*OFFICIAL* Alienware M18xR1/R2/18 Benchmark Thread - Part 3

I might just put this here for our leader board...

View attachment 110650

 

Looks good. Nice job! :thumbsup: I almost asked you to post the link, LOL. I see you did, but I almost missed it.

Nope, it seems unlikely. There is no clock generator in SetFSB that works for this mobo. I tested everyone one, in fact. I found some old threads were multiple users were trying to crack this problem on the same motherboard, so unless you know of a sneaky trick to get to work, I'm probably not going to be able to OC the CPU.

 

I had a look on the 3Dmark website for 7970m CFX scores and I was a bit disappointed at how many tess modified scores there were for 3dmark11.
Its good for me as I got the 2nd highest real gpu score but still!
I'm gonna have to work some magic if I want to beat some of the firestrike and vantage scores tho, seeing as some people are using proper Extreme CPU's

Haha willy wonka what a classic!

Wow you guys must be 100 years old at least to have had hardware like that!

Nice score TBoneSan

 

Nope, but as the Bon Jovi tune goes, "were half way there... living on a prayer." Sometimes it feels like 100 though.

Yeah, I was really surprised, too. But, it looks like a fair number of them might been the same clown submitting cheat scores over and over again. I'm sure he is a legend in his own mind, LOL.

Yeah, it's great for you. As long as you're using a driver that Futuremark "approves", you can check the box in the search filter to hide all of the invalid results. Yours will be at the top and those bogus runs will be hidden. And, I bet you can take that first place spot if you put your mind to it.

 

So unless you find an x9000 yeah looks like not.

 

Since my 5 years of available warranty and accidental damage coverage will be running out on the M18x in August, I will probably start leaving it at home on business trips to minimize the risk of issues that come with the rough and tumble nature of travel. I may just take this disposable Inspiron 6400/E1505 when travel abroad. I think the $50 I just spent on upgrades is probably already more than it's worth, LOL. An X9000 would be nice and I will see if I can snag one for a really low price. The lowest I have seen is too much ($105) and I am not familiar enough with this old laptop BIOS to know if dropping in an X9000 will automatically open up Extreme CPU menus in the BIOS. It is possible that it may not since this Inspiron is not designed to accommodate an Extreme CPU. I'm also skeptical the heat sink is capable of managing the temps from an overclocked X9000 effectively.

 

No it wont open up bios options but throttlestop should be able to change the multipliers and voltage. I had an X9100 at 3.6ghz paired with a M4000 upgrade (mobilty radeon 7770M equivalent) in a 7738G shell and it did well for itself.

 

i got a x9000 in my hp 20 inch laptop right now lol clocked at 3.6ghz. collections man!

 

I had an x9000, but the best I got out of it was 3.0 ghz. And that was because the gateway fx had that over clock feature in the bios. Man, I thought I was the man!!!
Then came all the other machines that could finally over clock past 3.0 ghz.

 

For those with Nvidia GPU's I heard of others being able to OC slightly higher with the latest driver so I tried and succeeded in making a Vantage run with the clocks at +250 core/+500 memory @ 1.025 V whereas before doing this would result in CTD or display driver failure and the highest that I could go with 1.025 V was +225 core/+450 memory. New Vantage best reflected in signature.

 

That would be a good retro gamer.

Sent from my SPH-L720 using Tapatalk

 

dont think my HP 20 inch laptop allow OC. I am lucky because i am late adopter with help from throttlestop.

 

Yeah don't remind me.

 

Don't feel bad. Most people don't hang on to old tech with the intent of still using it. Usually it's because they just haven't gotten around to ditching it.

I wish I still had a couple of my old machines. I would upgrade instead of buying a news sustem. The old parts were used as donors for other people so they no longer existed as originally configured.

Sent from my SPH-L720 using Tapatalk

 

I still have an incredible Inspiron 8600 from 2004 (techs from 2003) working 24/7 checking mails, thesis, showing videos connected to a 27" Samsung TV etc. like a CHAMP!
It has a

• 2100MHz Pentium "M" CPU (working admirable [and cool] @ 2250 MHz),
• 2Gb of Ram,
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Turbo pro with just 128 MB (Core Clock maxed @ 382MHz [instead of the original 337MHz] and with its Memory Clock maxed @ 288MHz [instead of the original 243MHz]),
• 1920x1280 Sharp (very sharp) display
• 340 Gb. HDD,
• Win 7 ultimate,
• Office 2013... etc. etc.

​

and when the other laptops are "busy", it give heavy presentations (with a lot of video clips) formidable. Like engendered by the MARVEL S.H.I.E.L.D imagination...
Had several issues when it was new, but after a little while... everything becomes smooth... Like a glass of a clean old single malt whisky... (Lagavulin anyone?). Never have any issues or problems ( besides a 2013 virus that flash the bios and kill my HDD).
BUT... "Those where the days":

Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we laughed away the hours
And dreamed of all the great things we would do

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
La la la la...

