M17 General Information Thread

i don,t like the fact that it's up the front but it still is beter then any slot load laptop

 

I heartily disagree, the slot load on my M17x is just awesome......this laptop has ruined me in so many ways in regards to laptop design and features haha

 

My notebook sits on a stand so the front is facing downwards so no difference there. In fact having the hard drive in the optical bay and using an external optical will be much easier for me since at the moment, I have pick the laptop off the stand and balance it in one hand on my palm whilst opening and reloading the optical. Since my casing is damaged, I can't even close the screen whilst doing this which makes the task more tricky. Not to mention all the cables which run through the stand all need to be unplugged and plugged in again each time.

I've ordered the 1tb caviar black again for external backup, a 1tb scorpio blue (both are WDs) for the optical bay hdd caddy (which is on it's way too) and a bus powered optical.

Next thing is I'd like to upgrade to 8gb of ram in the next 6 months.

The caddy which I'm getting allows me to also fit other bezels on the front if there's any issues with size, so I can always remove it off the stock sony drive is necessary.

I look forward to posting back a good result so there's finally a record on the internet of someone successfully using 3 hdds in their M17.

 

Wow, thank you for saying that! I don't think that particularly does anything in this case, but I do remember there being a problem/snag that sometimes disabled the webcam in the BIOS settings, so I'll check there next time I reboot. Seriously, I'm so glad for a solution, and an easy one too!

 

I'm confused, lol!

You're saying thanks for the easy solution and also saying it's not much use in your case simultaneously? lol

Hope it works out in any event.

 

Hello
I had Win7 on it & Now I want to put Vista, which i had got with my comp
how to make clean fresh instal

when I put in the Windows CD i should press
F10 or 12 to booth from CD ?

cos I restart & it did not give me option
said- press any button to boot from CD

& then i choosed Country & Language
& seem it is copying old windows & making a Old Windows Folder

It did not ask if I want to delete old files or say if I will loose old files

After it finished it did not delete my Old Files


Need Help Please

 

well you machine seem like it's set to auto boot from cd if it asked you to press a key right away


the thing is to perform a clean install you must delete the partition then create a new one during the installation process

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9ehGfaOHSM the video show how if you are wondering what button does what

 

Thanks for the Video
it was helpful


After I formated the laptop
do i just install all the Drivers from My Hive

any particular order I need to install them
like Bois 1st then which next & so on ?

or just keep Installing in order its given in my hive ?

Thanks again

 

all the info is right there http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/426562-official-alienware-m17-drivers-page.html

no the bios does not need to be reinstalled

 

All in all all I'm quite pleased with the end result with having 3 hdds in my m17. So far I haven't noticed any issues and HDTune pro is still showing all 3 drives as being healthy.

Incidentally, how come I haven't seen any here with 1333mhz ram in their M17? As far as I can tell, the M17 does support up to 8gb (2x4gb) 1333mhz ram.

Lastly, any opinions on Cosair vs OCZ vs Gskill for a 1333mhz DDR3 8GB kit? In the UK all 3 are around the same price (about £85 inc delivery).

I found another thread where someone is doing a similar upgrade and people recommended GSkill due to how well they honour the warranty. All 3 brands offer lifetime warranty. Just that one person said he was able to easily get replacement ram after 2 years with no questions asked from G.Skill.

Lastly, there are slight differences in the stock timings:
G.Skill and Cosair: 9-9-9-24
OCZ :9-9-9-20 (they claim this means it's more likely to run stable).

Thanks for any input.

 

I would just avoid OCZ as they are closing the doors on their dram division all together.

As for the 1333 remark,
possible: yes
supported: no

Since there is no user control over the memory multiplier from what I remember in my OCZ whitebook, the user is limited to FSB overclocking to 1333 MHz FSB if you want to have 1333 MHz ram. I do not know if XTU changes this or not.

 

Thanks scook9. I guess it's between Cosair and G.Skill. I did manage to track down some Crucial memory which was around £15-20 cheaper but it's out of stock and they didn't have much info on it's specs.

When you say "Supported:No" do you mean the motherboard isn't meant to support it? I picked up the 1333mhz figure from various sites where you purchase upgrades for specific alienware models and those companies have all written (and sell) that the M17 supports 8gb (2x4gb) DDR3 ram at 1333mhz (PC3-10666).

I did just find this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...6-ddr3-sodimm-compatible-m17.html#post4876736

 

I mean they will not give you an option to run the system ram at 1333 speed. As you noted, it can be installed but will run at the slower speed.

