*OFFICIAL* Alienware M18x Benchmark Thread

Now, that could be Sir Speedy. Thanks for pointing it out. You know, a lot of things might work better without an Alienware version of Windows 7, but I have intentionally put off doing that because I have been trying to fix the Aero glitch on a factory installation. Are you having the Aero bug on your system?

Are you running true SSD drives or the mediocre Momentus XT like I am?

I am still running the factory Alienware OS install and need to hose it and do a fresh install. My R2 ran way better on a generic Windows OS.

I've made two copies of Respawn media (a 2 DVD set and a single BluRay disc) for future use, so I don't need any of the factory partitions or anything. Maybe this weekend I will wipe it out and start over with an install from a generic Windows 7 Ultimate installation media. I am just not looking forward to reinstalling Adobe CS3, MS Office Pro, Project, Visio, FrontPage, all my third-party utilities and 30+ games. That's a sure-fire way to blow an entire weekend doing nothing but feeding data into a computer, LOL. And this does not even count the hundreds of Windows updates.

But, it's got to be done and once it is, it will be imaged to an external HDD and it will never again be time wasted in the future.

 

thx for the nice quote you made
makes it look clearer now then search all posts 1 by 1

 

Hey NVIDIA 580M guys... you can download this from Dell Support now.

Here is a direct link: ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/video/R308308.exe

 

I made my life simpler by loading a universal windows 7 sp1 on a bootable thumb drive son every time i get a new computer i pick what version to install takes 7 minutes to install on a vertex 3 120gb and of course after tweaking the OS it takes only 10gb of my precious SSD space and then if i want to load a special game I just dump it to my SSD from my desktop

for the rest of ordinary games i use a secondary HDD but I never install games on my laptop just move them from my desktop hard drives for my burning,encoding, I use my desktop that way i have less services running on my laptop

make sure on any kind of installation to disable superfetch and windows search

no I don't have any Aero problems everything is good one more thing I don't use Alienware respawn instead if i got a seagate HDD i use seagate disk wizard to do regular backups every month or if i don't have a seagate drive in hand I use acronis true image both work the same but acronis is not free

 

Yeah, I don't use Respawn either. I just wanted to create the restore media in case I ever wanted to have it for some reason later. If forgot to do that on my M17x R2 and had no way to do a factory install in case I decided to sell it or something. I'll probably never use it, just wanted to have the media in case... know what I mean?

I don't even use the CD Alienware sends, just the downloadable ISO for Windows 7. I use ABR for activation backup and restore and that works good, too. So, I can just use the ABR tool on my current install and that gives me a neat little package and a TXT file with the OEM product key ready to go when I do a fresh install.

I have the retail version of Macrium Reflect for imaging and it works awesome. It's much like Acronis. Has the WindowsPE and ability to create zipped files from entire drives that can be mounted as a virtual drive, etc.

I forgot about disabling superfetch and search. Thanks for reminding me. I don't have to do it often because it is a set it/forget thing and I always image my installations to save time later.

Glad you are not having Aero bugs. Nice!

 

one question MR Fox you managed to overclock the 2720?
I remember Joker posted how he did that before but i can't find the post
for some reason i cant change my BCLK

 

May be this helps?

 

Speedy, the video Red Line has linked is exactly what I did. You can watch the video and it does a nice job of explaining it.

After you change the number for the BCLK, go down to the next field and select "Permanent" and it will stay that way until you change it.

I also bumped my memory voltage up just a bit. You do that on the same screen in BIOS.

 

I use win 7 pro sp 1 on both of my m18x's to date and have not had this Aero problem either. Both were and or are solid as a rock, stable with no problems so far.

Is this just me?

 

thanks ...

thanks ...

 

At the risk of sounding impatient...has anyone with a 580m SLI or a 6990m CF had a chance to run Crysis 2 with Fraps yet?

 

not yet

Ok guys just by cranking up the BCLK on the 2720 to 104.00mhz i have 8452 gpu score on 3Dmark 11 that means the gpu's are starving for cpu power but sadly i don't have a 2920xm to test

AMD Radeon HD 6970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2720QM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P7822 3DMarks

 

Holy crap speedy ... BEAST !!!

Where is someone with the 2920 to test these things !?!?

 

Crying in the corner with terrible 6970s. Congrats on that score Speedy. I think you are just off by 100 for the number one position on non 2920xm m18x.

 

I've tweaked everything I can tweak and if I push any harder I am just getting BSOD, black screens and display corruption running benchmarks. I've got my RAM @ 1.55v, my CPU BCLK @ 103 and my CFX set at 820/1125 and my scores are good, but not great. I'm having no issues with heat. I did try CCC 11.7 and 11.8 and while 11.7 produced these scores, my issues with Aero dropping out are back. With 11.8 Aero really acts up badly on my system. I'll do a clean OS install and see if that improves things. For now, this will have to do.