Then the busy years went rushing by us
We lost our starry notions on the way
If by chance I'd see you in the tavern
We'd smile at one another and we'd say

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days
La la la la...

Just tonight I stood before the tavern
Nothing seemed the way it used to be
In the glass I saw a strange reflection
Was that lonely woman really me

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days
La la la la...

Through the door there came familiar laughter
I saw your face and heard you call my name
Oh my friend we're older but no wiser
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we choose
We'd fight and never lose
Those were the days, oh yes those were the days
La la la la...​

 

anyone interested in real performance stuff. The Tech Buyer's Guru - Dual-Core, Quad-Core, and Hyperthreading Benchmark Analysis

i know this is kinda old topic but want to bring it up as i have heard of many people giving misleading information so hopefully this would clear things up. what i want to conclude though is that lower end cpu benefits hyper-threading WAY MORE than higher end cpu. when people say 25-30%, thats probably i3 or i5 they are talking about, IF i5 had hyper threads.

40-50% thats probably atom processors to i3. high end i7 barely have any advantage to it especially when CPU is under full load, close to 100%. so i'd say anything between 95-100% would actually see a drop in performance with hyper threading, that goes for XTU, and all the other benchmark that utilizes near 100%. anything below 80-85% cpu usage would see a 5-10% performance increase in multi threaded applications at best for high end i7.

last thing is HT increases temp by quite a bit under load, 5-8C in my R2 and I was able to boost towards 4.8 stable HT disabled at the same VCore that I run with 4.6 HT enabled.

edit: heres another one test done by some guy with gaming rig on Asus rog forum you'll need an account to see the pictures though. http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthrea...ng-lower-VCore&p=303769&viewfull=1#post303769

 

BEFORE RESULTS

AFTER RESULTS
This is all just for fun, since it is lame old hardware. But, wouldn't it be nice to see a similar bump in performance for less than $50 in part upgrades with new hardware? BTW - the results below are stock clocks and those above are with GPU overclocked.

 

50x4 - 4 Cores / 8 Threads CPU-Z Validator 4.0

Spoiler

View attachment 110936

 

I think I have squeezed the last drop of performance out of my 7970s..... overvolting to 1.1v only gave me an extra 20mhz on the core and Firestrike wouldn't finish at all
Vantage
Link Highest valid result, second highest GPU score for 7970s
3DMark11
Link Highest valid result, highest overall and highest gpu score of the unmodified tessellation results

johnksss could you put these scores in the leader boards?

Wow Mr. Fox almost 5ghz! will it pass anything?

 

Kenny that's a fantastic score. You'd easily do over 14k with an XM. Well done

 

Here's an oldie...

 

Kenny, you need to "get it colder" to get better numbers my friend. Just remember, you are only doing this for numbers chasing. once done, then go back to normal mode.

 

Looks as if Haswell likes these old CPU-bound benchmarks. Will have to try 3DMark06 and 3DMark05 as well... no GPU overclocking needed, so the power handling problem the 18 has doesn't come into play.


It's kind of nice finally see at least a few examples of where the 4930MX outshines the 3920XM...

 

Finally got my 4TB HDD RAID0 data volume set up and all of the data migrated over to it...



All of the images here are without SRT or any kind of RAM cache acceleration. Not too bad for cheap 5400 RPM platters with no cache acceleration.

.​ Original 2TB RAID0 (2x1TB HDD) Benchmark 765GB Used of of 1.81TB Total Disk Space	For comparison, here is how one of the new 5400 RPM 2TB HDD performs in a non-RAID (single AHCI) configuration... (Note: This is with the exact same data as what I had on the 2TB RAID0 volume, so compare this to the first image.)
4TB RAID0 (2x2TB HDD) Benchmark 0GB Used of of 3.63TB Total Disk Space (empty partition)	4TB RAID0 (2x2TB HDD) Benchmark 765GB Used of of 3.63TB Total Disk Space

​

 

Man you've really got your machine truly maxed now. Brimming! Nice speeds there too bro :thumbsup:

 

I'm excited about finally being able to install everything in my Steam and Origin libraries.

Macrium Reflect is about 48% done copying files... It takes a LONG TIME to copy that much data, even with fast drives. Some of the files are pretty huge (Vista, Win7, Win8.0, Win8.1, and Win8.1.1 ISO files, my OS drive backup images, Steam and Origin libraries, etc., etc.) and I should have enabled caching before I started to help speed up the process. But, I didn't so I'll have to wait it out.

The 1TB volume (932GB) shown in the RST Control Center is an external 1TB disk that I have attached to the eSATA port for the data migration.