 

Thanks. I'm learning way more on here than those misleading retailer sites! Found this on the M17 owners lounge:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware/317455-alienware-m17-official-owners-lounge-179.html

I desperately want to sort out the ram since I'm really annoyed of these random pauses where the hourglass appears at the pointer when I open new tabs in firefox (admittedly this is with 30+ tabs open), switch between tabs or when I'm scrolling along the tabs. Also when switching apps etc I get pauses.

At the moment it's actually a bit harder to get 1066mhz ram at the sites I checked in UK but they are expecting stock in 2 weeks so I will take some time to see how easy it is to reach 1333mhz via overclocking the ram using 1333mhz ram or 1066mhz ram (with both stuck at 1066mhz initially). The 1066mhz ram is about £20 cheaper at the places which are out of stock right now. The sites which have it in stock are selling it at the same price as 1333mhz ram.

 

you are busting 4gb of ram with firefox? ethier firefix has a serious memory leak or there is something else wrong in your system

 

Goodpoint. Firefox is using about 750mb of ram and my system shows about 1.5gb of ram free at present. However why then do so many other m17 users upgrade to 8gb of ram? It must be yielding performance gains.

As Granyte said on the owners lounge thread:

I think I might just go with the 1333mhz ram and use memset to change the timings to it's got the usual timings for 1066mhz (cl7?)

I'm planning on keeping this notebook for at least another 2 years and since the highest spec CPU seems to be the QX9300, when I eventually find that I can't run the latest game with optimal settings (not insane though!), I'll prob need to resort to overclocking incrementally and seeing if it helps. At least I'll know that any limitations won't be down to the memory being unable to keep up with the cpu.

I just remembered, I do have lots of add-ons with my firefox, however I'd uninstalled all the ones with known clashes. One called memoryfox used to help to minimise memory usage and leaks with firefox, however lately it seems to crash which is probably why it's using 750mb right now.

 

it does not bring any performance boost in 90% of the case its jus that 8b kit became cheep since the 16gb kit are out

the only diference i see personally is that i can swap straight from starcraft 2 into supreme commander with no wait

meme set to change the memory timing? interesting i'm quite sure my quad can reach 2.5 ghz just the ram never follows

 

Ok thanks Granyte. I suppose on the plus side if I do upgrade, I'll be able to leave my browser and music player open whilst gaming without any issues. Sometimes I do find I need to close down my browser during gaming which means I need to re-open and reload all the tabs after (of if i need to look for some walkthroughs/tips online during the game!)

 

maybe you should manage your open tabs better to LOL

i never had any issue having a game and several bowser tabs music player and other stuff open

edit gskill stick are non responsive to memset

 

Thanks for the info as always. I do use this add-on called "too many tabs" where you can drag tabs onto a toolbar above the tabs and have several rows. Say 1 can be all notebook forum rows, another row could be various reviews I'm reading about purchases, another could be different blogs etc. Like you said, I just need to get a bit more organised and in my case, make better use of that plugin.

Incidentally, I saw a post in your Linux and M17 thread about someone who uses Nvidia in his M17 instead of Ati.
I did do a quick search on this thread for "Nvidia" but couldn't get an answer. Since 3870s and 4850s are practically unavailable so there's no way for me to upgrade to either crossfire of either setup or to upgrade from my single 3870 to a single 4850, can I simply purchase 1 or more compatible Nvidia cards which would provide an upgrade?

On a side note, did you ever get the issue with Ati drivers and linux sorted? I'm interested in dualbooting with linux again once Linus Mint 10 KDE64 is out (based on Ubuntu 10.10).

Thanks

 

I'm about to place my order. Decided on Cosair 1333mhz 8gb kit since it's £30 cheaper than everyone else (except g.skill, only £20 cheaper than them).

Just one thing, is it particularly bad to have 1333mhz ram running at 1066mhz with it's stock CL9 (9-9-9-24 timings) rather than the usual CL8 or CL7?

 

no it will be fine

 

i recall reading somewere over the ocz documentation that thier version of the laptop was suporting 1333 mem speed

and if you use the XTu you can oc the fsb fast enough to be back to 1333 speed

 

The whitebook could accept 1333 ram but it could not clock it at 1333 unless you used a program to set the fsb. The official max for the PM45 chipset is 1066.

 

Thanks everyone. I was just looking at XTU again since I am now trying to emulate Granyte and get my cpu voltage down even further from 1.05v to 1V. At the moment I'm just lowering it by the smallest increment each day

I noticed that it looks relatively easy to alter the ram's timings in there so assuming that my bios doesn't automatically alter the timings when it downclocks to 1066mhz I'll do it myself.

I did read in this forum that downclocked (1333mhz to 1066mhz) memory isn't going to perform as well as stock 1066mhz ram would, however not sure if this was speculation, fact or simply a negligible difference.