Speedy - what kind of scores are you pulling with '06 and Vantage? I am curious how far apart we are on the other benchmarks. If there is similar disparity, I am thinking there must either be something wrong with my 6970's or there is something that is better than normal with yours.

3DMark06: 22316 - Vantage: P22789 - 3DMark11: P6683

​

steviejones - notice that 3DMark06 will no longer run in Aero on my system with 11.7 drivers. Seems the special recipe for Dell's Catalyst with manually installed drivers from the 11.6 Catalyst package is the best combo for the Aero bug.

 

8026 3DMark 11

I think this is as hard as I plan to push the 6970's. I can't wait for the 580m SLI cards to arrive

 

Congrats on breaking 8k - I think anyone who is within 100 points or so of 8k (with 2920xm & 6970xf) is about as far as they can go.....nothing else that can be done but damn fine scoring! - well done! +rep

 

I didn't run vantage and 06 overclocked yet sorry to hear that but I am sure all you need is a fresh install and get rid of anything OEM

I think the combination of 2920 and 6990 will give at least 8800 3Dmark 11 if not more because those GPU's are CPU hungry

 

Yep Speedy - I too reckon that the xm/6990 combo should fly past 8500pts.....probably push 9k more than likely with the right approach....

 

Vantage and 3DMark11 do a really good job of running the GPU and CPU independantly, however, the CPU scores do play a big part of the overall score. So if you can upgrade, or OC the CPU, you will definately see large gains in the overall score. Especially in 3DMark11. I've hit 7900 on my GPU scores in the M17x R2 in 3DMark11 (6970), but due to PSU limits, can't push the CPU nearly as high as it can go, or the GPU's. On that run the PSU caused the Combined test to throttle. Otherwise I think I could get at least 7500 overall. But as it stands, may last run was at 7200 or something (see sig). But both the GPU's and CPU's still had ton's of overclock room,( See screenshot in sig for clocks). Stupid PSU

 

After pushing my system for several hours yesterday, I made another run this morning at first cold boot and results on 3DMark11 were consistent. Still no improvement worth writing home about (P6665).

Speedy, I think your suggestion about a truly pure Windows 7 installation may produce better results. My CPU and GPU have actually OC'd and scaled too well for the scores to be under 7k, so there's not really any other good explanation than the factory installation just blows. (I've actually pushed my GPUs further than you have from the looks of things.)

 

Have your turned everything off in CCC? That should net your at least 400pts if you havn't. I'm talking all the 3D Application settings.

Also for benching I have a dedicated 40GB SSD (SSD simply for speed, quicker boots=more benching). It has a pure win7 install, and only wifi/gpu/chipset drivers. If you see the screenshots in my sig for the R2, you'll notice there is nothing but benching applications and utilities on it. Most if not all unncessary process' and services have been disabled. I also have a backup image of the drive for when I kill the SSD, which has happend before and it was RMAed. When it died, the unsafe shutdown and startup count vs. the amount of hours was crazy. Something like 1000 startups to like 50hours. Don't recall, what exactly, and I posted it somewhere, but it was insanity.

 

I had the same issue you did, couldn't change the bclk whatever I tried.
For me it worked doing this specific routine:
- change the bclk number to what you want to set it to
- on "Apply new bus frequency" reapply immediately
- again on "Apply new bus frequency" apply permanently

After that leave it as is and hit F10 to exit and save.
Applying the changes "permanently" right away didn't do anything for me, I had to reapply the immediately setting first.

Try it, I'm pretty sure it'll work. It got me worked up too trust me
Lemme know how it turned out...

 

DR - thanks for the response. I appreciate it immensely. Yes, I have everything shut off in CCC except CFX and also have CCC disabled from startup. The only startup programs I am allowing to run are some basic utilities and my antivirus. I have disabled a number of services as well, such as Superfetch and indexing services.

I'm not thinking any of my benchmark scores or bad per se... in fact they are very good scores... mostly just trying to reconcile the disparity between benchmark scores of two very similar systems. My scores seem lower than they ought to with the OC tweaks I have in place. As far as normal everyday performance and gaming, these tweaks let my system totally shred everything I throw at it. So in that respect I am a very happy camper.

With your valuable input and what Speedy commented about, this is probably where the differences in the results are going to be reconciled. This weekend I will play around with disabling absolutely everything except what Windows needs to function and see where that leads before sucking it up and annihilating my current Windows installation.

