Alienware 18 with 980M SLI by HIDevolution

Shipping is extra. I used the online chat and email.

 

Thanks for the info TBone

What special about Ted? Discounts?

And should I ask for him in the online chat?

Also, in regards to warranty, do I still get warranty as if I purchased from dell UK?

 

Ted normally interacts with the community. He just know's what's up - I can't speak as the if you'd get any discounts but it never hurts to ask. Yep, just ask for him using the online chat.

 

If the issue is related to the cooler you could always jettison that for a Kraken G10, retaining your VRM plate of course:

[Official] NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti Owner's Club - Page 1387

 

Yes the logic supports picking up a pair of 980M vs. spending $4-5k on a desktop.

I just put together my desktop in May, in response to my 680M's giving up the ghost, and if I would have waited I could have simply added a pair of 980M for $1500 (if that one source is still selling them for ~$700.) and would be at 75% of the performance GPU wise vis a vis 780 Ti SLI (I believe 980M SLI is capable of 18k GPU Firestrike on default clocks) MORE THAT ADEQUATE VRAM (3GB of 780 Ti really is the Achilles heel) AND access to MFAA AND I would have retained the portability aspect of my R2.

All of this said, it remains to be seen if 980M is actually 80% as fast as GTX 980, which itself is only ~10-15% faster than 780 Ti. PC Gamer found Nvidia's claim to be a bit generous, attaining an average, albeit potentially CPU limited average, of 65% as fast as GTX 980:

GTX 980M benchmarked: testing Nvidia's mobile performance claims - PC Gamer

And when DX12 arrives, youre going to really appreciate having an Ivy E or Haswell E processor with 6 or 8 cores......

Decisions, decisions.....

 

Does the 980M support DX12 or rather will it? As it's new architecture (Maxwell)

 

Well I've been parroting this but the ones in RJTech($700 980m), there is a risk it may not work in M18x/AW 18.


Plus its asking what model to buy the cards. I can get it but I need to make sure it works. Throwing $1500 is not cool.

 

Brother Vulcan. It seems to be the performance of about 90% of a 970 (desktop) in most situations as Tested by PC Per.

There are all the same part, no matter which model you select.

 

Cards run ridiculously cool actually, it's everything to do with immature drivers unfortunately.

 

Hmm why does RJtech want to know the model of the Clevo when selling the gpu?

 

Perhaps you can ask. My guess is to anticipate their market for stocking other Clevo parts or the website is a little antiquated.

 

Maybe the cards come with a heatsink so they need to know?

The other guess is they have both SLI and non-SLI cards.

 

Slight differences in vbios of optimus vs non optimus potentially.

 

You guys are going to love 980M SLI and DSR.

 

I wish they would stop burning calories on silly nonsense like "Battery Boost" technology and stay focused on churning out more wicked performance when running on AC power. This inordinate preoccupation with the notion of power efficiency is not very assuring. Instead of doing more with less, they need be aggressive about doing a lot more with freed up resources. In other words, freeing up hardware power demands should be seen as a golden opportunity to seize the extra power currently at their disposal that was originally intended for supporting power-hungry components and just use it up instead of being able to get by with consuming less.

 

That's what they did with the base design of maxwell 2, they took the savings gained and then created a gk104 class sized chip with it (the size with greatest flexibility across all markets). This is just extra bits and pieces.

 

I'm going a bit OT, but I can think of one good reason to be concerned with power efficiency on the desktop side -- electrical limitations of your household circuits.

As I mentioned somewhere else, my room shares a 15A circuit with the living room, so I really need to squeeze the most I can out of every single watt, which is why I have double appreciation for Maxwell and its power efficiency (and why power hogs like the 5960X really make me cringe). I can however agree with your general sentiment that sacrificing performance in the name of efficiency is not good. However Maxwell 2 does seem to be heading in the right direction where they're taking the savings and actually putting it to good use. I for one can't wait to see what nVidia will be able to pull off with a 250W GM200 chip.

