*OFFICIAL* Alienware M17x R1/R2 Owner's Lounge Thread - Part 1

Hello,

i am a complete novice when it comes to computers. I've had my M17x since December 2009, so i think it's a R1 or R2. The service tag is F49V4K1.

About a year ago, i did a full system restore as i was running out of space and needed to clear everything off and start again. Unfortunately, this wiped off all my up to date nvidia drivers that i installed before they stopped being supported and started referring me to the dell website. The latest driver on the Dell site is August 2010 !

I want to go back to gaming but my current video card can't cope with the graphics and games are laggy and near enough unplayable.

I have been searching this site and looking for ways to install the latest driver - i even tried http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...tebook-win8-7-x64bits-international-beta.html - but there is no .inf file to replace ?!?

TBH, i don't understand what i'm doing ! Does anyone have a total idiots guide to getting a newer driver installed so i can start gaming again ?

Operating System:
Windows 2.6.1.7601 (Service Pack 1) CPU Type: Intel® Core™2 Quad CPU Q9000 @ 2.00GHz CPU Speed: 2.02 GHz System Memory: 4.02 GB Video Card Model:
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M G Video Card Memory: 1.99 GB Video Card Driver: nvd3dum.dll Desktop Resolution: 1440x900

Thanks,
Alison

Just saw the post about coloured audio ports - which makes mine an R1 !

 

Welcome to NBR Alison

I'm not that familiar with the R1 so hopefully katalin_2003 see's your post as he has much more knowledge on your system. That said, what I do know is the nVIDIA Geforce 9400M video card you mentioned in your post is the integrated graphic card used to save power and extend your battery usage. It is not meant to be used for gaming.

You also have another set of graphic cards ie. nVIDIA Geforce GTX 260M that your laptop normally switches to once a game is started. Unfortunately nVIDIA has stopped supporting this "Hybrid" graphic card setup used in your laptop as far as I know.

My suggestion would be to disable the integrated graphics and hybrid graphics setting in your laptops BIOS.

1. Enter the BIOS screen, by tapping [F2] at boot time.

2. Go to Advanced -> Graphic Setting; change both Hybrid Graphics and Integrated Graphic to disabled.

3. Press [F10] to save the changes and exit. Let the computer restart.

You will then be solely running your two GTX 260M graphic cards. Then try the drivers from here as they most likely already have support for your GTX 260M graphic cards built in.

 

Thank you !! Theres already a huge improvement from just switching to the GTX 260M's !!

I have updated them to the 2011 version - that seems to be the latest from what i can see - and everythig is all sparkly and looks great and isn't lagging me across the screen like before !
Huge thanks

 

Yea sounds like you were running on the 9400 GPU. Switchin to the 260Ms would definately improve things. Thare are a few cards you can upgrade to from the 260's if in the future they become inadequte. Also welcome to the forum. This is an excellent resource for any and all notebook related advice you may need. Great group of people as well.

 

Thank you

I may need to upgrade, as when i start up my game it tells me straight away that my drivers are out of date etc, even with what i have updated to !

The process of upgrading is way beyond my capabilities though - given that i was running the wrong card ! haha !

 

If it runs the games, I wouldn't worry bout drivers being out of date. I only upgrade when I need to. Stick around and feel free to ask any questions. Plenty of knowledge and helpful individuals here willing to hep.

Sent from my Samsung Captivate/JB CM 10.1 via Tapatalk.

 

well i figured out why my crossfire won't work. the slave card is dying. Thinking i'll just upgrade to a single 6990m. anyone know of a tutorial or something on how to do that?

 

Take a look at this thread. Although I would advise you to try and stretch your budget to a 7970M if at all possible as its a huge improvement over the 6990M.

Keep checking the NBR marketplace for possible bargains.

 

The only upgrades that are available for the R1 are the HD5870 crossfire . Upgrading the GPU's won't be too hard because they are very accessible . Also if you want to update drivers people on the forum post up modded inf files so you can get the latest drivers for your cards .

 

Please tell me how can I disable Hyper-threading on the alienware m17x r2 i7 920xm.

 

Unfortunately we cannot as far as I know Even the unlocked A10 BIOS doesn't give us the option to disable HT.

 

I have a problem and can't find the answer. I ran AlienAutopsy and got this error:

RTC Accuracy Test - Failed - WSB01-HS0

What can be causing this error? I imagine it can be anything with the motherboard. Can the CMOS battery cause this? This laptop is about 4 years old (got it when it came out). If I want to replace the CMOS battery, where can I find one?

Thank you much in advance for any help.

