2 can be pushed farther then I already have. Anyone think it may be possible to surpass M18x scores?

 

You know we wont let you surpass us!

 

Oh, I know you won't, It's the rest that I will have to surpass! Don't worry, I'll have some Dice on hand. Only hope my PSU can hang in there. I don't think the CPU turbo time limits will come into play, which is the only way a 920/940 can beat a 2920 in wPrime1024. This is if I'm correct in understanding that there is a TDP time limit of a min, or so locked by the bios.

Even so I think a 2920 can accomplish quite a bit of the wPime1024 bench in a min, which may leave it some breathing room to beat the 920.

 

You will not be able to push both the GPUs and CPU at same time on that PSU. I promise you that haha

Expect to top out around 290W before tripping

 

Yea, thats the other thing, now the 330W PSU, does it use the same connector as the R2 PSU? Im sure the Bios wouldn't allow me to use it either, or would it?

 

Same connector but the BIOS does not like it, someone tried already I believe

 

Boo. Dell...

 

i think the bigger psu would work but would still be limited by the bios. i've used an M17x adapter on my M15x. the only advantage i see from doing that is the bigger psu will prolly run much cooler then the stock one.

with the 6970, i think it will all come down to cpu scores, since everyone is limited to stock voltage on the 6970.

 

This was pretty interesting: 24 256GB Samsung MLC SSD's in RAID

 

Ah yeah, i remember back in the days , that video made everybody crazy hehe.

 

Nerds......they actually had pretty poor scaling if that was RAID 0....should have been over twice that. Needless to say I think they were hitting controller/PCIe bandwidth limitations haha

 

Gotta keep this interesting for you guys and keep the competition up, here's my most recent run on 3DMark06, hopefully I'll get the chance to do some more Vantage/11 runs tomorrow:

22,534 3DMarks
SM2.0: 9,199
SM3.0: 10,212
CPU: 6,420

 

Spoiler

Woohoo great job, Dane
Congrats !!

 

Nice score! Updated it on the leaderboards.

 

Here's another one to take my Vantage spot back again

P16,189
GPU: 14,838
CPU: 22,270

 

Nice Dane! Awesome score.

Here' my highest Vantage:
P14625
GPU: 16134 :yes:
CPU: 11421

Spoiler

 

I just ran 3Dmark06 at 825/1150 and I got 20643. I am also using M18x drivers. Is this an expected result or should it be better than this?

 

your score looks good to me.

 

Agreed with Inap, looks right.

 

Great. Thanks.

 

hey guys

I've benched mine and I've got about only 10500 points in Vantage performance bench, CF active, OC'ed to 810/1200, Steath mode was off for sure. Don't know what was wrong with it, some game seems to lower performance a bit. I monitered the temps everything max @79/80 degrees, i'm really confused about my GPUs, would be something going wrong?

thanks in advance!

 

^^ maybe a drivers issue? which ones are you using?

 

Djhuydx, you also have a Q720m

 

I'm on 11.6/11.6 cap 1, i switched back 11.5/11.5 cap5 but everything was the same, its a bit low performance compare ealier I had 15000 points in Vantage for ex, now I only got 10500, so... now I'm on 11.6 again, don't know why? lol

 

Crossfire? Turn all ccc settings to performance.

 

yes CF, and everything in ccc turned to performance, AA,AF use application profile, when I benched, i was monitoring gpu by hwinfo32 and GPUz, everything fine, both cards load 100% @810/1200, temps are good about 79/80 degree for both cards, temps for cpu about 70 degree, everything seems fine but still have low performance.

For sure I tried to bench in mafia 2, i've got 37FPS compare to 47 FPS before with same setting

 

yeah something seems off with those scores, can you post a throotle stop log along with a gpu-z while doing a vantage run.

 

Set your OS power plan to High Performance

 

I set my OS power plan at performance, everything in ccc turn in performance, steath mode off and result still is 10000 points

here the gpu logs




score:

 

Not sure what to tell you....CF is definitely working at least some since 10k on one gpu takes over a 1GHz speed on core lol

 

so i'm so confused, I don't know what's cause of

 

I know this is not what you want to hear...but tried a fresh install of OS?

Maybe on a spare hard drive so you dont lose all your stuff on current one

 

I can't do it right now , I have many things to do with this computer in near two weeks lol

thank you anyway for suggesting

+rep

 

I had once a similar issue with vantage performance... even though the system performed very well everywhere else.
Try uninstalling vantage and see whether an older version works, e.g. 1.0.2. This solved it for me.