 

Oh I see, yes that would be a total waste.

Damn that's still very impressive! GTX 970 is right on par with 780 Ti in benchmarks, I've even seen 26k GPU from 2x 970 SLI (I'm sitting at 24k with a stable OC on the default vbios)!

GTX 9xx Vs GTX 7xx Vs GTX Titan Vs R9 2xx Bench Off Thread - Page 5

What kind of temps? Will this vbios described on the last page of the OC.net 970 forum address your issue? I'm not sure if the whine is related to the fan-speed or what.

[Official] NVIDIA GTX 970 Owner's Club - Page 505

 

It's a coil whine that's coming from the chokes, so not fan related. Although I've found that once the cards warm up past a certain temperature (55C I think?) the whine goes away completely. Ironically heat is actually my friend here as the cards need to run hot enough to quench the coil noise.

The immature drivers comment was meant to address the voltage discrepancy caused by different ASIC qualities and the driver failing to compensate for that, so I have to set one card to run 20MHz slower than the other in order for them to match volts and boost clocks.

With OC to 1506 core 7600 mem, after 40 minutes of Far Cry 3 with 2.25x DSR (effectively 2880x1640 downsampled to 1080p) and 2x MSAA, the top card fluctuated between 67-70C, while the bottom card chilled out at 62-65C. Although to be fair my case (Enthoo Primo) is basically a windbox with 11 case fans rofl.

 

Put a 25 amp fuse in the circuit instead of 15 . Problem solved.

 

I just got off the phone with Dell UK, and I asked when they will be selling systems with 980m SLi.

He said most likely around 90 days until they start selling Alienware 18s with 980Ms SLi as an option.

 

That's craaaaazy. Alienware is loosing so much in sales right now it's no even funny. All early adopters are shifting to other brands because they want the 980m now

 

He could be bluffing, as I was interested in purchasing a system with 880M SLi instead, so maybe he wanted a sale out of me. And thus hoped I;'d be thinking "May as well get 880Ms instead of waiting 3 months."

27 Oct should be a reveal day for AW, so we will see if the 980m will be released then.

But yes, they are losing out, a lot.

 

Dude the sale ppl dont know when a system will release, lol, never believe them.

 

I hope your right Mike

He also said, they don't earn commission anymore. Because they were getting pushy.

However, I am unsure whether to wait for 980Ms, or get a good discount over the phone for an 880M system. I managed to get the price down to £2210. I think I might buy it if I can lower it to £2000ish.

 

880M are crap compared to 980M, if you really don't want to wait purchase a pair from a reseller, the extra cash will be far more worth it in the end if patience is not one of your strong points.

 

I'm still debating whether i want to just upgrade my current GPU in my system or wait and purchase a new system when they have the 980m configuration with the 8 core CPUs. But how long until game devs start utilizing the 8 core cpu's is what i am really concerned with.

 

You're right. It's a bit hard though atm as both my GPUs in my M18x have just died. So I have been on IGP for almost the last month. Here's to hoping tomorrow is a reveal day for the 980M in an AW 18 system, so I can finally start playing again haha.

 

From what I've been seeing on YouTube, the 980M is definitely a worthy upgrade over the 680M/780M/880M. The only issue at this point in time is availability and price. A lot of people are selling them, but don't actually have them in stock until November. And these same people are price-gouging us by exploiting hype. You need to read the fine print or make an inquiry before purchase.

 

8 core cpus. Where did you hear that from. Please post link

 

Where did you hear about this? I called Dell UK tech support due to overheating GPU (it was throttling like mad without HWINFO64) and asked the premium phone support guy when or if the 18 was being sold with 980Ms, and he said he didn't have a clue. I had called last week and asked and that phone support guy said he didn't have a clue either.

 

What about HIDEvolution with their in-stock AW18 with 980M SLi? Do you think they actually have them or selling them, but awaiting stock?