 

Hey Guys

I have had my m17xR2 for a pretty long time, recently i have had nothing but trouble with it, it freezes on windows startup randomly. Dell has recently dispatched a part for me to replace the Screen, the part says F364N. I was just thinking, its been 4 years, and its still under warranty, and what if there was an "accident" to happen to it. What is dells protocol? do they give me a refurbished system, or something like that?

 

Hey man, Yea dell will give a refurbished one if they have it. Chances are they don't have anymore R2s so the next step is equal or better. Wish probably means an M17x R4 or something like that. Which is a single GPU system. If you push the fact that you have a dual GPU system, they may replace your R2 with an M18x


Oh Yea, and to answer your question (forget which thread/forum) about me and Clevo. I traded my R2 for the X7200. I had maxed out the specs on my R2 and painted it as well. Got the itch to change it up and try something new. Also the desktop i7 980x 6 core CPU appealed to me. BD it's a 130w beast. So I did a 1 for one swap. Also the X7200 allowed me to install 4 HDDs. I had no real use for an optical drive. But the 485M were great cards. So it was a good deal. And had triple channel memory so I could run 24GB. Not that I really need all that lol.

Also I'm currently deployed out to Kyrgyzstan. Should be headed stateside sometime in March or April. So not having my computer is killing me lol. I'm stuck using my buddies spare old Macbook :thumbdown:

Some links to my R2 with the candy white paint job

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=8551995


https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151076274581973.431867.71644901972&type=1

Sent from my DROID RAZR/JB CM 10.2 via Tapatalk II

 

Nice seeing you around DR.

For the "better" part, is that a new system or is it still a refurbished m17x or m18x. I was looking at the Alienware website, and the new systems look awesome. I was not sure whether they would give me a new Alienware 17 or 18, would have been nice. And whats the best way to have an "accident", out of the window or spill something. Also do refurbs have new outer components, like the touchpad, keyboard, lids and stuff, no scratches etc..?
And that Clevo is pretty impressive, a desktop cpu in a laptop, hell of a performance upgrade. And i got to say, I love the paint job on the m17x, looks great, and I see dell/alienware noticed too

Your coming back in March :/ That's a long time man, and i never even heard of that country lol... Hope you come back earlier then that.

 

What kind of problem do you have?
However I bought some time ago this battery: Laptop Motherboard PLC/COMS 3V CR2032 Li-ion Button Battery w/ Wire + Plug - Black + Red - Worldwide Free Shipping - DX
I still have to get it but it should work, if you open the plastic around the CMOS battery you'll see that the code is CR2032.
I asked about the issue because I had a grey screen while turning it on, and solved by removing the battery. Now i'm without battery, the only issue is that i may need to re-enable the virtualization technology when i need it (for me, less more annoying than the grey screen on every boot). DX.com has very low prices but shipping takes a lot of time :\

 

Figured out why I was getting the error message. My computer came with 940XM CPU. The BIOS allows me to overclock the CPU up to 5%. The problem is that while in Windows, if the computer goes to sleep and wake up, the CPU speed is reverted back to default. I don't know how to fix this. Anyway, AlienAutopsy checked the RTC speed and sees an error. I went back into BIOS and turned CPU overclock off and everything is fine.

Thanks for the link to the battery though.

 

First off, asking the "best" way of having an accident is condoning fraud. An accident is an accident.

Dell refurbs usually are returns due to actual defects, buyer's remorse, overstock, etc. A lot of times Dell refurbs are actually new.

 

That country is located in Eastern Europe more towards the middle east ususally they were former soviet republics and heavily the dominate religion is Islam. Anyway, i really haven't used my R2 for a very long time since i use my desktop Alienware X51 and i am just wondering what should i do to upgrade it software and hardware wise i'm very out of the loop.

 

Kyrgyzstan is not in Europe, neither geographically nor in terms of values ​​and politically.

 

Hi,

Anyone can share the .inf file for 331.40 Nvidia Driver for GTX280M @ Alienware M17xR1?

 

@V-Moda
Not sure if this will help, but if you go to LaptopVideo2Go: NVIDIA & Laptop News you can download the latest Nvidia drivers with modified inf files for installation. There is even a inf enhancer/modifier to tweak the driver. I have not messed with that site in a while but its a good place to start.

@All
Has anyone with an R2 made a warranty claim in a while? I want to upgrade to the 7000 series GPUs but need a new GPU fan.

 

Have you tried laptopvideo2go.com? They usually have the latest ones available.

 

I want to put a NVidia gtx 765m into an m17x r1 ----- is this possible??

 

Looks like it should work, the R1 has MXM 3.0b sockets and supports 75w cards. Doing a quick google search, I found that various Nvidia cards after the 580m have a lot of problems with internal monitors/displays. Sometimes its fixed with a vbios flash, and in most cases that I read SLI was out of the question. I hope this helps and I hope I did not discourage you.

