*OFFICIAL* Alienware 18 Owner's Lounge Thread

Another vote for the processor over the SSD here......

 

Better still get the 4930mx

 

The OP can barely afford the 4900MQ, what makes you think he has another $700 to dish out?

Also, upgrading to the extreme edition CPU is not worth the cost over the 4900MQ. I would not have said this about Ivy Bridge, but Haswell, yes. Believe it or not, the 4900MQ actually performs better than the 4930MX in some instances because of all the limitations that come with the CPU. Perhaps one day these issues will be addressed, but it doesn't seem like it will be resolved anytime soon.

 

There's nothing to worry about. Just update your graphics driver and download some monitoring programs, then run some games/tests while keeping an eye on temperatures. Alienware systems are basically 'ready-to-game' out of the box.

 

best thing to do,

1. unbox it
2. connect power brick to wall socket and m18, switch on
3. press power button on m18
4. once booted up to desktop, download the latest nvidia drivers
5. take out your eyeballs and give them a polish, pop them back in and be amazed at something you probably haven't experienced before, and be ready to blown away...

enjoy.....

 

Ahaha good one and yes it's 100% true that's what I felt when I got mine
I wanted to ask you experienced users on the AW 18 what do you use to clean the rubberized palm rest and also the keys of grease and stuff because I've noticed this can attract a lot of it but I keep it clean with a litle piece of paper or my shirt xD

 

Personally I am using a Hama lens cleaning cloth, the same I use with my camera's lenses. Does the job well... I prefer a "dry" cleaning approach.

 

Hi all,

I have had my Alienware 18 for a while now about 4 months. So far I have followed you guys with mods and bits.

Mr Fox - I got the Kingston Hyper X 2133mhz ram as you suggest and I also caches accelerated my momentus XT drive.

I now have windows 8.1 done a few little mods I found online.

I am now on the hunt for some more go I have 4800mq and also SLI 780m. So I guess its time for some overclocking. I downloaded EVGA precision X , I saw this from a few messages posts ago that Mr Fox posted. I shall give overclocking a go.

Is there much else I can do? push my CPU if so how? I am a bit of a novice, flashing my vbios freaks me out lol but I am willing to give stuff a go.

On another note WOW does battlefield 4 look good on 780m SLI!

 

Glad to hear the HyperX 2133 is working well in your Alienware 18, as well as the cache acceleration. There is not much extra you can do with the 4800MQ CPU, although it might benefit from some fine tuning.

After flashing your vBIOS, use EVGA Precision X to max out your power target slider and set +125/+300. You should see a really nice performance increase that won't tax your system too much.

 

Awesome, I shall have to get over my fear of the unknown. I have never flashed my vbios before. Man up and get on with it! I wish there was a youtube video guide on flashing the vbios, step by step. I really benefit from visually seeing what I have to do.

In case that was to subtle, please someone make the above video. Alienware 18 with 780m SLI and flash a vbios walk through guide lol

 

Fear of the unknown is normal. A complete lack of caution certainly raises questions about a person's intelligence. We have all crossed that bridge of fear at one point or another. Here is a link and a fitting thread.

 

Yeah, even though I don't own an Alienware, I am also planning to flash my vbios for a while, but knowing myself I am afriad that I will screw it up. It would be greatly appreciated if someone could make a simple video about flashing the vbios. I know there are guides online, but still I would like and prefer to have a video.

 

Hey guys I wanted to know if there is any benefict in AlienwareArena by owning an Alienware and if there is what do I have to do get it eheh

 

Mr Fox i notice u r using shadow play on the benchmark thread
i am unable to enable on my 18 saying it is only valid for GTX desktop GPU
any advice

 

Maybe you're not enabling it using the proper tweak. Add -shadowplay to the end of the target path in one of your GeForce Experience shortcuts, then launch that shortcut. Use the toggle switch in the ShadowPlay app to turn it on and off. After doing that GeForce Experience will still say the same thing in the UI, but it will be working in spite of what the UI tells you.


click to enlarge image

 

Ah, computer finally arrived :thumbsup: Too bad I have a few hours of work left before I can start playing with it.

Already warned my wife that she has to handle the dog and our son this evening

 

Okay so I did some thinking and okay, some knowledge might light my way. Mr. Fox I did read that entire thread on techinferno and I must admit it took me some hours. I have decided to listen to your warning, I am not stupid I just have an extreme fear of destroying things that have cost me so much to buy.

First of all lets try some over clocking. I take I need GPU-X and EVGA precision X and then just have a play within and see how things go but be careful with sliders.

Secondly an admission in the techinferno forums it says put a file in the root of my usb drive, genuinely I have no idea what that means....

Thirdly I just found I have Bios A00 and just noticed there is A03 out in the downloads section on the dell drivers page, though its not listed for my service tag I have to check 'All related drivers for your Product (22 files)' so do I actually need it?