In fact, I'm going to hold off a week or two on reinstalling because Alienware may be swapping my system out. Their engineering department has indicated they want to capture my configuration because I have essentially resolved the Aero bug and the "dead space" problem. This swap needs to be with the factory Alienware OS installation intact. If they do not follow through with the system swap, I'll do the full OS reinstall.

 

Yes, this works for me also. Should work for everyone. The trick is making sure the changes are applied permanently from the drop down because pressing F10 to save and exit does not otherwise save the changes in BCLK.

 

I'm trying to run 3D mark 11 but I keep getting an error:

3DMark11Warkload1.exe - System Error

The program can't start because C:\Program Files.DLL is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem.

Anyone know what that means?

Edit:
Nevermind, Avast! was blocking it.

Edit again:
Still not working after disabling Avast!
Any suggestions?

 

Hmmm... where'd you get that 3DMark11? Sounds like you're trying to launch something questionable, not 3DMark11 to me.

Hopefully, your system is not already borked with that installation. I'd suggest removing it and running a full system scan. If you're system is clean, you can download Futuremark products at Futuremark - world's most popular benchmarks and PC performance tests.

 

I got it from the first post of this thread.

Edit:
I just realized, that's supposed to say "workload"

 

Stock Dell out of the box. Still has the protective plastic on the front grills.

AMD Radeon HD 6970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-2920XM Processor,Alienware M18xR1 score: P23359 3DMarks

 

SNNNAP ... update those drivers baby ... and then throw some OC on it ... I wanna see a 30K score !

 

Remove that plastic and you score should gain about 350 pts. That plastic is restrictive. Then add some NOS for another 1700pts.

 

I get the same error using the download on page one.

I will try a game bench....
what game bench should I do?

 

Crysis .

 

reinstall?

 

Had to laugh at the NOS comment there DR. Need some in my S100RR

 

@ Dave - I love that reinstall game!

@BDRacing - Google 3Dmark. That link is out dated in post one. Download From the futuremark website.

@NYC Drifter - I've been drinking! the smart --- in me comes out. i also grew up loving Detroit muscle and NOS stickers on rice burners burned my backside. If its really used though, I love me some giggle juice.


This is a lot of typing for a drunk nerd on android

 

OK.... is that any good?

I took the plastic off...LOL




7/29/2011 10:18:20 PM - Vista 64
Beginning Run #1 on Map-island, Demo-benchmark_gpu
DX10 1920x1080, AA=No AA, Vsync=Disabled, 32 bit test, FullScreen
Demo Loops=3, Time Of Day= 9
Global Game Quality: High
==============================================================
TimeDemo Play Started , (Total Frames: 2000, Recorded Time: 111.86s)
!TimeDemo Run 0 Finished.
Play Time: 27.87s, Average FPS: 71.77
Min FPS: 48.70 at frame 186, Max FPS: 99.92 at frame 927
Average Tri/Sec: -46974536, Tri/Frame: -654534
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -1.40
!TimeDemo Run 1 Finished.
Play Time: 23.62s, Average FPS: 84.68
Min FPS: 48.70 at frame 186, Max FPS: 102.75 at frame 944
Average Tri/Sec: -55180976, Tri/Frame: -651666
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -1.41
!TimeDemo Run 2 Finished.
Play Time: 23.49s, Average FPS: 85.15
Min FPS: 48.70 at frame 186, Max FPS: 103.82 at frame 1004
Average Tri/Sec: -55447056, Tri/Frame: -651187
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: -1.41
TimeDemo Play Ended, (3 Runs Performed)
==============================================================

Completed All Tests

<><><><><><><><><><><><><>>--SUMMARY--<<><><><><><><><><><><><><>

7/29/2011 10:18:20 PM - Vista 64

Run #1- DX10 1920x1080 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 84.915

 

Nice. Crysis is one of the most demanding games so 84fps is quite impressive as an average.

EDIT: Must put down beer to be coherent...Nah...

 

You are drinking Nitros

Oh, and I just bought some "Detroit Muscle" today. 2011 Escalade ESV

Well, it was built in Texas, but its a GM product. 403 HP Stock.

 

I ran it again for fun.... I think it's braking in....

