The Official Area-51 m15x Owners Lounge II

my m15x cant play crysis on high with a playable framerate. im not sure if it was the downclocking issue >_>.

 

Nahh. 8800m gtx cant run everything on high even if it dun downclock. I have run some test about it. Even if it didnt downclock I still hit 5-15 on some maps. - but it last not more than 3 secs. I am runnning mix medium/high and the graphics looks the same on all high

 

even on all medium i was getting framerates in the upper teens and lower 20's at some points.

 

I think you guys are expecting way too much out of the 8800m GTX. In terms of Crysis, that is.

 

really? a 500 doller graphics card? i mean im not asking for vsync, anti anailising x 16, and all very high at 2500 x1600.

 

Damn waiting game.... keep refreshing my Australian Air Express page to see where my m15x is... still with the Courier Driver and not in my hands

 

My 8700 can run it on high with playable framerate.

 

Well, my ,15x finally arrived! Cant see anything wrong with it so far - body has no cracks, everything looks good, no screen wobbles. Downloaded Everest to have a look - a few things a bit out. Firstly on my invoice it quotes my system being $800 less than what i paid for it... Secondly only says i have 3GB of RAM when i ordered 4GB... even says this in Everest. Is this normal?

Dont have Crysis, so not going to be able to put it through its paces with that. All up looks good!

 

I think someone somewhere along in this forum said that at this time vista doesn't support 4gigs of ram and so it only senses 3 gigs. Don't worry, I'm sure they'll fix that in service pack 1 (maybe)

I don't have Crysis either and seeing as it has a tendency to murder everyone's m15x's, I think the best thing to do would be to simply stay away from it for the time being.

 

I agree with you there mate about Crysis... and if you do get it, dont get your expectations up about playing it maxed out... It is unfortunately ahead if its time.

I remember reading something about Vista and RAM actually, cheers for the reminder Jelly. Hopefully SP1 will fix it, any ideas about when it will come out?

 

Uh... that's a 32-bit limitation. As it is, they (Microsoft, Linux, etc.) had to do some... "interesting" things to get past the 2 GB barrier. It's possible that enabling PAE ( Physical Address Extension) on Vista might let you have access to more RAM, but I wouldn't bet on it.

You could always install Vista 64 to get access to all 4 GB of RAM.

 

Vista SP1 is already out, came out today. you can download it directly from microsoft's site or wait a month and it'll be in the windows update.

 

Cheers NNUgles

 

I hope this is the right spot for noob questions. I just got my m15x today and promptly put 4gig of ram in it and tried to install server 2008 just for fun. Got tired of looking for drivers and installed my own copy of vista (I ordered it with home). What I'm curious about is that I lost the message on startup where is says to push F10 to run restore (or something similar). I'm pretty sure this just boots into PE from the hidden partition. Does anyone know how or what to modify to get this back??

 

I installed SP1 and Vista now sees all 4.00 GB of RAM under computer properties.

That is a good thing!

 

So far with playing over 5 huores of crysis and Frontlines, also wow. max heat was 93, and stayed between 86 to 92. so far no downclock. i was using Zalman cooler. so thats helped.

I really started loving my AW,

I do got the Aw briefcase with it. and it's really huge, the laptop fits nice and it have it's own place , there is 3 places to use for books , access. and some side places for water battles, also back strips for holding things.

NNugles . i tried to find the link of the SP1. do u have it ?

 

have you happen to take your zalman apart? I was going to take some photos of the inside but i figured i'd ask if someone else has done it first... might save me the trouble.

AW briefcase, i was heavily debating on getting that. i was wondering how big it actually was and if it can fit everything including powerbrick, m15x, mouse, etc.

It looks like they took the sp1 link down... prob due to the flood of downloads last night. I saved the file to my home computer (at work now)... i'll get it to you in a bit.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/sp1.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...6d-5ebb-413b-89c9-cb3d06d12674&DisplayLang=en

actually it says later "DO NOT CLICK DOWNLOAD IF YOU ARE UPDATING JUST ONE COMPUTER: A smaller, more appropriate download is available on Windows Update. " I don't know if the "windows update" link will work after posting so, yeah, it's on the 2nd link.

