*OFFICIAL* M18x Owner's Lounge Thread

will the swap of the drive void my warranty? I was going to get an external br but its the same price. I wanted the br for dvds and such anyways

edit: nm m18 it is. im going to regret its big powersupply

 

Nah... you'll learn to love it. There are some M17x owners that really wish they could use that bad boy on their systems. Good choice on the M18x... this thing is a beast X2.

No, the drive will not void your warranty. Take out the original drive and set it aside in a static protection bag in case you ever need to exchange it for another system. Changes you make to your system will only void the warranty if those changes cause damage. It's always a good practice to save the old parts for later in case of an exchange or system replacement.

 

I had an external BR (Asus) for my older Dell. Just my opinion but if I pause a Blu-Ray, the internal BR drive on the m18x resumes play (i.e. from clicking unpause to actual screen playing) a bit faster than the external.

I'd just keep both my SSD and the original HD together in the little caddy. I use the SSD for programs/OS and Momentus XT for files. Works fine for me.

 

I have a BluRay burner that I transferred over to the M18x from my M17x R2 during the exchange process. It's a Panasonic BD-RE UJ235A. It works excellently. You can purchase one online for about $220. I highly recommend this particular model.

 

i just kinda needed it to watch blurays since I dont really care for a tv, so I was looking at just the bd-rom. I think its about 100 new, and about 150 installed by dell.

depending on how it affects my discount, I might just keep it.

two more questions, sorry to bother the lot of you. can the 2630 use ddr3-1600? The intel spec sheet says 1033/1333. And.. hows the red? Im ordering tomorrow and was unsure if I wanted the red or black

 

I know the 2630 supports hyper X plug and play 1866 ... which is what I am ordering ...

its like 150 for 2 x 4GB. So if you are planning on upgrading make sure you only get 4gb stock from dell

 

The red is gorgeous. I have the "black" and it's nice, but not black. It's a dark slate sort of gunmetal look. The R2 that my M18x replaced was called "Space Black" just like the color of the black M18x but they are totally different. The R2 really was totally pitch black and I liked that a little better than I do the dark slate color. They need to change the name of the black color to something else, like maybe "Lunar Slate" or "Gunship Gray" so people can actually know what what they are ordering.

The nice thing about the BD-RE drive is the 25GB and 50GB DL disc capacity. I created an AlienRespawn restore disc with one 25GB BD-R disc with room to spare. Using DVD it took two discs.

 

Guys, does anyone here has dead pixel within one week? anyone?

 

posted in wrong thread....

 

Well the Technician and I swapped out the GPU's and Motherboard. Turned on the computer and still no control over brightness. 30 minutes into us both arguing with Dell, he goes into Bios. Apparently I can control my screen brightness "ONLY" in bios. 3 hours of disassembling wasted. And my new 6970s still won't clock above 815 memory. I'd like to thank myself for being having the weirdest problems pop up that can't be fixed.

 

did it ever work?

 

How interesting. I do not recall seeing any place to adjust screen brightness in BIOS. Can you post a photo of that? What firmware is on your new mobo? A02 or A03, or A00?

If A03, I wonder if the brightness controls in BIOS and capped core clock on the 6970 is something built into the new firmware. If A02, maybe that's why my 6970s can comfortably run their cores at 815, but lose stability past 820.

 

fn+ f3 or f4 while in the bios

 

I'm on A00 since it was a new motherboard.

 

Oh, I gotcha. The FN keys work in BIOS, but not in Windows. I thought he was meant there were literally some adjustments in the BIOS for screen brightness.

The optical disc eject button works in BIOS as well, even when not working in Windows.

Maybe A02 will help with the core clocks... worth a shot. Maybe even the new mystery A03 BIOS without any release notes would help.

 

so did i. jumped right in there to investigate. i thought i missed something...as many times as i was in there.

 

I haven't been able to meet the same overclock as my record with these new cards. The only thing could be the fact that I'm using 11.7 rather than 11.6. Either way my cards refuse to hit clocks high enough to break 8k. I'll probably just wait since xfire 6970s run everything and upgrade to 28nm 7000 series when they come out. No point in going with 6990s when there are't any games out there to challenge them.

 

That's certainly a possibility. I had poor results all the way around on 11.7, but solid with drivers from 11.6. With the R2 and 5870 CFX 11.7 was excellent.

 

Räy did you try what I told you before?

 

As weird as this sounds I now can change the brightness on IGP. I couldn't do that before we gutted her. Even after going back to 6970s I can't control the brightness. The screen doesn't dim if I set it to after a minute in windows on either IGP or 6970s. The screen will shut off now after the set time on both IGP and 6970s. But I rather not make the Owners Lounge turn into a "How the heck did you manage to screw up your brightness that way" thread.

 

I just finished my order but might change it, let me get your opinions on this. The 1 tb raid 0 was 80 bucks for the upgrade, do you think its worth it? and also the advance warranty, do you think it would suffice to go with 2 years or 3?

Im at 3 right now, everything sounded so magical on the phone but im not really sure how much of it I need now that I just ordered

 

For $110 you can pick up a Samsung M8 1tb and use the other hard drive bay for a SSD boot drive. Raid 0 is great and all but if you have the money I would suggest a 64/128gb SSD to store your games on. This way you have 1tb to store all your games that you aren't playing and move them to your SSD when you want to play them. You get the storage of 1tb raid 0 with more speed than raid 0.