Thank you. Sorry I am being so dumb!

 

Don't worry you're not dumb.

 

We need to sure sure we are not confusing things. Not knowing how to do this and finding it intimidating is normal, not dumb. We have all been at this point in the learning process. Nobody is born with experience.

You would flash your video cards (vBIOS) using NVFLASH and a bootable USB stick. You would use the vBIOS that svl7 provided for the GTX 780M (there is only one to choose from). Have you already done this? There are detailed instructions available if you have not completed this. See this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m18x/736253-flashing-vbios-780m.html.

You do not need a bootable USB stick to flash your system BIOS. A03 is the latest release for the Alienware 18. And, yes you want that because it fixed a problem with Core Current Limit being locked at a low value. It was supposed to also improve fan table functionality, but I'm not sure that it accomplished anything with the fans. You download that for your Alienware 18. You click and run the executable. It gives you a warning, you accept and leave it alone. It will reboot and apply the new BIOS, then reboot again when finished. You do this on AC power and do not interrupt the automated process. You will know it is finished because you will see the status message and end up back in Windows after the process is finished.

 

I find Rufus rather nice to use to create a bootable USB drive. After you make the DOS bootable drive, then you can just put the files into the USB drive. You will need nvflash and the vbios rom. Rename it so that it's less than 8 characters, since file name can't exceed 8 characters in DOS. Plug in the USB drive, go into BIOS, set it to legacy mode (if it's not legacy), then choose the boot drive. Use F5 and F6 to move the boot sequence around. You should see your USB drive there, move it to the first position. Then boot into it and proceed flashing.

Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way

Either that, or one could use the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool.

How to Create a MS-DOS bootable USB flash drive - Taiwan CSS Platform Team - Site Home - TechNet Blogs
MS-DOS Bootable Flash Drive - Create - Windows 7 Help Forums

 

Turns out my AW18 comes already with the A03 bios pre-installed. Fancy that

Been trying out BF4 today and my god can it handle it like a monster!

Made sure to make a USB recovery memory before installing all too much. So will try some more games, and more fun things as soon as possible but this sure is a nice machine, it really went above my expectation, not only do I really like the look of it all with the glowing etc, but I really find that I like the look of the screen, which I was a bit... unsure of on the images on the web.

Now if only Dell would decide to fix the small issues remaining and Haswell becomes better then I'd be one happy guy

 

Hi Mr Fox. I think for me its a little it of both, not knowing and intimidating.

Okay I will get on with this. I shall do the A03 flash tonight. I will make bootable flash tomorrow as I am day off, and also attempt the nvflash using the guide provided and the bootable flash creation tool in that thread.

When it says put the file into the root of the USB does that just mean move the file into the USB drive 'literally drag and drop'

Thank you for helping me with all this.
Glen

 

Yes, that is correct. In common language the word "root" simply means the main drive space and not inside of a directory (sub-folder). For example, C:\ is the root of your OS partition, but C:\Program Files is a directory (sub-folder).

 

Bios A03 done That was the easiest thing ever hoping NV flash is as well lol

 

Got my new AW18, Love it except the Broadcom Wireless is terrible I cant get stable speeds. Once I hook up to wired lan it pulls a steady 30mbps.

i7-4800MQ (6MB Cache, up to 3.7GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit, English
16GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5 - NVIDIA SLI® Enabled
Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BD-ROM, DVD±RW, CD-RW)

 

Congrats on the AW18

I seem to have the Killer Wireless card, and it has been excellent so far, managed to get speeds up to 84ish-mbps when checking on website tests. All online games I've tried I've to have really nice ping responses as well.

Which is by far the best wireless I've managed to get here, my old stationary could get a maximum of 30 from the wireless. So I'm pleased that I finally can use the 100mbps that I pay for

I have noticed some ghosting on the screen however, not during gaming but when just using windows.

 

MR FOX, MR FOX! I managed to do it! both cards now have new vbios. I did have a hairy moment where I confused the settings with my legacy and UEFI with secure boot, I think they are back the right way round. I will take a photo and post it later if you don't mind checking it.

I got GPU-Z and also EVGA-X, I maxed out my power slider which oddly only goes to 146%? I notice yours goes to 200%? Did I miss something?

Thank you so much, if your ever in England do let me know I owe you some drinks!

Regards
Glen

 

Awesome, Glen. I knew you could do it, bud. Good job! :thumbsup: +1 Rep

One the Alienware 18 I am using the Power Target slider stops at 146% also. It goes to 200% on the M18xR2... maybe some sort of difference between the video cards, but it may not matter if the performance is fantastic at 146%. I also notice on the M18xR2 it will go up to 222% using NVIDIA Inspector, but stops at 200% using EVGA Precision X.

 

Thank you, can't believe I was so bothered by doing it. Feel kinda relived in a childish way lol.