 

If you're talking about 32bit Vista, it's not really that good. Vista SEE's it, but does not USE it. All it's doing is confirming what's physically in the notebook, but you'd know that already.

 

nope nnugles is right: it cannot be downloaded now. I think I will wait until I go back to school anyways. The internet there is much faster than at here at home .

 

looks like it's going in a out... try this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...4c056d4c34d/Windows6.0-KB936330-X86-wave0.exe

if it doesn't work i'll upload my file somewhere so you can grab it.

EDIT: Also i should point out that it takes over an hour to update and your system will reboot a few times in the process. You may not want to start it if you need to use your computer within about 1.5 hours after initiating the update.

 

Hey you can play Frontlines. I continually get freezig when playing this game.

I have no idea what is causing this problem.

 

i cant believe anyone would actually play that game anyway. lol

 

Well B4 the SP1 install my system was only able to "see" 3 GB's. So I think it is a little improvement.

Anyway, So far so good on the manual install.

 

Link to Vista 32-bit Service Pack is here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...6d-5ebb-413b-89c9-cb3d06d12674&DisplayLang=en

 

It's good to hear that everyone is having a better time with their m15x's now.

The BIOS update via AW and Vista SP1 via Microsoft both comes out at the same time, who would have thought of that huh? lol

 

so I got my m15x yesterday.... everything seems OK. At first the display wouldnt come on after hibernate, I'd have to restart for it to come back. Installing the latest Vista updates seemed to resolve that problem.

They misspelled my last name horribly on the nameplate lol, so I'll have to have them send me a new one since you can easily unscrew it to replace it.

The volume control touch buttons don't seem to work at all...

They need to update the AlienFX command center... it's acting strange. When you open a theme and make changes to it, it seems to save those changes without asking you first. I dont exactly know if that's the behavior but I've lost several themes already cause it's acting weird. Anyone else having that problem?

I notice all the lights stay on even when it goes into hibernate or sleep mode.. is there a way to have the lights turn off when the laptop goes into sleep mode? I don't want them to dim out over time or even worse go out... what kind of lighting is it in there? LED's?

 

I received an email last week saying that these two items are back ordered.
- CPEN,INTEL T9300 CPU,2500/800,6M,FCPGA6
- M15X NVIDIA 8800M-GTX 512MB
Also stated to call this week and they should be in stock.

I called just 5 minutes ago and they won't be in for another week. Great. I got pushed back a phase and my estimated shipping of the 28th is probably going into early/mid April. Great for spending $3,000+. Well atleast by that time they will have (hopefully) all issues settled.

 

here is the trick for the volume control button. at first i thought they did not work at all. first open up the sound control center so you can see the sliders move up and down more easily. PLACE ALL FINGERS ( minus your thumb ) on the volume slider. move left to decrease volume and right to increase volume. keep working at it, you will get it soon. for the alienfx, best you can do is to press the FN key + the alienfx f button on the top right of the keyboard, that turns off most of the lights.

 

I didnt even get a name put onto mine... sniff

 

I got my SP1 update from Windows update yesterday, and installed it in 20 minutes and it only rebooted once. I have no idea why it took so long for you or rebooted so many times for you. Were you using the standalone installer?

 

Yes, sorry to say, even if it costs 500. You have to remember that these are just mobile GPU's and not even close to their desktop equivalents.

 

I was using the standalone as the one through microsoft/windows update won't be released until mid April. I also didn't install the one released to technet plus peeps just because i didn't mind waiting. I installed it on 4 systems simultaneously: 2 Vista Home Prem and 2 Vista Business... i haven't tried to update my Vista Ult machines but i read that those will receive a separate update later (not sure). I got similar time on all of the systems. They were all up to date and defragged before the SP1 update. I'm pretty sure it took me longer than 20 mins... maybe an hour but it felt like longer. I shutdown once, booted up, went through a long configuring process, made myself some ramen (at 3am), came back and i think it had rebooted while i was away, i waited longer, finished my ramen, waited... then it gave me the log in screen and then a message popped up and told me SP1 update completed. I didn't get the confirmation on one computer but it did update on that one too regardless.

