*OFFICIAL* Alienware M17x R3/R4 Owner's Lounge Thread

Yeah re the switching, once I figured out that iGPU was inaccessible, I was pleased I didn't have to deal with it. I've seen a LOT of help requests about it!

As for benchmarking I completly understand how it is addictive. My last rig I built a few of years ago had quad SLI + physX GPUs (2 x 295's and a 9600)and 5 water blocks. Got pages and pages of settings. The thing that scared me off on the laptop was that there is no single button bios reset - it's a pain to recover a brick AND you can't save different settings in profiles. Once you get used to these things you miss them.

Have Fun - flip side dude.

 

AMD Catalyst 13.1 WHQL is out on the AMD website. There's also a leak of the 13.2 Beta here.

 

Thanks Prasad, I wonder which to install now? Does it have some significant improvements on 13.2 compared to 13.1?

 

Well, except for a certain Far Cry 3 optimization, 13.1 WHQL is essentially the same as 12.11 Beta11, since it takes a while to get WHQL certification from Microsoft. The 13.2 Beta however keeps up with current development that's ongoing. It's a choice really, but you can't go wrong either way IMO. I've tried and tested both, and they both perform well and as they should. The 13.2 Beta AFAIK has some additional improvements in a few more game titles, and paves the way for the upcoming revamp of the memory controller code.

 

Alright, but I am having troubles installing 13.1 :/ I restarted my m17x for the fourth time and the Catalyst menu doesn't show up at all. Weird.

 

How is everyone's morning today? It's 46F here in Orl, FL...... Sounds like good weather to do some hardcore benching

 

Hey, doing good. 30F here in the UK - a little chilly

 

excuse me,but can u guys help me slove or find a driver for bluetooth peripheral devices for my 17 r3,i try to pair logitech boombox but cant

 

Dude where are you in Orlando ?

 

You probably installed a driver on top of another.

Try a clean video driver installation. Once the current driver is completely removed, try to run driver sweeper or manually clean up your registry, then install 13.1.

 

I have M17x r4 with HDD (500GB 7,200 RPM) + 32GB mSATA Caching SSD and optical drive (DVD+/-RW). Can I upgrade by extra SSD (like Samsung 830)?

 

Yup, the M17xR4 has 2 HDD slots apart from the mSATA. Check out my sig for instance.

 

Thank you. Now, Im thinking which SSD is the best So Im going to check other topics ^^

 

samsung 840 pro and the latest intel drive I heard are pretty good. You also couldn't go wrong with a crucial m4.

 

I have heard the new crucial m4 is very fast but has reliability issues, though it's covered by a decent warranty

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

 

Are you talking about the Crucial M500? I haven't seen much on that, other than it should be coming out here soon.

 

Yeah I actually have first hand experience on it just breaking with my friends pc I built for him, though when it works it's blazingly quick

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ah... my m4 has been rock solid after the latest firmware update. Prior to the update I was having issues with my drive randomly not wanting to be detected. All fixed now though!!

 

The OCZ Vertex 4 is the fastest at the moment been amazing for me so far

 

Nice nice! It's been so cold past 2 days that i didn't have to turn on the fan.... finally feels like x-mas for once, in January lol

Kissimmee area? I'm guessing you reside somewhere in FL too?

Really now, I've been purchasing OCZ drives for a while now, Solid3 & Vertex 4, had no idea teh vertex 4 was the FASTEST drive so far. Also both drives are still alive after 2 years of non-stop usage

 

Poor you guys... Here in Dubai it's "cold" for me xD but it's actually like 20-30 degrees Celcius

Don't be concerned, even with the iGPU disabled you should get over 3 hours of battery life and you'll love the display, it is the most beautiful colorful and responsive display I've ever seen. Could not give up the 120Hz for anything now don't be worried

 

lol.... that's a good night for me hahaha.... 20C is actually the temp i run my house in just to sleep.

