*OFFICIAL* M11xR2 Owners Lounge - Part 1

Until the volume OSD is added, this program is small (380kb) and nice

http://volumedisplay.com/list-themes

 

Oo very nice. Been wanting something like this ever since I got my laptop. Hopefully they'll patch it in as a BIOS thing soon, but until then this works perfectly. Thanks!

 

1) Tempreature seems fine, in the 70 when gaming for GT335 but I'm not worried.
2) I AM worried about battery life, doing test now, just leave it on browsing and power saver and lowest setting as if I'm taking note in class and doing stuff. No flash site, so far its been 17 minutes on low power setting with 2 mins LCD blackout and NO flash, no youtube, its down from 100 to 95% will keep an eye on it. I need at least 5 hours, hope this doesnt disappoint

 

ok..at min brightness, with wireless on, set to power saver mode, and backlight off, my laptop use approximately 10% every 30 minutes. means 20% an hour meaning 5 hours to go through 100 percent. But in real life probably need half hours reserve for occassional heavy browsing and stuff. I would guessstimate this to last around 4 hours battery life... maybe 430 if you play the setting right........

Of course this one is much more powerful than my Asus UL30-VT but damn....the asus lasted me 10 hours in real life...

 

Okay, Same settings as you; wireless on, BT off, no backlight, lowest LCD brightness, power savings setting. Doing browsing and making sure the 335M doesn't turn on or something. I am getting 19 minutes/10% of battery, which means just a tad over 3 hours. Sigh. I'll time out the whole thing though and see what happens.

 

Yes, lowest brightness , bluetooth off, power saver mode. 1 mins till LCD Diims and 2 mins till LCD turns off, no back light, browsing and word document with occassional inactivity so screen would go off, but i promptly press touchpad to bring it back up. 17% consumed in 1 hour ( i timed it)which means roughly 4-5 hours.

Wonder what's amiss from yours...

 

So I'm at the 30min mark and I've drained 16.3% according to BatteryBar. So I am right on track with 3 hours. If you have BatteryBar installed mind telling me what your discharge rate is?

Maybe my overclock is killing the battery life. I'll test out stock clocks tomorrow.

 

OH YEA! knew there was something....mine is bone stock i5 @ 1.07 ghz guess that made the difference. I'll gladly trade a few fraction of ghz for better battery life

 

Okay. I clocked in at 2:40 with minimal settings. Again, that's with the i7 (160 Mhz overclock), lights off, min. brightness, bluetooth off, and power saving mode. Sadly that's actually less than my Studio XPS 1340, which makes me very unhappy lol.

Google Chrome seems to eat up a lot of power for some odd reason. At idle BatteryBar says I'm consuming 14 watts at most. Using Chrome I get upwards of up to 28 watts drainage, and that's with the 355M off. That's twice the battery drainage! Like I said earlier, I'm gonna try stock clock speeds sometime. I'm also gonna time how long my laptop lasts when it's idle. If neither are impressive I am going to try the beta drivers that are out and see if that helps. And last on the list is gaming battery life, of which I'd expect at least 2 hours.

 

Try firefox, they had problem of battery draining and hog system resource 2 years ago but has since fixed it, thats what i use and light on system.

2 hours 40 mins is unacceptable even overclocked.

My Asus ul30 with SU7300 overclock from 1.3 to 1.7 ghz only shortern my real life battery life by less than an hour and I still achieve nearly 10 hours battery life.

 

check this out

RAM use by Google Chrome much greater than Firefox - Google Chrome Help

Does Google Chrome's process-per-tab model inherently use more memory than Firefox and IE? - Stack Overflow

Pros for Chrome is downfall for your battery life. Each tab of chrome start and consume a new process, hence more battery and more resource.

