*Official Alienware M18x AMD CrossFire Discussion Thread (re: Dell/AW Conference Call)*

Do you want to capture an Awesome AMD for comparison ?

Not that I am not happy but after Johns work those greens look fun

 

We have all the captures we need inbound. The way our capture process works is we identify customers in the field affected by the issue and replace their systems with new ones. Usually this identification takes place via the call centers and individual tech support agents. Now days with the pervasiveness of social media, we are able to "cast a wide net" and solicit captures in bulk, as we did here on this thread. The reason we did not replace like for like hardware in this case is just as Mr Fox alluded to earlier- it just doesn't make sense to replace hardware with hardware that could possibly have the same issue.

So, in the cases of the captured units, the GPU swap is not considered an upgrade for compensation reasons, but simply the logical thing to do. If your affected system was not one of the ones we captured and exchanged, and you would like to swap 6990's for 580's, that is a matter you would need to take up with tech support or customer care. I'll be honest with you though, in my opinion that would be time better spent just rebooting after a cold boot, using your computer and waiting for a fix.

However, if you still feel you deserve a GPU swap, have at it, but there's no need to request them through me. I am not a customer service agent or tech support rep. I have no dispatch rights, and can only gather contact details and forward the information along to the team that staffs @DellCares on Twitter and the Facebook support link. You will be much better off reaching out directly to them. I'm in essence just the middle man for them and the customer.


The factory team is working on thermal testing of 10 units they pulled off the line yesterday. We should see results tomorrow morning (or late tonight if I watch my inbox from home). Bear in mind we are still in investigating phase. I have 2 systems inbound to Louis- Mr Fox's and CrysDark's. The others from the capture list are going to quality engineering here in Round Rock.

 

Dell Chris M is compiling service tags on DCF.
M18x Thermal Shutdown with AMD Radeon HD 6990m AMD GPUs in CrossFire configuration - Alienware Forum - Alienware Club - Dell Community

 

I sooooo agree with this. As I said before, if you think you deserve a shot at 580M SLI call tech support. I've already seen 2 members in this thread get 580M SLI through this avenue.

 

does anyone know how to send a PM in that forum? I click on chris' name and it gives me a page cannot be displayed

 

fun and expensive.


side note:
and now they are just handing them out like candy on halloween. i do remember hearing that 580's were ridiculous and over priced and not worth the performance. and a few other things. now people are trying to grab them like it's the end of the world. (but get them in a trade in and all is super great) lol

to damn funny.

 

Very logical and reasonable.

 

Applaud the approach! Please, as soon as you (or Dell_Chris_M) can, publish the findings. Thanks!

 

I also recently remember this...

 

@johnksss I was one of then, but there is a flickering on my machine that I can't take any more.
An exchange is on it way but I'm not happy anyway.

 

I also Recently remember the 580M throttling, themn there is no happiness on this alien thing.

 

I know I could read the thread, but is the 580m throttling thing still going? What's the fix/outcome?

 

I haven't noticed the throttling in-game since the last time I played Crysis 2 with DX11 and HR Texture pack. Avoid Crysis 2. I believe they are still working on another vBIOS...........................................

 

Thanks Bill , I would like to part with green side this time , I'll contact customer care.

 

Not sure what the deal is on DCF, but you can just PM him here instead.

 

So, is this being deemed a gpu issue or a motherboard issue - just out of interest....

 

So I finally get a Motherboard replacement that I phoned in about on July14 wow talk about next day business On a side note no 580s for me he said they are working on a fix for it I won't hold my breath lol.Hopefully this 4 in home visit dosnt go like the first three TOTAL TIME ON PHONE 4 phone calls 204 minutes of my precious time wasted

 

I stumbled on this thread recently and checked my revision and it is 1139 and this issue worries me especially with the other ones I have seen. This is an expensive system and I expected better but I don't want to have to send it out within the next 12 months or less and get it back with refurbished parts. For the cost of these it should be new parts but my main issue comes when my warranty is up then I'm screwed with an expensive paperweight.