What kind of price point will we be looking at for 980M SLi in a base configuration system? The current price of adding 880M SLi is £680 ($1094).I would hope 980M would be about the same.

 

They probably prioritize the stock they have. I'm sure they are putting them in systems because they want to sell the entire system to prepare for R2's coming out.

Everyone on eBay does not have them in stock. That's all I know for now. I'm not sure if HIDEvolution is shipping them separately.

 

Ahh, so they are installing 980Ms into AW 18s, possibly knowing that an R2 is soon to be released with the flag ship GPU being a 980M?

 

Most likely. New products coming in, old products going out. What better way to move old products than to put new hardware inside that everybody wants?

 

AMD has been making 8 core CPU's for a while now, Intel has expanded from 4 core to 6 core with Sandy Bridge E a few years ago, apparently Moore's Law has been temporarily suspended as CPU operating frequency has been unable to breach the mythical 5GHz barrier. So it seems that instead of trying to get few cores to run faster Intel has decided to simply double the amount of cores and now with the recent refresh has gone the 8 core route with Haswell E's 'Extreme Processor', the 5960. If youre unfamiliar with the development input 5960 and X99 on Youtube to get up to speed; you'll find a plethora of videos.

DX12 promises to implement proper multi-threading for video games, right now most of my cores are actually unused for the majority of games as there is poor to non-existent multi-threading support. Crysis 2 and 3 are one of the few exceptions. Intel knows DX12 will change this and has gone full tilt with the multi-core development route.

I'm running a Hexa-Core (6 core) Ivy E processor, an i7 4930, my desktop's specs and bench can be found in my signature. My 4930 is about 50% faster than the 3920 in my R2, both running at comparable frequency (4.6 and 4.5 GHz respectively). My 3920 is good for about 11k Physics in Firestrike whereas my 4930 is flirting with 17k......

No-one has taken the time to lay this out for you as it's fairly common knowledge among the tech savvy, which is the majority of the readership here. But we seem to forget that at some point in the not-to-distant-past we were all asking similar questions; no-one wakes up knowing all of this as if they were Edgar Cayce accessing the Akashic Records.

If you have any more questions fire away.

 

Ah yes, many EVGA 780 Ti Classy owners had the same problem. Yeah that sucks, out of all the non-reference Maxwell cards the Gigabyte G1 Gaming had my vote for most enthusiast grade. If I had the coin I would have totally picked up a pair of 980 G1 Gaming', but now that I am looking at the benches I might have even gone the 970 route! I can't believe how fast the 970 is overclocked. I felt safe looking at the reference benchmarks, with 970 SLI only churning out around 16k GPU in Firestrike. But now that illusion has been COMPLETELY obliterated by the OC benches, with a single 970 G1 Gaming capable of 14k GPU and SLI at 26k GPU. That is pretty much non-reference 780 Ti performance with 4GB of VRAM, access to MFAA (a big deal actually) and for less!

Johnkss is sitting around 44k GPU with 3x 980 SLI with the best I've seen from 3x 780 Ti SLI around 38k. The 780 Ti is officially dethroned

And what is even crazier is not just the significantly reduced power-draw but also the temps the 970 is seeing overclocked with more voltage. I've seen reports of primary load temps of 75 C with 1.275V!!!! That is no small feat at all. For comparison my primary load temps go from 75 at 1.187V to 85 C at 1.212V!

Although I DO want to upgrade to non-reference 980 SLI my budget mindedness is telling me to wait for Big 22nM Maxwell (Big 22nM lol). I can't wait to see the performance from 980 Ti / Titan 2.

 

Thanks for taking the time to give me some insight into this. I will be up to speed with you all in the no to distant future. it will definitely give me something else to look into. I learn more and more every day.
Thanks to everyone here.

 

You realize if the wire gauge is not up to snuff you could easily start a fire right? Believe me if the fix was that simple I'd have done it already.

There are 2 20A circuits in the house, one in the kitchen, one in the laundry room. You couldn't pay me to set up camp in either of the places.