 

Hm life just got a lot more complicated xD

 

I've used Chrome and Firefox a lot, and I do agree Chrome uses more ram (it masks that fact by each tab being a different process), but Firefox uses a lot more CPU constantly, so I'd think Firefox would be the biggest battery killer of the two, as it will cause the CPU to scale up more often and stay higher. YMMV, as I use a few more plugins in FF than Chrome.

Using ram really isn't going to kill your battery life. However, if you have a paging file, it may use that instead of ram, which would mean more hard drive use, which would eat away at your power. I turned mine off because 4gb of ram is plenty.

 

I guess you will just disable the OC and try it out....no other way around this.

 

Yeah, good thing I have all summer to figure this out before school starts. I'd even be satisfied with 4 hours. But reading that this laptop could get 5.5 hours was the tipping point really. We'll see what happens.

 

To reach the best capacity of the battery, you have at least one time to completely discharge it.

You can do this in bios till the M11x turns off. Did you do this?

I need a silent and powerful subnotebook which i can use at least 4 hrs (better 6) without charging...

For browsing and doing office. : (

 

for me if i turn wifi off, i'd probably be able to get a solid 5 hours. Yours should be no difference, just turn off OC and see how much improvement it gets.

 

Your i5 and my i7 have the same TDP, so I hope there will be no difference.

Where can i turn off the OC?

 

There is a couple of us debunking this myth, but I fear it's spreading faster than it's being contained. TDP is not about power use. It's how much power the cooling system can handle. You could say both cannot use more than the same amount of power without the system shutting down (and that doesn't mean both will use the same amount of power at maximum), but comparing TDPs says nothing more than that.

 

Not really sure with R1, but people with R2 seem to be pushing 5 hours. With the R1 having better battery life than the R2, the R1 would definitely meet your standards in terms of battery life and power.

And yes, I've fully discharged my laptop battery. I'll be timing my battery life with stock speeds and turboboost enabled later today.

 

i've removed the alienware face recognition software, made a profile disabling the led lights, made a desktop profile without aero and use power save mode. what else can i do to squeeze more batter life out of the m11x? i get just over 5 hours and with steam running in the background and would like to get up to 5.5 hours or higher.

 

Hey guys. So I found the source of my lame battery problems! I didn't do any long term testing as it's time consuming and I sort of want to enjoy my laptop instead of running around like a paranoid freak trying to justify my purchase. Instead I just looked at battery bar and the discharge rate I was getting. I went back to clock speeds with turboboost enabled (I posted some CPUMark scores in this thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/495937-m11x-r2-i5-i7-advantages.html. Apparently overclocking doesn't yield a significant boost). Same settings as before; power saving, no backlight, blah blah blah.

Other than the fact that Chrome+flash makes the battery drainage shoot way high cause of the 335M, I have found the source of all my problems. The culprit? HWMonitor! I usually leave it open in the background just because I like to keep tabs on my comp's temperature. Not sure if anyone else would be surprised by this but it sure surprised me lol. Browsing on Chrome, no flash, with WMP, Microsoft Word, and even Steam open in the background my dishcarge rate hovers around 12-15W. Batterybar isn't showing it, but Windows 7 estimates just over 5 hours of use. If I open up Firefox with a youtube video playing, my max drainage jumps to just above 16W. Chrome+flash started getting up to 30W.

So when I do get around to actually timing this stuff, I'm confident I'll be able to surpass the 5 hour threshold that I expected from this laptop.

 

turn off your paging file (and then reboot), turn of indexing--both will lower hd use

 

what's a good anti-virus/anti-malware program? my university offers mcafee to students free of charge but i am looking for something that uses less resources in the background

 

I've had great results with Nod32 in the past. I've never tested it, or even looked at how much memory it actually takes. I have noticed however, that while watching hulu on my gateway, nod 32 NEVER made it lag! While trend micro was constantly interrupting games with annoying popups that meant nothing to me, NOD32 was always silent as a mouse. It offers decent protection, but take into mind that it's no fortress...