By the way, welcome to the forum!!!!

 

Yeah my bad sorry about that still working on my geography and cultures.

I am just wondering what can i do to upgrade my R2? Specs are single 5870, rgbled, dell wifi, seagate 500 gig ssd 4 gig that series, 500 gig storage, 8 gigs of gskill 1333mhz, how much of a benefit is the modified A10 bios? Newer versions? Upgrading the gpu to crossfire? I am not very very bad with technical hardware i can the basic stuff change hard drives, ram, wifi, but when i tried to change the gpu once... i really messed it up, dell fixed it and my cpu is the core i5 m520.

 

The R1 usually has issues to get anywhere above the 280m. It would be better to sell and re-order.

 

The confirmed most powerful card that you can install in the M17X R1 is the AMD 5870M, unfortunately any NVidia card higher than the 285M will NOT WORK. You can get a 5870 for around $150 each off ebay, and you can sell a 260M for roughly $110-$130, so pretty much the upgrade will cost barely anything. The 5870M is still a good card, plays all my games, Crysis 3 medium settings, Far Cry 3 on ultra, Saints Row IV on ultra. The only games I really had problems with were Metro Last Light and Arma 3, they only played on low. However, this was on the stock Dell driver and vBios. I have just upgraded the vBios and drivers and overclocked my card, so I should see a performance increase. See this thread for more info: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-17-m17x/735303-m17x-r1-5870m-can-i-use-new-amd-drivers-2.html
I will be posting my performance increases there.

 

How did it fare? Choppy? Slow? Lowest settings?

 

So I found this nasty little piece of software "AMD Dual Core Optimizer". No wonder I was losing so many frames. Played a few games that used to really slow down the M17x-R2 and now things are much smoother.

 

That piece of software was built for the Athlon64/Opteron chips for WIndows XP. That was before AMD bought ATi so its highly unlikely its affecting your framerate. I used to use it with my dual core Opteron 170.

 

Well I am going to throw something out there as it has been long enough that I have used the m17xr2 to get a good enough evaluation.

This m17xr2 with 8GB of ram and sandy bridge cpu 840qm runs faster and more fluid than my clevo p170hm with ivy bridge 2820qm and sata3. The alienware spits out the web with ease whereas the clevo is slower to load pages. I am not sure what may cause this and it's ever so slight difference but it is noticeable. I also notice my icon cache for the desktop is slow to load from windows bootup with clevo and I have changed icon cache size to make it larger but still it is still slow to load the icons. The alienware does not suffer from this. To me this is a very solid machine with an impeccable backbone/chassis and outstanding RGB display and audio quality. Aside from the bulk of the beast it oozes class in every field including future upgradability. The 7970m in it is running the latest titles BF4, batman on max settings beautifully.

Happy Alienware anniversary guys the beast RoX!!!!

 

So the AMD Dual Core Optimizer software intended for Athlon64/Opteron chips in WinXP was running on a Windows 7 64bit Intel Core i7 system....that's probably why it was taking up cpu cycles while running in the background everytime I started up my computer...

 

Sorry for the hold up PsiPr0, my poor m11x R2 had a hinge that broke so been prepping it for the depot. I just finished playing the first area in BF4 and to my surprise the game runs relatively smooth. I set the graphic settings to Ultra for kicks and only noticed minor stuttering and screen jerking when entering a new area but it did not affect my game play. The game will prompt to install AMD driver 13.1 but will let you play with an older one (I was using 11.1).

 

Cool, sounds good. Something wrong with the 13.1 driver that you didn't want to install it? I am going to buy an 8GB ram kit today and then hopefully I can download BF4 on Origin tonite. I'm so very impressed with my first Alienware ever. Thing still hangs in there pretty well after 3 years. It may have been a bit of a struggle getting it to work right at first, but that was only the first few months of ownership. It's been great ever since.

 

I had a beech of a time installing 11.1 when it first came out. At the time I was having a series of BSODs caused by the USB driver and the ATI drivers (oddly enough raiding the vcore and overclocking the CPU fixed it). 11.1 is the one that suck, and all the games I have played on it since I installed it have worked. You know the saying "ain't broke don't fix it". I will admit that I have been out of the loop with ATI drivers the last few months, I just downloaded the 13.11 beta driver and may give it a try while the m11x is getting repaired.