On the otherhand, I reckon that after about a year when the next batch of games are out, I'll prob be regularly doing as people advise and using the FSB to OC the RAM. Thank god I got a CPU which is pretty decent at being OC'd so hopefully it will still last me 2-3 more years even with being OC'd. I'm going to invest in some diamond based thermal paste for it (or see if I can borrow some from a friend). Plus since I began undervolting and using the Zalman NC3000U cooler, my temps (CPU & Chipset) have gone from averaging 70-80 degrees to always been in the low 50s (although HW monitor says it is maxing out at the low 60s).

On the M17 benchmark thread, I think the best I seen with it is around 3ghz. Hopefully this plus RAM running at 1333mhz should be good enough to keep gaming (without resorting to the lowest settings!) till 2013

I might even give Civ5 another bash when I get the ram and try OC'ing. I used to find that towards the latter part of the game, I was having to wait ages in-between turns when playing on the gigantic map. I think I saw a thread on this somewhere, so not sure if this is due to notebook specs or just how much is going on for the AI to calculate - will re-read it.

Thanks for letting me know about it being the P45 chipset. I need to see how readily this ATI based chipset can run an Nvidia card.

 

yay! It's ordered. Having read all the threads on here, I realised that all ram is basically made by 3 companies for all the main companies to then resale, so I just went for the cheapest (non 'budget' line though):

Corsair 8192MB (2x4096MB) Memory Module Kit 1333MHz PC3-10666 DDR3 SO-DIMM 204pin 9-9-9-24

I'm guessing all the above sounds standard for acceptable ram?

 

All DDR3 so-dimms are 9-9-9-24 for 1333 except for Kingston HyperX so you are fine

And PM45 is an intel chipset, not ATI.

 

Thanks scook9. Sorry about that. I think i got confused when I saw something in this thread where someone was trying to run an ATI and Nvidia card in their M17 in some kind of SLI-Crossfire hybrid mode, and someone had referred to ATI chipsets (or maybe they said ATI GPU slots) acccepting Nvidia cards.

 

The GPU slots are vendor agnostic, that is the beauty of MXM (Assuming that the system bios does not block any cards - the whitebook was pretty wide open though)

You can run a single Nvidia card. SLI is not possible on any of their high end offerings because:
1 - there is not an SLI bridge designed for this system
2 - all of the decent nvidia cards are Type HE which only one of the 2 slots in the M17 is

 

How to update all the drivers
after fresh install

also how to repair windows OS
i am stuck on a windows update

 

First page of this thread has links to drivers for different OS
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ms/357640-m17-general-information-thread.html

Your window's disk aids in repairing windows? However if you've just done a fresh install there shouldn't be anything to repair.

 

By the way, using XTU I undervolted the QX9300 to 1.0125V and stress test was fine. However I got a BSOD with 1.0V. Any tweaks to get it stable at 1.0V?

Asking since I've seen other people undervolting it to 1V in the benchmark thread and other places.

edit
I just realised it'a probably due to one of the following:
it might have been someone with a M17x rather than a M17 which could be why they managed it.
Or maybe they were running a different bios on their M17. I'm using zfactor's 0.29 bios.

 

Could also be the chip itself, undervolting has the same limitations as overclocking, not every chip is equal and can sustain the same clockspeeds at the same voltage.
Your chip simply may not be stable at 1v and needs a bit more juice, especially as you consider it's default VID is likely higher.

 

the qx will never get to 1.0v anyway the cpu fimware allow only 1.05 to be sure use hwinfo32 i tough i undervolted to 0.95 but it never get that low for truth


and the reason of your bsod is hat you are likely runing at a to high speed for the voltage you suplie

also ram timing affect only the stick of ram that accept it

 

Got it installed. Glad to say that bios did automatically alter the timings from CL9 to CL7 whilst running at 1066mhz.

Now what I'm wondering is how I can experiment with running the ram at 1333mhz. In XTU when I up the cpu fsb, it doesn't show and increased ram speed in the proposed changes. Is that because it won't be available till the reboot?

Also, is it bad to increase the FSB on the cpu? Like I've mentioned earlier, ideally I need my M17 to last another 2 years so I can always wait another year till games aren't running as well as now to experiment with CPU FSB if it's not good for it's longevity.

Also, I did up my voltage back up to 1.05V since that is the lowest voltage listed for the QX9300 in Intel's published specs. It's still lower than the stock voltage of 1.2V so still better than no undervolting in terms of improved battery and temps.