I personally prefer it, and I'll see if I can find some numbers for ya.

 

thanks i shut off indexing, is it wise to turn off paging file?

 

That depends what you do. The paging file is hard drive space used as ram. For whatever reason, Windows uses it before ram is even close to full, which is why I turn it off. With it off, my system hasn't come close to using 3gb, so given that I have 4gb of ram, there's no reason for me to have a paging file.



I'll give you directions in case you don't know how to do it (or for future readers who don't):

start->type perf-->under the control panel section, click "adjust the appearance and performance of windows"-->go to "advanced" tab-->under "performance" click "settings"-->click "advanced" tab-->click "change" button-->click the "no paging file" button and then click "set"-->keep hitting "ok" until everything is closed-->reboot computer



oh 1201NFTW, I forgot to mention if you go to the advanced controls for each power plan, there are more options to change to get better battery life, like how long the hd isn't used before it's turned off.

 

NOD32 is nice. I used to use it but tried avast and ended up liking it a bit more. On my M11X right now, it's only taking up 2.4mb of ram, and watching it for the last 5 minutes via Task Manager, it hasn't used any CPU. I think aAvast uses a bit less resources, but NOD32 certainly isn't a resoruce hog, either.

 

Avast is free, right? Hmm, I better try that then!

 

Yeah, you register and get a year subscription. I don't think there's anything preventing you from registering with a different email again in a year, either.

 

thanks for the walk through, i'm disabled it

i learn so much on this site all you guys are great! if i need more than 4 GB of Ram i guess now i'll find out quickly lol!

 

Playing around in the power settings some more, I noticed "high performance" has a minimum cpu scaling value of 100%, meaning it never underclocks even when it doesn't need to be running full throttle. I thought maybe I'd want that gaming if it couldn't scale up fast enough, so rather than change the value under the "high performance" plan, I took all the settings from "high performance" on AC and transfered them to "balanced" on AC except kept the minimum scaling value at 5%. On this new "balanced" plan, my CPU temperature has been 42-45 degrees C on average, while before it was 50-52 C at minimum. It still gets up that high, but it doesn't stay there. I definitely recommend trying this.

 

I highly recommend Microsoft Security Essential, completely free and very very light on the system. Pretty good detection rate too for virus.

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

 

Any recommendations for a good bluetooth keyboard? Something to go along with the orochi would be nice.

 

in the power saving mode i changed the minimum processor state to 3%, i might also change the maximum processor state to 90% or something, when i am not plugged in it usually means i am word processing/using excel/doing school work. i figure that should still be able to play music or youtube videos. also changed to turn the hard drive off after 3 minutes instead of 5 minutes.

 

Will this wifi card work in the R2?

INTEL Wireless Ultimate N WiFi Link 5300, IEEE 802.11a/b/g/Draft N, 11/54/450 Mbps, Internal PCIe Half Mini Card.

 

m11x R2 first look by anandtech

 

good catch!


" Battery life results will have to wait, as we're busy testing other things right now, but the M11x should easily last upwards of seven hours for lighter loads."

Nope. Why publish the article with guesses before you've tested it? How is that a "review" in any sense of the word

And later: " $300 extra for performance that should be 10 to 50% faster is reasonable, "

I'm not sure why they say that when their own benchmarks show 5-36% at best with other benchmarks showing it went down in speed.

Other than those two things, it's a pretty good article.

 

probably talking about FFIV benchmark test + the 3dmark06 test..since the new cpus r tricky ya know? This is what im thinking

 

"$300 extra for performance that should be 10 to 15% faster is reasonable"
if it's m15x, i'd say yes.
but 15% improvment base of su4100 and gt335m, i dont think so.

 

a couple Quick Question if you dont mind guys.
I didnt quite get the idea of Optimus Technology. I ordered the i7 model so does it mean that i get that Optimus Technology?

second, It seems like my r2 will arrive after Est. Delivery Date of July 9th according to the email that I received after purchesing it (I have 7 day shipping so in the best case if they send it this tuesday it still wont arrive until 14th.) should call them up and comlain them and try to get overnight or 2 day shipping. ?? thanks for your help. have a good night everyone.