 

Very nice. Here's what my drives are looking like without any hub attached (cheers for the Ram Disk guide too)



I want to get some 2 x 2tb for some massive raid 0 love but can't say it's a need just yet. It's hard to separate the two when it comes to having the fastest technology. Let's just say it's on the 'to do list'

 

Nice! 128GB SDXC card, too? How much did that sucker set you back? That's a big SDXC card, and they're usually not inexpensive.

It wasn't a "need" for me either, but I am a data pig and like to keep everything possible on local storage. I haven't been able to install everything in my Steam and Origin libraries for a long time because 2TB isn't large enough for all of the games. I don't need to install all the games that I don't play anymore, but I still want to, LOL.

Copy process is 69% complete now.

I thought about leaving the drives separate (non-RAID0) and use one for data and the other for the game libraries, but the faster RAID0 read/write performance is too tempting. I have two 750GB HDD set up that way on the 18 and it works pretty nice like that, just slower. But, I can yank either drive out and slap a USB or eSATA adapter on it, or drop it in another system without losing the data. Kind of a trade-off of speed for flexibility, but the M18xR2 deserves speed more than convenience.

 

Finally finished. Added final benchmark to above post.

 

Meh good choice to raid 0 those babies up - how can one resist ?!... Having Sata 2 SSD like speeds (with cache accel) over 4tb would be magical
I got really lucky with the SDXC card on a New Years Days sale here and nabbed 1 of a limited 5 selling for about US$50. Its very handy to keep system images on there just in case.

 

That was a great price on that SDXC card.

Here's what it looks like cached...

 

thats pretty damn amazing on just HDD alone. if I didn't have my enterprise SSD i'd have gone for those HDD.

 

New personal best 3DMark11 score...

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3920XM Processor Extreme Edition,Alienware M18xR2

 

what HDDs did you go with? links?

 

It was posted in the Owner's Lounge when I ordered them. Here is a quote...

 

Anyone having "display driver failure" with 337.50? I've gotten a few yesterday and now I am getting black-screens while gaming and am now getting system shut-down while benching. I replaced the PSU with a spare to rule that out. GPU temps are fine and normal and have been. I am going to try rolling back to an earlier driver to rule out the driver being the culprit. Can someone recommend a solid driver?

 

I had the "display driver failure" with 337.50. I went with the beta hotfix driver 337.61 and haven't had that error again. Sometimes I do get a black screen for a couple of seconds. My guess is that drivers still have a few wrinkles.

Sent with love from my Galaxy S4

 

Here is the highest score on Fire Strike that I have ever achieved with the Alienware 18. Still has a ways to go to catch my R2, but at least the gap is not as wide as it was before. It really sucks that the BIOS is more locked down with A07 than A05, but I have been doing more testing with it and if you ignore what they did, set the Extreme Edition Core Ratio Limits to "Disabled" (not OC LV 1) XTU and ThrottleStop will still let you overclock. It just makes me wonder how nice this machine might perform if they would fix whatever stops the dual PSU from working and lightened up on the Secure Flash feces so we could unlock the BIOS menus. It is really nice that HWiNFO64 fan controls work now. Each fan can be controlled independently (one for each slider).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4930MX,Alienware 01W2J2

 

Very nice Mr. Fox.

Sent with love from my Galaxy S4

 

Stock:

3D Mark11: AMD Radeon HD 7970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3720QM Processor,Alienware M18xR2

3D Mark Firestrike: AMD Radeon HD 7970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3720QM Processor,Alienware M18xR2

Clocked too 945/1445:

3D Mark11: AMD Radeon HD 7970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3720QM Processor,Alienware M18xR2

3D Mark Firestrike: AMD Radeon HD 7970M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3720QM Processor,Alienware M18xR2

Specs in sig, Im pretty happy with these scores so far although they are not my highest.

Running on 14.4WHQL latest release.

And a quick snap of my caches SSD's Raid-0

 

Awesome! Thanks for posting those results. Your machine is running really well. :thumbsup:

 

C'mon guys... this thread is dying, so let's see some action. Work that beast!



Let's make it easier. Here are some baby-step overclocks using just one AC adapter, no AC cooling, just fans... so, go beat them.

Just so we're all using the same measuring stick for validation >> [ Download HWBOT Heaven Benchmark]

HWBOT Version - Unigine Heaven Basic DX9 - B5783.193	HWBOT Version - Unigine Heaven Extreme DX11 - X3796.546

 

Now this is interesting, but not in a good way. Did a bit of tinkering with the Alienware 18. Keeps shutting off trying to run the above Heaven benchmark, even though temps are fine.