Can't agree with you more.... for a very powerful GPU (gtx680), the thing goes a bit over 3hrs with regular usage

 

OK, if the intel graphics adapter crashes again I think I'll scream. Any ideas? I think the idea that I must rely on the integrated intel graphics and trust the computer will happily switch to the GTX card is is dumb to begin with, when I pay for discrete graphics, then I should ALWAYS rely on them.

Everything is up-to-date. computer is only 3 weeks old. But the screen continually goes black, "recovers" and gives me a message he intel graphics adapter failed and recovered.

 

That's also happened to me a couple times, except the Nvidia driver has crashed and recovered. Really pissing me off. And too often do I get "____ has stopped responding" in the middle of a game and had to force quit it.

Bad drivers? Bad hardware? Windows?

Would a fresh install of windows help?, but my hard drive is full... so much hassle

 

Sounds like a bad driver install. Have you tried reinstalling the drivers?

sounds like a bad driver to me. Are you overclocked or anything like that? and what is your hard drive filled up with!?!

 

Definitely bad drivers, the only problem I have with windows is the media player lol, I have 0 game crashes/ I used to then I did a driver sweep of every driver and reinstalled everything and now its perfect

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I do know quite a bit of history on the TDR errors. Back in the day when I was using Vista RC on my desktop rig (NV based) it was a nightmare. The forums were packed with it and after a few months I formed the opinion that the following was probably the cause:

When MS wrote Vista, they completely changed the HAL. This sits between the OS and the hardware and is what drivers HAVE to communicate with. Prior versions of windows allowed 3rd party hardware to produce drivers that 'talked' directly to their hardware.

Now, this is where there was finger pointing as to who owned the problem. MS were saying that the driver authors were using 'undocumented calls' causing the problem. NV were saying (in very vague terms, NDA?) that MS had changed the HAL very late in development and after they had released code to them to write drivers for.

For me, and most at the time, after about 3 driver releases it only happened very rarely. By increasing the timeout (done by the driver install) it had reduced the BSOD's as well since they now 'recover'. Not much use since your game has crashed but at least it's less of a drama that a BSOD!

Now we are seeing it again it say to me that the driver manufactures are trying 'tricks' again to get better performance but this is compromising reliability under certain circumstances? But that theory falls down when it happens to an Intel driver - very unlikely they are using undocumented calls to the OS/hardware

Since the latest drivers work for the majority, for those that have problems it's a driver strip out and start again, it's often the only fix .

This is all IMO since I saw a bunch of other stuff saying different causes.

 

I'm not overclocked, monitored my temps too and they stay around 60 on load... Hard drive is filled with a lot of games xD

Bad drivers? Hmm yeah maybe I didn't install them properly over the previous ones, kinda too lazy to do proper driver sweeping.. Any advice on how to fully clear all remnants of Nvidia and then reinstall the drivers? I'm on 310.90 at the moment btw, but this kind of stuff has happened on earlier drivers.

Personally, I think it's got something to do with windows... But graphics drivers sounds more like it. Thing is, this comes randomly during games and many different games. Let's say I'm playing a game like Call of Duty, everything is fine... map is loaded blah blah, but then 10 minutes into the game it stops responding or freezes... like could have happened?? It's so random and occurs after a while of gaming, so I would expect graphics drivers issues to show up much more frequently and sooner, so I'm thinking maybe it's a windows problem.. related to Admin rights or something perhaps, like when a game is trying to save?

I'm not that tech savvy to know too much about that so any advice would be appreciated

 

See my previous post re the possible cause, and this thread might have some relevance: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...keeps-saying-nvkflt-sys-something-help-2.html

It wont be a rights issue but I've seen it happen when a game is saving - probably just due to the extra power draw on a flaky installation?

 

Anyone having issues with Killer N 1103 wireless card with Windows 8 on his/her R4? I brought it from the aftermarket and the range seems to be slightly worse than the stock card and I keep on getting disconnected every so often.