7/29/2011 10:35:00 PM - Vista 64
Beginning Run #1 on Map-island, Demo-benchmark_gpu
DX10 1920x1080, AA=No AA, Vsync=Disabled, 32 bit test, FullScreen
Demo Loops=3, Time Of Day= 9
Global Game Quality: High
==============================================================
TimeDemo Play Started , (Total Frames: 2000, Recorded Time: 111.86s)
!TimeDemo Run 0 Finished.
Play Time: 22.31s, Average FPS: 89.64
Min FPS: 68.19 at frame 166, Max FPS: 135.82 at frame 1645
Average Tri/Sec: 92864112, Tri/Frame: 1035985
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 0.88
!TimeDemo Run 1 Finished.
Play Time: 17.79s, Average FPS: 112.43
Min FPS: 68.19 at frame 166, Max FPS: 141.15 at frame 1792
Average Tri/Sec: 116376240, Tri/Frame: 1035071
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 0.89
!TimeDemo Run 2 Finished.
Play Time: 17.96s, Average FPS: 111.34
Min FPS: 68.19 at frame 166, Max FPS: 141.15 at frame 1792
Average Tri/Sec: 115361136, Tri/Frame: 1036082
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 0.88
TimeDemo Play Ended, (3 Runs Performed)
==============================================================

Completed All Tests

<><><><><><><><><><><><><>>--SUMMARY--<<><><><><><><><><><><><><>

7/29/2011 10:35:00 PM - Vista 64

Run #1- DX10 1920x1080 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 111.885

 

I wish I was drinking some nitrous. Sadly just budwieser. But 400+hp is nothing to laugh at. Im thinking old Camero lol

 

Yes, very nice. My R2 with the 5870 CFX OC'd would max out around 40FPS set on Very High, 2XAA, 64-bit and DX9. If you only did 1 run, you might was to set to run 3 loops, as the first run is usually the slowest.

Edit: I see you already did that. My browser was not refreshed, so my comments above are irrelevant.

 

The Escalade was a present from my wife for my 50th Birthday this Sunday.

Use it to pull the motorcycle trailer

 

OK... Average FPS: 111.885

So what program are you using to OC the cards and what should I set it to?

7/29/2011 10:35:00 PM - Vista 64
Beginning Run #1 on Map-island, Demo-benchmark_gpu
DX10 1920x1080, AA=No AA, Vsync=Disabled, 32 bit test, FullScreen
Demo Loops=3, Time Of Day= 9
Global Game Quality: High
==============================================================
TimeDemo Play Started , (Total Frames: 2000, Recorded Time: 111.86s)
!TimeDemo Run 0 Finished.
Play Time: 22.31s, Average FPS: 89.64
Min FPS: 68.19 at frame 166, Max FPS: 135.82 at frame 1645
Average Tri/Sec: 92864112, Tri/Frame: 1035985
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 0.88
!TimeDemo Run 1 Finished.
Play Time: 17.79s, Average FPS: 112.43
Min FPS: 68.19 at frame 166, Max FPS: 141.15 at frame 1792
Average Tri/Sec: 116376240, Tri/Frame: 1035071
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 0.89
!TimeDemo Run 2 Finished.
Play Time: 17.96s, Average FPS: 111.34
Min FPS: 68.19 at frame 166, Max FPS: 141.15 at frame 1792
Average Tri/Sec: 115361136, Tri/Frame: 1036082
Recorded/Played Tris ratio: 0.88
TimeDemo Play Ended, (3 Runs Performed)
==============================================================

Completed All Tests

<><><><><><><><><><><><><>>--SUMMARY--<<><><><><><><><><><><><><>

7/29/2011 10:35:00 PM - Vista 64

Run #1- DX10 1920x1080 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 111.885

 

Nice. Happy b-day! You have a great wife. I Havent been on my Yamaha R6 in almost 2 years. Been too busy with work and don't have a safe place to store it since I've been on an apt since I got back from the desert. Hope you have a great bday.

 

Thanks Dr

I don't remember High Street being dangerous unless you wore blue and gold

 

Trixx... this Tech|Inferno tutorial will give you the details of how, and what to use...
Miscellaneous Tutorials | Tech|Inferno

These settings should be a good starting point...
http://webpages.charter.net/mr.fox.rox/Images/3DM06-22316-07.29.11.jpg

 

Thanks.... I just checked the bios and they had the cpu set at level 1 and I changed it to level 3.

Level 3 is higher... correct?

It's getting late so I will play with the OC in the morn.
Rerun the tests.
Cheers

 

Hahaha I repped you for that but threw in a "?" due to beer. I love high st but I took a better job in Quantico, Va. Better opportunity for my career path that i want to be on. But will always have fond memories of high st.

 

For OC'ing the CPU and memory in the BIOS, go to this post a few pages back...

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...are-m18x-benchmark-thread-76.html#post7754265 ...the video is self-explanatory and simple to follow.

I think your question about L1 vs L3 CPU settings apply to your XM CPU and I do not have one. I have the 2720QM and the Extreme CPU settings are not available to me. You might want to PM Steviejones1333 or Nicholaus.rossi to ask about what settings are working well for them with their XM processors.