Here is what I found... M18xR2 running +170/+500 @ 1.035V on the 780M's and CPU at 4.3GHz draws 371W peak. Alienware 18, with same CPU overclock and identical GPU settings shuts down 4 times in a row when the power draw hits 329W to 331W as displayed on my Kill A Watt. Just like clockwork. Not cool... so it doesn't even use the capacity of one 330W AC adapter. Just to make sure the playing field was level, I ran back to back benchmarks using 2 different 330W AC adapters and got the same results each time. It passes without shutdown with the GPUs running stock, but never hits that 330W mark... falls just shy of it ~325W.

What's sad is the FPS on Heaven looks to be more or less identical to the M18xR2 until it hits the power wall and turns itself off. I'm going to have to test this further later this week to see if the shutdown point is consistent on other benchmarks. I don't know if I am imagining things or not, but it seems worse (lower trip point) after flashing A07. If they can control this with the EC/BIOS that would be good news because they would be able to remove the power-handling limitations the Alienware 18 suffers from with almost no effort.

 

Uintall intel Xtu

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Why uninstall XTU, Brother pauloimp? How would this affect the Alienware 18 not using the full capacity of the 330W AC adapter and shutting itself off before exhausting the capacity of the AC adapter? Is this something you ran into with your Sager and XTU? Care to elaborate?

 

It's true this thread has been far too quite and it's a little disappointing that no one with a AW18 benches in here or anywhere either. Perhaps we need to make a 'Graphics score only' class or something

Myself, I've given up on the idea of dual PSU (purely on logistical reasons. Being in Japan - buying new tools; soldering iron etc only to leave them behind in a couple of years time seems like a waste).
I feel like my 3D mark 11 score of 16338 is a high as I'm ever going to get on a single PSU. Admittedly, I'm kind of expecting and conceding that the next GPU refresh is going to let me push the cards harder within the 330w limitation while only being marginally faster than what we have now. Hopefully we'll see the p20000 broken at least.

I should start getting into more of the game benchmarks again like the Resident Evil/FF ones. They are excellent.

 

Aida and Xtu cause machine restarts. Sandra and xtu cause machine restarts.
Intel watchdog driver cause this

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I'm sorry to hear that you're running into that with the Sager. I have not experienced this problem so far.

The problem I was mentioning has to do with a defect or engineering mistake involving the Alienware 18. It does not restart, it simply turns it self off as soon as it reaches ~330W power draw. It almost seems like someone made a conscious decision to make it behave this way, because it seems like too much of a coincidence where the trip point is set. This is pathetic, because the decision-maker(s) at Compal did not even consider setting the trip point to the maximum output of their own 330W AC adapter. Had they done so it wouldn't be happening until closer to 400W (which is the approximate peak output of the AC adapter). Whatever the cause is, this problem effectively ruins the Alienware 18 as a performance enthusiast machine. Not only is it gimped from being able to use a dual AC adapter mod, it's extra-extra-gimped and cannot even effectively use the AC adapter provided as standard equipment. The degree to which this machine lacks the capacity to match the performance of its predecessor is truly disheartening. In almost every measurement, the performance of my M18xR2 has spanked the snot out of the Alienware 18, even when the R2 still had 680M SLI. After upgrading the R2 to 780M SLI the performance gap only got wider between the two machines.

I don't know if this is something they can change through firmware or not, but I think the trip point used to be a little bit higher than it is now.

<iframe width='1280' height="720" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/7CoeOq-lkdY?rel=0" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen=""></iframe>

Having a "Graphics score only" class won't help because the 780Ms are what gobble up most of the power. If you disable SLI and run just one of them, there is no issue. It runs extremely well like that, with the CPU and GPU both overclocked to the same degree that the M18xR2 is capable of. It seems like they just did something to gimp the crap out of it in terms of power-handling capabilities. This thing should perform at least equal to the M18xR2 and not have the kind of performance limitations that it seems to suffer from, but it's really not even close to matching the M18xR2.

Don't you give up on the benching, bro. If for no other reason than "you can" I think you should find a way to build yourself a dual AC adapter setup. It's way too cool to not do it. Unless the engineers at Alienware/Compal have a change of heart, the M18xR2 will go down in history as the last truly amazing high performance laptop from the Alienware brand. As things are at this point you own a hallmark product, but I sincerely hope that it's not the Last of the Mohicans.

 

Interesting discovery Brother Fox. If they could sort the trip point out, better still, just simply offer dual PSU I'm sure a lot more enthusiasts would happily jump on board.

 

No doubt, there would be a lot of folks jumping aboard... We have lots of friends in this forum alone that own M18xR1/R2 machines that won't touch it because of the performance limitations. The Alienware 18 is an amazing machine in terms of build quality. It's better in that regard that anything you can buy. I love the way the thing is built. But, if performance is what matters most there is no direction left for guys like us to go except for the Clevo P570WM at this point. It's very sad... and avoidable. The unlockable BIOS and dual AC adapter, on top of the 4930K desktop CPU, makes it a very compelling product in spite of its ugly plastic box chassis.