 

I use the 13.11 Beta on my M17X R1 which has a 5870M. The driver is great and I have had no issues so far. The best part is that I can overclock the 5870M within CCC, but of course you need to flash the vBios of the card to the newest version to enable overclocking

 

I'm still sitting on a 12.10 xD i have all drivers on the HDD and whenever i need to i wipe windows, i can install them immediately wihout waiting for download (256Kbps internet :/)
Easier that way, and i don't play new games so the driver wouldn't do me any good anyway

 

Hi there!
I was wondering if it could be possible to run different MXM cards on each slot, without XFing them. I have both 5870m and a 7970m with enduro disabled. The fact is that my battery is willing to retire and without the intel GMA I can´t get a proper autonomy, and maybe with the 5870m as primary I could probably get the GMA as default desktop card, then the 5870 as primary and switch it to the 7970m if required.
I googled it a lot but without luck, and as my previous experiences with alienware told me that his mobos are too expensives to replace and stuffs like AOD403 are hard too find mosfets (M18x R1 regulators) I will leave my knows apart and ask you genius about this.
thanks and good luck
Chad
I´m running an unlocked A10 bios on the M17x R2 with 720qm and for now a single dell 7970m w/o auto fan control with the 240W brick AC.

 

Hi all , I was looking for some advice from the Knowlegdable people here . I was looking at buying a HD 5870 I have been told the card is working fine in an M17X R2 and believe the seller because I have been offered a full refund if the card doesn't work for 30 days . I have an M17 X R1 and was wondering if I ran into problems with getting the laptop to accept the card could I flash the cards vbios using my M17X R1 . I'm currently running the A07 bios on my M17X R1 . The seller told me the part number is C8245 . So I'm just wondering Am I buying the right card to be used as a master card .

Dell VBios software .
Driver Details | Dell Ireland

 

Well I don't mean to burst your bubble but the R2 doesn't have an Intel GMA integrated GPU... it never did. So that pretty much rules out your entire plan

Also desktop replacement laptops were not designed to be used on battery for extended periods of time, the R1 could get decent battery life as it had an integrated nVIDIA 9400M GPU. On DTR laptops like our's the battery acts more like a UPS than anything else.

The good news is you're buying the best card that's been found to work in the R1. From the part number he's given you it seems it's a Dell card.

You should be able to flash the latest vBIOS provided by Dell with no hassles. If you encounter any problems just post here and we'll be able to assist. Do NOT flash the vBIOS using ATI winflash. Always flash any BIOS in DOS.

I would also suggest updating to the latest motherboard BIOS before installing the card. There is no master or slave card anymore, both primary and secondary cards use the exact same vBIOS, the only difference would be the heatsinks design for the left and right slot.

 

Just a small note, the Mobility 5870 is not/was never officially supported for the M17x (R1) but it functions in this system. Best official cards for the M17x were nVidia 280M and the Mobility 4870, on ATi/AMD side.

 

Thanks for that info katalin_2003. I've edited my post accordingly and removed my nonsense

 

Yeah I know they aren't offically supported thanks for all the help form everyone here , I can get my hands on the heatsinks but do the heatsinks off my gtx 260 cards work on the HD 5870 ?

 

There's one set of heatsinks to cover all official cards for the M17x and the M17x R2. So yes, the 260M heatsink can be installed on the Mobility 5870.
You'll need new thermal pads though.

 

Thanks Nospheratu for your answers and your greats knowledges! It´s a shame it hasn´t an integrated graphics (in fact when I asked I was thinking that the 720qm had a gma itself but now I know it doesn´t)
Is there any progress on getting the auto fan control on a 7970m Dell branded card on a M17x R2? I´m a little affraid of bricking my card trying different bioses and then as I didn´t get an answer if somebody has tryed allready to boot with two really different GPU on each MXM slot I don´t know if I could reflash the vbios if something went wrong and also can´t get precise info on mixing vbios (clevo on dell card or viceversa). I can see on HWInfo 64 that the Dell 7970m has an incorporated fan sensor that should get bypassed or fixed.
And a little more offtopic here... but my 7970m is at x8 pciex 2.0 (in gpu-z render test, plugged in with 240W etc...) but the port says it should be x16 Pciex 3.0 so I don´t know (the card is at the primary MXM by the way, and even if at x8 it shouldn´t bottleneck I would like to know if I can get the best out of my Alien).

 

I have got dual GT260M that are starting to artifact and crash at times so I have decided to get my hands on an ATI mobility HD 5870 . I'm in the process of saving for a new Alienware but this should tie me over until I can afford a new system .

Also I would like to thank katalin_2003 and Nospheratu for all the infor provided .

 

That's awesome! Hopefully you will be able to enjoy gaming on your rig really soon.

 

Yeah I hope I do !! I really love my Alienware and everyone who sees it always admire it even it's a few years old . They really have got it all killer hardware and look at me looks .

 

Anyone using the latest Nvidia GeForce 331.65 Driver for GTX260M or 280M?

Can you guys kindly share the .inf?

Tried to download from other website but the link is dead