 

ill see if I can change the order then, what about the warranty? do you think I should keep it at 3 years or drop it down to 2?

 

Warranty - I would get as much as you can afford. Depending on how long you anticipate keeping the system for, of course. If you change every 2yrs, dont waste money on 3yr cover...(only upside to that would be resale value maybe)

HDD - I would get the base level HDD and throw the money you save at a small-ish SSD - that way, you can put your OS on the SSD as primary boot drive and enjoy some rapid speed and swap the Dell issue drive over to the secondary bay for storage. The small SSD will be WAY faster than any raided traditional HDD configuration.

 

how do i actualy dim (put out the screen)?
only way i found so far was to toggle with f6 is this the correct way?

 

thanks ill stick with the 3 year and drop the raid 0.

 

Dim? - as in brightness?? - Use FN keys and F4/F5 up or down. Chances are if you are on AMD drivers, this can be hit and miss at the moment. 11.6 works well....11.8 preview does not allow brightness to be adjusted. Dell drivers should be ok but using them means taking a gaming performance hit.

 

I don't understand your problem. You can't change the brightness while using amd gpus, same for all of us...

 

A03 update for the M18x BIOS is now officially posted at support.dell.com

 

what new cpus?

 

Nothing in the information provided by Dell identifies the newly support CPUs. I am guessing the next round of i7 procs coming out before too long. In fact, the only information Dell provides is "Fixes and Enhancements: Support new CPUs" on their downloads page.

 

It's the 2x60 series CPU

 

ment in the way like putting off the screen, like power buttoning the screen off
my acer and medion in past had this feature,
atm i just need to close the lid so that the screen turns off but then i need to disable turning off when closing the lid

 

So you want to be able to close the lid without going into sleep and have the screen turn off, right?

If so, go to control panel > Hardware & Sound > Power Options . Then on the left you will see "Choose what closing the lid does". Click it, then change the action accordingly from the dropdowns - you want it set to "do nothing". Doing this will leave the computer fully "on" but it will turn the display off when you close the lid.

If you want, you can also turn off AlienFX lighting by pressing FN & F11.

Bear in mind though that the computer will still be fully on...

Is that what you were after?

 

Today when I powered on my alienware nothing happens only black screen come up with 4 continous beeps... I took out the battery and tried again but still the problem not resolved. Is there someone who have any idea about 4 beeps meaning??
Is it the MB?? note that I had the same problem only 1 time 3 days ago and I was able to restart my labtop. Today the problem seems to be persistant. PS I called Dell support and they are going to dispatch technician tomorrow...

 

OsOs,

I can't remember all of the system beep codes, but my first guess would be RAM not seated properly - have you recently upgraded this?

 

OsOs - In addition to Prodigal's question, did you change any settings in BIOS, such as the bus clock or memory settings? If so, you may have been too aggressive. As soon as you power up start pressing F2 repeatedly and see if you can get into BIOS. If you can, set failsafe defaults, save and exit.

 

Mr. Fox nothing changed all was set to factory bios. I was able to start in safemode by pressing f12 w/o battery. Now i am going to make a factory recovery and see if that resolve the problem
PS I didn't make any hardware upgrade.

 

Hey guys I am sure this question has been asked but why is it when I choose "go dark" with Alien FX my Tactix Keys my touch pad and my shortcut buttons (top right) all stay lit ... any help here ?

 

Shaden - right click the alienhead systray icon and uncheck "Keep Status Zones on During Go Dark" and they'll also go dark.

 

how the hell did I not see that ... thx fox !

 

just ordered a m18x. i hope I dont regret getting this over the m17x

 

You wont !!! Welcome to the club. I am VERY very happy with my purchase, and I am a very critical person.

 

i actualy already do that, what i want is to have the same effect lid closed or open all lights off screen 2 and pc is still running, downloading and so on

 

The only way that could happen is that you prefer owning second-best. Yes, welcome to the club.

 

um ... can't you just set up a power profile call it "darkness" set it so it shuts the screen off when plugged in after like 30 seconds. And click Go Dark on your alien FX ? Actually you could turn the alien FX off in the power profile and set the screen to shut off after 60 seconds ...

 

is there a comparison of the colors of the black/red anywhere? going over my decisions, i keep second guessing myself.

and is the aluminum a brushed texture or just a regular type 2 anodize? I got red, dunno if its going to be distracting or too gaudy. hoping it isnt a candy apple but a darker, less reflective red

 

I have updated my post (#1150) regarding benchmarking results using the updated 280.19 driver.

 

i have a question about the built in speakers. lets say you are browsing the web through internet explorer or even windows explorer. when you click on to navigate the browser there is a normal "click" sound comming from the speakers. what i am noticing is that after about 10 seconds or the speakers go into some standby mode or something because on the next click attempt the click noise sounds different, like a muffled or something. on the very next click attempt after the incident the noise sounds normal again.

this is irritating me because i am sensitive to changes like this and i like consistency. i wonder if it is something to do with the IDT software or something?

 

another question on the aliend fx light zones. when i turn them off they all go off like i want it to but when i enable them again by fn-f11 the darn macro keys still remain off. any way to solve this without manually going into the command center again?