I called customer service last night and asked for a refund. Should I continue with this and get the refund and take my business elsewhere or should I try to order a new system or is this all still unresolved and a new one would have the same problems? I love the system but I'm not going to lose my money because Dell's QA is apparently MIA/non-existent. I live in Ontario BTW if that's important at all.

 

In my case I'd always have gone for the 580s had they not been so prohibitively expensive. However, I was given a choice of picking them at the start and still went with the 6990s. I'd stay with AMD if it weren't for the constant driver headaches (brightness issues, sleep/wake problems, poor driver support, high memory temps) and other issues like this cold boot situation even though I fixed it using an old motherboard. Side note: I received my SLi cable lol! No cards yet..hopefully soon.

 

If you aren't having problems with your system then I would say you don't have anything to worry about. Dell hasn't identified the root cause yet and once they do, I'm sure an advisory will be put out for existing customers.

 

I have had several BSOD's, couldn't write them down as the system rebooted. I forgot to disbale to reboot to give me time to write them down. It also seems to have issues connecting to my home network, seems to cause the whole system to get a bit choppy and the sound becomes slow and jittery (I guess is the best word to use). The network thing seemed fine on my brothers network when I travel out that way last weekend as well as when connected wirelessly to my phones hotspot so not sure if it's just the drivers or what but I tried updating to the most recent as well and no fix.

As for the gpu and the overheating I don't know, only really played some Rift so far, waiting on Skyrim and some other games but I don't know if I should play it safe just get my refund for now and wait for them to resolve this issue.

 

That's EXACTLY the way I look upon things. Anyone weighing up from a price to performance point of view would have been nuts to go 580's initially unless they really needed to or were a die hard fan. The closeness in performance between the two was tight with both setups trading blows in certain areas. If they had been more closely priced, I would have gone green at the outset for PhysX and Cuda.

In the UK, there was a £700 markup to go green, so over $1000usd - a heck of alot of cash.

The constant barrage of AMD issues including brightness, sleep, driver support, gpu temps (10c difference at idle? - ???) and of course the latest set of problems have forced anyone with red's to seek Dell's help.

With that in mind, I dont think anyone of the AMD owners getting 580's expected Dell to offer the greens as a solution....I personally think that came out of left field. It sure is good news for those that are in the position to take advantage of Dell's generosity in that area - I wouldnt call any one of them out for accepting a green solution because at the end of the day, we are all on team M18x and want our systems to perform as they should.

 

Call again!! That's what I'd do!! It's not your fault that somebody messed up somewhere along the lines. If they have another solution now(580M SLI) that can fix your problem then that's what they need to provide. It really is that simple. Maybe you'll get a more understanding tech next time.

Congrats on you're 580M SLI in progress

 

for hwinfo you need to add these settings to the ini file
openfanctrlmin=1
hwinfoautomin=1
this will kick the fans on automatically and start the program minimized. provided you have it auto starting.

 

Neither at this time. We have to identify root cause first. Preliminary evidence may indicate mobo, but since the cards function fine after a reboot, I think there's a stuck bit in some piece of BIOS or VBIOS code. But I'm far from an engineer. I'm just guessing.

If your system does not exhibit thermal shutdown symptoms fairly soon after a cold boot, you do not have this issue. Judging by your subsequent post, it seems you do have some other issues. If I were you, I would start with uploading my most recent couple of minidump files and see if some nice smartey man here might run them through the Windows debugging tool to give a sense of what's going on.

 

totally agree bill.
i don't have that thermal shutdown but i do have the flickering on some web page or black bakground, for example in the alienwarearena.com, on the m18x configuration page.i chek on the integrate graphics and i don't get the flickering.

 

That reminds me. I need to check on a status update for the flickering issue.

 

As one of the people going thru a system capture, I just wanted to weigh in. I initially ordered the most cost effective solution, dual amd 6990m's. All the benchmarks I saw showed them pretty much equal. I felt the small if any performance difference was over shadowed by the price difference. Had I had no overheating issues AMD would have been fine. Matter of fact this problem could still turn out to be Dell motherboards because don't 6990m's work fine in earlier mobo revisions?