Yeah definitely wait for 980 Ti/Titan X or whatever GM200 will be called. I only got these Gigabyte 970s because I got a pretty killer deal on them ($688 out the door including shipping), and they have more than 2x the GPU power of my 780M SLI laptop. Tbh 970 was never really intended to be a long term solution, since I'd always been eyeing the GM200. I'd really love to see what nVidia can accomplish with a 250W GM200 aka Big Max. That being said if GM200 proves to be a disappointment I'm sticking with these 970 until something worth throwing money at releases. So figured I should get the most powerful 970 available.

 

HOLY SMOKES that was a good deal, that's about what I paid for EACH of my 780 Ti SC ACX...

You might be surprised, those Gigabyte 970's might be able to hold you over until Pascal, if you can tolerate the coil whine for about 3 years that is....

If you feel the need for more performance, simply OC away! Did you see these 970 SLI benches? (second post down).

http://www.overclock.net/t/1516661/gtx-9xx-vs-gtx-7xx-vs-gtx-titan-vs-r9-2xx-bench-off-thread/40

That is simply amazing. We're talking non-reference 780 Ti, if not better performance here.

 

N=1 . I was just being sarcastic and or goofing around .

 

I'd most likely go insane lol. There's a joke that the 980 costs more not because of performance but because of much less chance of coil whine. Thus far 90% of the reference 980 owners report no coil whine, and even the unlucky 10% say it's so faint it goes away once they crank up the speakers. I'm starting to think the lack of a reference board for 970 might be the culprit here.

In all seriousness though, I'm optimistic since it appears once the cards warm up the whine goes away, even when frames shoot past 100. The first day I got these cards they only stopped whining when I capped FPS to 80. Still I'm thankful I got rid of my first set of cards that sounded like a dolphin at the dentist. Godamn that was brutal. (that's not my vid, but mine sounded just like that, and I had 2 to boot. Talk about doubling down...)

And yeah I'm waiting for nVidia to unbork the drivers so I can unleash the beast in these cards. Right now I've decided to not overvolt since it requires too much finesse to get these cards to match volts in SLI. Let me share some really funny stuff I observed.

Using MSI AB, if I only let the top card (higher ASIC, lower VDDC) run 20MHz slower than the bottom (lower ASIC, higher VDDC) card (+120 top card, +140 bottom card), both cards boost to 1506MHz, and the top card only sips a cool 1.200V, while the bottom card is at 1.206V. However, if I set the top card to +110MHz and the bottom card to +140MHz (so top card 30MHz instead of 20MHz slower than bottom card), Firestrike still shows both cards are boosting to 1506MHz, but the top card is now running @ 1.225V and the bottom card at 1.206V. So basically role reversal where the top card now overshoots the bottom card.

And just for kicks I made the bottom card run 20MHz faster than the top card, Firestrike instantly crashed and gave an irrecoverable red screen that required a hard reset.

...yeah these drivers are borked.

DOH!

 

Does anyone know if the Clevo P377SM-A GTX 980M from RJTech will be compatible with an Alienware? I'd like to buy one.

 

That's a good question. I will call them to find out.

Nevermind. Their lines are busy.

 

Sometimes they will say it won't work, but in reality it does. I hope you get someone who doesn't just look at the webpage and be like, "No, it says Clevo only."

 

One of the member's here, "godfafa_kr" can't seem to make it work in a couple of different Alienwares so far. It seems like it might need a Dell vbios flash at this stage.

Have read through this thread

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/763137-i-need-gtx-980m-sli-4.html

 

Ah, okay. Looks like it doesn't work then.

 

I guess I am going to upgrade my CPU instead then.

 

You would be better off waiting, it's going to take a little testing and confirmation to be sure of what will work.

 

If end of November nothing happens, I will stick with my 780M SLI on my AW 18 and upgrade my M18x R2 from 7970 Crossfire to 780M SLI as well.