My Boot screen as of now is this:
http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd284/perfect_shadows/Alienware18/IMG_2409_zpsee34d4aa.jpg
http://i224.photobucket.com/albums/dd284/perfect_shadows/Alienware18/IMG_2408_zps976a2145.jpg

The system is working but I cant remember if those are the correct settings.

Thank you for your patients as well. Amazed at how you deal with everything.

 

Glad to help.

I don't use those settings. I have everything related to UEFI Secure Boot/Fast Boot disabled and use pure legacy mode with MBR disks.

If your system is working fine, let's not mess with your boot menu settings or it might throw a kink in the works.

 

Ah fair point. Thing was I did mess with the settings by accident when I did my nvflash. I turned into legacy mode from the boot settings (f12) which disabled secure boot and also uefi. When I restarted it booted from the video card bios and not the motherboard bios. I was getting a message about tech inferno like a DOS text screen. then just the windows 8 logo and booted into windows. In the bottom right I would get a message secure boot not properly configured.

I went back and guessed the settings as I remember roughly from when I did my windows reinstall (new hard drives) That its UEFI with secure boot enabled. All seems fine now boots up exactly the same way as it did before the nvflash. All the same images appear at boot up Alienware logo etc then windows logon screen. Its the same boot speed etc as before as well as I remember windows fast boot being enabled so I assuming its fine .

As you say though 'if it's not broken don't fix it'

 

I have the same settings as you do, although there's a general disdain for secure boot, I have not had any problem with it. The modified vBIOS works fine with it enabled. What it does if you use Win 8/8.1, is removing the annoying watermark on desktop which says "SecureBoot isn't configured correctly". There are other ways to remove it, by disabling UAC in regedit, but that breaks the Metro Apps.

Secure flash on the other hand is giving us some problems. There have been problems with no POST now and then. Although it used to be that unplugging the CMOS battery will reset the BIOS, it doesn't work on the AW 18, and I guess that it might have something to do with secure flash.

I don't think you will, but if you run into no POST, you can PM Mr. Fox or me or the other members here. Or you could call up Dell and they will send someone to replace the motherboard. So no biggies don't fret out too much.

Enjoy your new machine.

 

Cheers KH, I haven't had any issue at all with secure boot. The only thing I would say I have different is I did a fresh install with GPT the day I got my system so I could put in my drives. Touch wood I have not had a single issue with my system.

 

That's an awesome rig! Hope you have a great time gaming on it!

 

A lot of the disdain for it has to do with the fact that it enables Gestapo-grade control and it doesn't need to exist. It is configurable now, but the intent for the advancing UEFI roadmap is that it will NOT BE in the future. It will be a "take-it-or-leave" proposition and homey don't play dat. It's none of their business what hardware or OS I want to use, and they should have no legal right to have a say in matter or restrict anyone from doing whatever they wish to do.

Seeing how often your system and a couple of others fail to POST with CPU settings that other machines have no problem handling, it would be kind of interesting to know if the machines that handle settings that "brick" yours has any kind of relationship with UEFI boot list mode being set to Legacy. Might not, but it seems there could be some anecdotal relationship. Have you tried setting your BIOS they way I set mine to see if that changes the behavior with what bricks your system and doesn't brick mine? The technology definitely enables the deployment of artificial functionality restrictions and who knows what kind of secret junk might be imposing restrictions that do not exist using Legacy. You have to believe that there is some information that isn't freely shared by the UEFI Nazis and end users are not on the "need to know list."

 

Is there any performance advantage if I flick over to legacy? My system runs fine currently and I don't tweak no where near as much as you do

If there is an advantage is it as simple as a flick from uefi to legacy or is there other settings to consider? boot options and such like. Pretty sure I have GPT and GUID, not mbr.

(Must admit I am getting pretty into this tweaking stuff, I have been raiding google like crazy, whats more crazy is just how much of google brings me back to yourself Mr fox lol)

 

If I set it to Legacy mode, then there's no boot device, and it will complain that there's no boot device. It will then try to boot off LAN.

UEFI is sometimes buggy. Although it has not given me any problem, I cannot rule out that it's related to the no POST. It could very well be related. I don't like SecureBoot and all those crap but if they are not giving me problem (for the time being), then it doesn't offend me. I wonder if UEFI will work fine with the next gen GPU though. I think that might give us some problems in the future.

Since last week, I have not had any no POST, even when I am crashing the system/making the CPU overheat all the time.

I believe my no POST were more related to the settings in XTU, specifically, I am pretty sure setting a negative cache voltage offset will brick the system after rebooting it. Setting negative core voltage offset should be fine, it didn't brick mine. But setting an offset below 1.167V would be useless, as adaptive mode does not allow any voltage lower than that. One can achieve the same effect with static voltage. Well in short, if you want to run your CPU below 1.167V on the AW 18, adaptive mode doesn't allow that, just use static voltage.