Dell's ongoing commitment to getting to the bottom of this is admirable. I'm biased of course because of capture/exchange but I'll tell you two things. I'm going to continue to do business with Dell, and I'm going to upgrade my warranty just in case

 

Is there a screen flickering thread? I looked around and only found a couple with very few unique users. I see it mentioned a lot, but we're not seeing it in call center data or social media searches with Radian6.

 

I dont recall a seperate thread for it Bill but I can tell you that I get the flickering on my displays.....one minute it will be 1/3 from the top and then 1/3 from the bottom of the display...each time a seperate horizontal flicker right across the whole display like a glitch or surge or something....this happens to me even whilst sat idling at desktop without any apps or anything open.

 

sounds like it's time for a phone video upload.

 

"Displays"? As in external monitors? As in cable swap or different cable type would be 1st troubleshooting steps? Or "displays" as in both the internal monitor and any external monitor you connect to?

 

Been there, done that Bill.

My Ultrasharp U2410 worked flawlessly with my old R2. It was only recently hooked up again when I got my latest M18x a short while back.

I have swapped out different cables to elimate the issue of a dud. Still no go. I dont use cheap HDMI cables, I temporarily "robbed" some from my home theatre where I get perfection with my Chord cables.... but not so when used to hook up the monitor.

Its just happened right now as I am typing looking at the screen....flicker flicker flicker....

 

No no no. I'm not troubleshooting or suggesting steps. I am just trying to determine if this is an external monitor only issue. My phrasing was just bad.

 

i'm geting a replacement, but if the new one have this flickering it will go back tu dell.

 

Could be just external Bill - I will apply closer attention to the internal and let you know.

 

ok, here is mine. just finished loading my system up.
stock gpu/cpu

 

Nice one man!

It looks like you absolutely destroyed me. Even with mine OCed you still win lol! Nice scores!
I'll do some more testing later again. Off to work.
Good luck everyone with getting your issues fixed. Hope the new Dell AMD driver is out when I get back lol.

Any new updates or news about that Dell-Bill B?

Cheers.

 

so is it wierd that mine scares me because the fans are running so high during normal internet usage that i think its about to turn into a hovercraft?!?!?!?!? :/

 

Mike - it's an Alien war ship, not a hovercraft.

The nice thing is that your fans are working. If your temps are good, that's not a bad thing at the moment. Dell is working on a fix, so stay tuned for more info in the near future.

 

hahaahhahaha! well it is about to levitate and take off to bf3

 

Hearing fans is a "good" thing. The problem we were experiencing was fans not kicking in causing shutdown. Now i like to him them.

 

Well a dirty fix to fan issues if one is so concerned about burning out a card, while you are lost in the beauty of a game, is to pull out the sense wire of the fans that way they pull the full 5Volts its allowed and they run high all the time. Pulling out the pin is easy as they are very cheap in built. But careful they can break just as cheaply.

I will never recommend this method, there are no aftermarket vendors out there at this time who have spare M18X fans. I have checked. So don't try this at home.

Mine is setup like this on the right GPU, but not out of choice. It happened when I discovered how poor those 4 pins wires were in construction, trying to clean out the laptop.

 

yes, but one should not need to remove those fans. if one has a very strong blower. if you have to pull the fan to clean...then it's generally on the late side of things...

 

Oh I was just checking out everything and taking things apart, I do that with every laptop the moment it comes to me from the shop.

 

So, you were speaking hypothetically about the cleaning, so folks would know to be gentle?

 

then you'll need to chalk that up to "user error"

 

Sort of, I don't rely factory builds to be always "clean" and I never trust factory thermals paste jobs either. So I always open things up to try and clean if anything happens to be in there.

Yeah should have made that clear, poor choice of words.

 

Oh believe me the ones on the M18X are really weak, all 3 fans were ready to break up with the slightest of pulls to get them out.

Never seen such issues with so many other laptops that I have opened up for servicing. Different brands, Different dell models etc.

 

that's because they have a tool for that as well or at least i do.
pulling the wires is not a very good idea with any laptop fans. at least from my prior experience....

but i do understand where you are going with this....when i looked under my keyboard i noticed they broke a clip as well..*face palm*