 

I got mine through Windows Update, it's available now. Just tell it to check for updates and mine found it rather quickly. Probably took longer cause it was standalone (and it includes all previous updates, so it probably installs those as well). Would explain why it also had to restart a few times.

 

those MS peeps told me april... grrr



EDIT: ok so it is available through Windows Update... there has been some reports of problems and bsod while doing the suto update but most people will make it through just fine.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948343


OK now that's enough for running off topic for me... sorry.

 

In my opinion(which doesn't count for much on tech stuff), If Crysis can hardly play well on desktops GPUs, how do you expect it to run as well on a mobile one? I'm not even gonna buy Crysis until maybe the fall. All I know is I love my m15x. BioShock runs effortlessly.

 

You are right. I love Bioshock, now that's one game you can go MAX on. Call of Duty 4 is pretty sweet too! I'm happy that you guys love your m15x so much, it makes me jealous. haha

 

ok so i really want my m15x

yeah Crysis has been sitting on my shelf for a while now and I've purposely not even installed it... been sticking to TF2 and COD4. I'm waiting to run crysis for the first time on the m15x. I figured i won't be disappointed that way... i don't expect it to run it well at all maxed with a 1920x1200. I really just want it to be playable on med to mid-high settings.

 

what flavor of ramen? chicken? oriental?

 

cool thanks.

 

crab actually... it was alright, would've been better if i added a bunch of stuff to it.

 

According to this, Windows Vista, as of SP1, supports PAE or "Physical Address Extention".

Without PAE (which is only available on windows 32-bit Server OS's (2000, 2003, etc)), a 32-bit OS can only see 4GB of memory MAXIMUM. now, to clarify, this includes all reserved memory (lower memory) and video memory.

Often, this will cause a 4GB computer to only "see" 3 to 3.5GB of Physical memory.

As of SP1 with Vista, PAE is included, which will allow the Operating System to "see" up to 64GB (in this case).

so as of SP1, there is no significant reason to "upgrade" to a 64-bit enabled OS. since most software is still 32-bit.

the only reason PAE wasn't enabled before is because 1: there was no reason to, and 2: the extended memory space messed with drivers. I'd guess that with Vista's driver isolation techniques (which have been improved for PRIMARILY security reasons), probably allows it to use PAE without de-stabilizing the system.

Finally, there's a delay on some versions of the vista update... specificly with Ultimate. From my understanding of the problem, they havn't ported the install to all capable languages. THATS the holdup. Unicode compiling. Ult. users who are using the WWE (worldwide english) version, are probably o.k. for doing the update, but you'll have to do it through the stand-alone installer. the Windows Update version won't be out for another month.

 

I guess that's where the confusion came in for me with the whole April thing. Thanks for clarifying.

 

no problem.

like i said, you're PROBABLY okay to do Vista Ult. with the standalone. But don't take my word for it. My advice is: if you're willing to wait, then do so, if you want to experiment (and risk having to restore/reformat your notebook) then go for it.

obviously the hardware will survive anything you want to put it through (besides a furnace) so, it's up to each user individually.

 

So now that I've installed the SP1 on my m15x, my Welcome Center screen now shows 4GB of RAM. So you guys are saying that my Vista 32bit now recognizes up to 4 instead of the previous 3?

 

Not sure if you all heard but here it is...
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/19/alienwarez-bios-released-to-fix-overheating-area-51-m15x-rigs

They claim to have a BETA BIOS available to fix the overheating problem, abdept more fan noise. May be worth checking out.

I should get my m15x tomorrow... I hope all is well

 

this is kind of a random thought. but does the m15x feel a little less than solid to anyone else? its heavy yet it just does not feel sturdy. does anyone not have the squeaky display lid sound?

 

i think we were prob the first to be notified.

grats on the m15x. hope you love it.

 

100% true, but it doesn't bother me that much though, because my laptop is on my desk most of the times and yeah I have that display sound too.

 

yeah, it just doesn't feel sturdy to me at all, but so far nothing's broken.