You could experiment with it, by setting a negative cache voltage offset. If you brick it then you can try the swap-in-4700MQ way, or you could try the way I proposed. I have never touched the analog IO and digital IO voltages, but I presume that setting a negative offset for those voltages might brick the system too.

I am noticing what you mentioned about the system shutting down when it pulls more than 330W. I am beginning to slowly understand why my scores in 3dmark11 weren't good. I tried the way of setting the multiplier using TS, but only works for multiplier less than 20x. If I set 21x it jumps back to max clock speed.

 

That's funny. I guess that makes me a Googletramp?

I don't know if there is a performance advantage because I intentionally do not use settings like yours. My guess it, probably not. I refuse to use Secure Boot as a matter of personal ethics and principle. I am dead set against anything that enables restrictions. I think that's rooted in evil and so I boycott it.

I think that may be due to using GPT disks versus MBR. I'm not sure you can flip back and forth as easily. I haven't test that theory, but there has to be a reason I can flip back and forth and some other folks cannot. I suspect it is that I use MBR instead of GPT.

 

Are you gonna try setting a negative cache voltage offset in the XTU?

I warn you guys, it will/might make it not POST upon rebooting. I am quite convinced about this, until someone shows me that it's fine.

 

Maybe... I have been thinking about repasting with IC Diamond, so maybe I will try that when I am prepared to take it apart. I don't want to experiment with bricking/unbricking until I have time to straighten it out if it goes south.

 

Hey guys I m in need of help because I m having a lot of BSOD, the warning is non paged area and I checked the file that is causing it, its the broadcomm driver so I turn on the wireless it will give me the bsod. I checkes in the forum for the same, I found a lot of erros but not the same yet, what should I do? Should I uninstall it? Should I unninstall all the wireless/ethernet drivers and han reinstall? And which ones, because it seems there the killer/ethernet drivers are all mixed up

 

Check your hardware IDs for both network controllers in Device Manager and install the correct drivers. There is more than one WiFi adapter available in the 18, so there is no way to know which driver is the correct one until you first confirm what hardware you have.

 

I found that my pc crashes because of my college wifi system and when using others there is no problem at all, also I reinstalled all the drivers broadcomm wlan 1020 and that neat killer wireless software still he crashes, I seriously don't know what to do

 

That almost made me spit out my water. Lol

 

I've had issues with my University's wifi as well. Not sure why... They must have some weird security protocol that messes with our network card.

 

I've taken care of the issue by upgrading to windows 8.1 don't know what kinda of error was, searched about it but the explannations nothing had to do with the source of the error itself so well if anyone has the same upgrade to windows 8.1 and it will be taken care of

 

I thought there was a sticky thread for temps but I will post here since it's 18 related. Specs in sig:
Crysis 3: GPUs heat up to 76*C
Heaven Benchmark: GPUs heat to 74ish.

Seems like games run from 65-70 in moderate GPU intensive games and then mid to higher 70s in intensive GPU games. Is this normal? I'm not overly concerned about it as I have 3 year warranty and am not going to keep pasting and repasting when I pay good money for a good warranty. Just wondering if these 780s are running hotter as my old 580s ran in the 60s constantly.

Happy Fragging fellow 18ers.

 

It's the fan tables. Once they release an update your GPUs should run cooler. The 780M cards run cooler in the M18xR2, but the fans run too slow and are slow to react with the 18's current fan table. Anything less than 80°C is actually decent for GPUs and should not have an impact on performance.

 

New to the new(er) Alienware 18 R1. To save me the time of reading 269 pages, I had a couple of basic questions I hope someone can give a quick answer to.

First, the basic 18 R1...i7-4700MQ. Can this be overclocked with the current BIOS and if so, what are people seeing (OC speed) without repasting, etc?
Second, the dual GTX 765M. Is this a decent setup for the average gamer? Obviously, not interested in benchmarks, etc., with this base model, but wanted to be sure it's capable of decent performance in games.
Are dual 765M's significantly better than dual 6990M's?

I just impulse-bought an R1 from the Outlet for $1400...base model with 16GB RAM. Seems decent but had to ask those questions!

Thank you!

 

The 4700MQ can't be overclocked. It's a limitation of the CPU itself. The 4800MQ and 4900MQ can be overclocked up to a maximum of 400 MHz through the bios. The 4930MX is completely unlocked and overclockable, though with respect to the 18 in its current bios state that is debatable.

The dual 765's will give you good gaming performance. They will not set any benchmark records though. For $1400 I would say you got yourself a very nice system.

EDIT: Here's two links giving you an idea of the difference between 765 SLI and 6990 Crossfire:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-765M-SLI.96627.0.html

http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6990M-Crossfire.58862.0.html