Btw, I did read some posts earlier in this thread saying that FSB can be increased without harming your hardware if done sensibly and that it's usually the safer method of overclocking compared to increasing voltages. Also read this elsewhere:

Would you agree with this in terms of stock speeds (at least in terms of QX9300) being lower than it's true (SAFE - i.e. not damaging the hardware's longevity, especially if temps remain in the 50s) potential. I'm glad I read the tip about increasing in 5-10mhz increments. Originally I was going to go straight to 1333mhz since I know people with the QX9300 in their M17x have it at that speed. Having said that, it's a different motherboard, so prob better to increase it slowly.

Also curious if keeping the CPU undervolted at 1.05v whilst increasing FSB to 1333mhz is ok, or if I need to increase the voltage back to the stock 1.2V, again, this is from the point of view of maintaining the CPU health.

I am also rereading all the posts earlier in this thread about overclocking via FSB as well as the M17 overclocking thread.

 

as long as it does not bsod due to low voltage the lower the voltage the better

 

Ok, revo-uninstaller completely screwed up my system whilst removing yahoo off my pc! I was really worried it was something to do with increasing the gsb, or that I'd fried something whilst installing the new ram.

Anyway, I finally got round to doing a clean install, except I found a RTM (not the RC from a couple of months ago) version of Win7 SP1 on one of the windows beta testing forums so applied that to my clean install! System is running very nice and smooth now. Have a look around and give it a try! Apparently MS won't officially release it till Summer otherwise. Now I'm de-doing all my old registry hacks, but so far very happy with how it's performing except for when I run the win7 benchmark in control panel, I always get decent marks for CPU/RAM (7.2/8) but my HDD performance is always off (5.9/8). A SSD drive should perform better and the bootup times are definitely lightning fast. Crystaldisk and HDTune show it as healthy too.

Only issues I experienced with increasing FSB:
1) First night, for some reason I noticed that windows wasn't downclocking my cpu when on battery (or at any time) which hurt my battery life. However now it seems to be doing so.

2) I didn't realise that overclocking via FSB would mean that when the CPU downclocks during idling it would no longer reach the minimum of 1.5gz.

I'm guessing this is due to the 6 (mutiplier) x FSB. Since FSB is something which can be altered via XTU without a reboot, I guess I could always manually change it back to the stock FSB when on battery.

Lastly, just wondered if anyone has had any issues using e-sata with the M17? I did install the e-sata driver linked by alienware on their support page for win7 x64, however I always seem to get 26mb/s MAX transfers. This is using a WD Caviar Black with a 32mb cache running at 7200rpm inside an external caddy with an esata port plugged into the M17 esata port.

Only asked because other people online seem to be saying that get 40mb/s - 60+mb/s with an esata connection to their systems. One solution for low speeds is generally the motherboard, so I wondered if it's just a known issue with the M17/Whitebook motherboard.

Thanks

 

Try using the OEM Drivers from the M17 Drivers Page. I couldn't get my 1TB External WD Passport HDD to work with the alienware drivers, but it worked fine with the OEM version.

 

the oem version works fine my transfer rate are close to thoses of my internal hdd


also i think you have a QX you should give a go to throttlestop to see if it can bring the qx below the 6x multi

 

Hello, I was just wondering if you guys knew where to find an updated BIOS (if there is one) for the M17. Mine is currently at version W841.B10 -- Secondly since I upgraded to a 64bit OS (Vista x64 or Win7 x64) I get issues where audio stutters for a second or two and the machine kind of freezes up (mouse stops moving etc), neither CPU is not under load when this happens and I have tried MANY drivers thinking that was the issue to no avail.

 

most recent's versions of the bios are
official alienware: w841.b14
can be found on your myhive on alienware.com

unofficial Zfactor :Z.29
can be found here on the forum
this bios is ment for overclocker and not suported by alienware



on an other note do you have a quad core?

 

which is best Bios which wont have Stutter problem ?

Thanks

 

errrr depend on the user, laptop, hour of the day, phases of the moon, positioning of pluto

seriously it's preatty randoom

 

No, I only have the dual core but have been thinking of upgrading it.. also thanks I found the bios update on My Hive now

Idea's with the audio issue with x64 OS's?

 

maybe you need to update the realtek drivers otherwise i have no idea i've been runing a 64bit os since day 1 on my laptop the only audio issue i have seen where related to the quadcore issue

 

Thanks for all your help!

 

Anyone have any comments about the AMD 11.2 video drivers? I've installed them but haven't run any tests (don't have the software right now), but doesn't seem to have changed or helped many things so far =/

 

They're more bugfix drivers than anything else. Have used a lot worse.

 

your having what kind of issue

 

Well for a bugfix they sure made my Crysis angry on my desktop.....the last scene on the carrier deck was completely psychedelic with flashing and odd colors everywhere....... (and the usual plummet in performance for that level)