 

1) yes, with i5 or i7 you get optimus auto video switching. With core 2 duo you get manual graphic card switching.

2) can't say about your shipping, if it says DELIVERY on the 9th then most likely you get before the 9th, they always quote longer than what it takes. Unless it says EST SIHPPING DATE on the 9th then yes, it will take a bit longer than that. Not sure how complain would work unless you paid for the faster shipping.... I paid 39 for 2 days....worth it for me.

 

Just got my R2 with i7. Don't have time to mess around with the GPU yet. I was trying to overclock the CPU. The system simply shut down on its own at 162. Windows wouldn't load at 160 even though it could get past the alien logo. Turbo Boost was disabled at those settings. The highest it would boot at is 158. I'm going to run Prime95 to see if that's even stable with Turbo Boost.

Is this machine's overclock potential just way behind the power curve? Is there anything that could be done to help? Like getting a better hard drive or swapping ram.

Should I look real hard to find reason to return and exchange for another system? Or the difference in performance is so little that it's not worth the trouble?

One last easier question, is there an option in the BIOS to enable POST screen instead of the alien logo screen? I couldn't find it.

 

Every game I play on my m11x r2 doesn't play smooth. Will the graphic drivers which are on the supported dell site fix these issues?

 

I received my M11X a couple of days ago. All I can say is this thing rocks! It is built like a tank - no hinge issues. Plus it is super fast without overclocking and plays all the games I have thrown at it without any issues. I did have to update to the latest Dell video driver (the beta one) to get a couple of Steam games to recognize the Nvidia card.

After removing indexing and Windows Search, AlienFX and Dell DataSafe (after making a recoverery disk), the performance is noticeably better. Plus the hard drive was 32% fragmented. Running Windows 7 defrag helped with that. No regrets on returning the R1 and getting the R2.

 

Awesome news - the feedback on here occasionally makes me question the R2 before it has arrived (scheduled next Monday). There are some glowing references on here though so fingers crossed I have the same experience with mine next week.

 

Why do some people say that games on the m11x r2 run really bad when some say they run awesome.. this gets me paranoid since my r2 is arriving tomorrow -__-

 

Maybe people have different standards? Like maybe some consider medium graphics horrible and high graphics decent while other consider medium graphics good and high graphics great? I don't know. Though from what I have researched, the M11x should be able to run recent games at high or medium with 30 FPS or more and run older games at high graphics easy.

 

Compare with my desktop with OC i7 and GTX 480, the M11xR2 runs horribly, compare with other netbook or notebook of similar league, M11xR2 runs beautifully, actually beyond exceptional. All depend on perspective and expectation.

Alienware logo doesn't make this thing invincible, just like sports, you have to compare within its class

My desktop runs MW2 @ max everything @ 1080P while R2 runs it at 1366 x 768 @ medium setting. My desktop runs MOH 32AA @ 1080P while R2 struggles with 1024 x 720 with 1 AA and still unplayable. Doesn't make R2 bad, just gotta be fair

 

Hm so hitting the 1 week mark with this laptop. Squeaky hinge is squeaky, but I think instead of having a tech come to replace it/sending it back to Dell to replace it (I've NEVER had a successful repair with Dell in the past) I'll deal with it until the hinges crack or something. I was thinking about returning it for a refund and then reordering it since my quote still works but it's probably not worth the hassle either.

So I can get upwards of 5-6 hours but that's with just light browsing (~12W drain according to BatteryBar). I am still a little disappointed that I have to TRY to get these times but I guess at least I know it's possible to get better battery life.

Other than that I am fully satisfied with this purchase. Anyone know if you can boot with AlienFX/the backlights off?