 

There are updated intel gfx drivers on their site from December. I had trouble installing the exe version, recommend using the zip version. If you still have a problem installing read their readme on how to do the "have disk" method.

 

Yes I have that issue, there is a thread already for the killer 1103.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/689010-killer-wireless-discussion-thread-look-solutions-ask-questions-here-10.html

 

Anyone know the the brand's name and type of HDD of R4? I have 500 GB variants but I dont see any information in Everest.

 

The 750GB 7200RPM drive that came with my M17x R4 is a Seagate ST9750420AS.

 

my 320gb drive that came with my r3 is a seagate as well, so im guessing that yours is a seagate (since others have seagates too).

 

AnandTech - Alienware M17x R4 Notebook Review: Ivy Bridge and the GeForce GTX 680M
Maybe Hitachi?

 

mine is a seagate as well. Check device manager or Intel RST.

 

You should be able to see with HWinfo. I think it's a ST9500420AS if you get the original config.

 

My 500GB HDD on my R4 is Hitachi..

 

Thanks! It is ST9500420AS...

 

My 500gb HDD is a WD Black.

 

Sounds like they used whatever they have in stock at the time when it comes to hard drives.

 

Now, I would like to install an Win 8 in UEFI. I read [M17x R4] - BIOS A09 released - Page 2 post and I made the USB succesfully. After, when I changed the setup in bios, the windows install has boot up but I cannot choice any partition. Its look like the win installer dont see any installable partition.

What can I do? I have only one HDD in the machine and I cannot format this one to GPT ... or can I? And How?

 

Seagate my HDD is, about the windows 8 installation.

You can use a DVD which the windows installer program creates it has the necessarry UEFI partition to work, thats how I did mine. You have to disable legacy support in the BIOS? What are your BIOS settings?

 

I can also second a seagate HDD. on both of the drives.

 

Anyone know where I can get the original themes and screensavers that originally came from alienware? I can't seem to find them via dell.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=549358

The first page has all the wallpaper and boot screen wallpapers as well as some other colours.

Hope this helps

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Hey guys, the M17x was delivered today and I've been having a blast. Swapped out the hdd with my ssd and did a fresh install of Windows, now I'm testing out performance in FC3, Metro 2033, and AC3, and the 680m completely blows the 7970m out of the water. I wanted to swap out the stock 6gb RAM with my Kingston HyperX, but they're under the keyboard so it's going to be a bigger project than I expected.

One question though... I'm on the latest Nvidia WHQL driver, and when I hit fn+f7, the message "switchable graphics key press detected. choose yes to enable or no to cancel." When I hit "yes" and reboot, the screen resolution is 800x600 and the computer only runs off the igpu (the Nvidia control panel isn't available when I right-click on the desktop.) Any idea why that is? I'm also on the latest BIOS revision (AO10 I believe) if that has something to do with it. How do I get the laptop to run off the 680m only?

Performance is awesome and everything, I'd just like to be able to do it for future reference. Any ideas? Sorry for the possibly very noobish question lol.

 

I... love... this... laptop lol. Not sure how I lived so long without an AW.

I flashed the VBIOS with one of svl7's magic super mods, and now it overclocks easily and doesn't throttle at all.

Here's my first 3DMark11 run, with a mild overclock: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3740QM Processor,Alienware M17xR4 score: P7500 3DMarks I can tell I'll be approaching 8500 sooner or later, it depends on how long I can resist the oc temptation.

Temps are incredible as well... My max temp so far is 70C, and that was while overclocked and doing a 3Dmark11 run right after playing a couple hours of Far Cry 3 The fans sound like jet engines, but in an awesome way, they're not annoying at all.

Did I mention it's gorgeous? Build quality is miles ahead of my Sager, everything looks and feels incredible, and it has the best lighting I've seen on a notebook. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but this laptop... it's so awesome lol. Makes me want an M18x to go along with it