Projected R3 versus R2 bechmarks

Although I would agree with you, citing my GT200 vs GF104 example, I will wait until it can be proven the 540m is slower clock for clock as nVidia could have done some funky stuff and made the architecture faster, effectively making it so that less is more. I truly hope. It's not like nVidia had a better card for the job as it could have been worse- the GT525M. It's not like they could use ATi graphics as Dell are nVidia fan(boy)s- there are more nVidia options then ATi in their gaming/performance lines- M15x had GTX460M as base, the entire XPS range all had that same god damn GT540m core with the 445M option for XPS 17 and M14x has a GT555M. Only the M17x has ATi graphics as stock.

Where?

 

Honestly it would have made more sense to use a GDDR5 555m, or AMD, but whatever. The fact that you can use XMP and real RAM speed will help out.

 

I'd buy an R3 at this point if I were you. You get new silicon to play with, and worse comes to worse you can return it for an R2 if the performance isn't up to snuff.

 

Yeah, but I don't have $1200 to spend on a new R3, while I have enough for this second hand R2. Also, it looks like, in most scenarios, the R3 gets worse battery life, which is important to me. I may be wrong though.

 

then buy the R1...

 

Ony thing the r2 isn't available on the site anymore, So if he did want too return the r3 for a r2 i don't think its possible.

Its available threw outlet tho, And i saw a r2 with a i5 3gb ram 160gb hdd for 669.00$ seems like a good deal if you wanted too upgrade the ram and hdd yourself.


Pretty much what holding me back from returning my r2 is it seems like the performance isn't worth the extra 370-400 over what i paid for my r2 and seems like the r2 overclocked beats the r3 stock like mine does 8700points in 3dmark 06. Battery life also seems questionable on the r3 from the mix reviews that's out. And we don't know if the r3 can be overclocked but from what i herd its lucky too hit 5 too 10mhzs oc so if that's true the r2 is going too preform a bit worser than a oc r2.

My r2 i can get pretty much 5hours and a half browsing the net on power save and screen on 2 notches. I even saw 6hours already when it was idling , Mosty if im watching videos and and browsing the net i can get a solid 4hours and a half.


I think im going too wait till the r4 comes out

 

I honestly couldn't bring myself to buy an R1. I do some BFBC2, and it performs about 40% better on R2.

 

Why do you keep saying these things? The GPU scores end up like 16% apart.

 

See this...

GeForce GT 540M

Compare it to desktop version which is this...

GeForce GT 430

They are not the same but VERY close...

So google benchmarks on 430 or 430 oem and see what you get.

Should be close to the performance you will be.

Cheers,

StevenX

 

I see they are almost identical. hmmm.

 

Dell did not invest a lot in the R3 and knew that a lot of people would go with lesser models because R3 is not a revolutonary change with a new chassis.

I think it will be time to upgrade from my m11x i7 when Dell changes the chassis as they did with the m17x 3d replacing the m17x. The 3d is thinner and lighter.

The m11x R3 is just an R1/R2 with slightly better hardware that will yield slightly better performance.

But Dell expected this.

 

I really think I would have been so ready to buy it, right now, if it had a slightly better screen, not resolution, but quality, and made it slimmer. Come on, 4.5 pounds is light, but Im sure they could trim it to 3.5 with a much more svelte frame.

 

You sir, are an idiot.

Testing shows it is around 15%-20% faster in vantage.

And would you look at that, the games come in at around 10-25% faster. So vantage was bang on the money.

 

Vantage is a much more accurate test that 06. 06 seems to favor certain hardware, and CPU plays a much higher role in the score than GPU. Vantage is more even.

 

Ony thing if they did that i would think it would be less quality and wouldn't feel solid as it does now, And For how small it is the 4.5lbs ain't a problem for me. And the same if they made it slimmer which i think its fine the way it is

I just hope for the next version R4 they wont change much of the chassis buildness .

Also for the benchmark games i get around that or even better with my r2 Unless you comparing it too the r1 but the r2 when overclocked cpu and gpu does just as good as the r3 or better in games.


Benchmarks i never go by them for real world performance sense my g50vt in my sig gets around 11k and my r2 does better in some games or just as good

 

Yes your games from 2006 will run better on the R1 and R2, while the games actually released this decade will run faster on the R3.

 

Yeah, I'm not saying they should change the entire design. I love the design, and 4.5lbs is nice. I jsut think that they could make it slimmer, while still as stury. (eg m17x R3)

 

And meaker, exactly. The main reason I'd get an R3 is for DX11 support.

 

Games made in 2006? lol I mean like crysis 2 bbc2 you name it.


Again we wont know till someone on this forum gets it and do benchmarks or some review that is trust Worthy and know what they doing.

Like in crysis 2 i get over 30fps while on the benchmarks on the r3 gets 30fps sometimes i see 40s.

And on bbc2 i get 30s and 40s on maxed.

Im not saying the r3 is bad at all because it ain't but its not worth the extra money if you already have a r2 at least, heck r1 does great too when its not doing cpu intensive stuff.


Sure if i already didn't have the r2 i probably would've went with the r3 But sense i have it already and dell said i could get a refund still but i be paying a extra 370-400 more than i payed for this r2 which was 820shipped and for the little bit of performance or if any because my r2 is overclocked i dont think its worth it because that money can go on other things like my desktop which is my main machine anyways.

 

I was comparing benchmarks of the 335M and 540M in metro, crysis (which was actually released LATE 2007), dirt 2 etc.

I'm not even talking DX11 here.

Modern games have a different loading on the ROPs/shaders/mem bandwidth.

Games from 2006 are likely to punish the rop count while modern games are likely to be shader limited.

 

The 540m will not have enough horsepower to take advantage of the dx11 features. You will be better off running in dx10 mode if available. If absolutely have to run dx11 then I would choose to disable tessellation.

StevenX

 

Im not talking about dx11 either sense the 335m doesn't even support it.

I wont even compare metro sense its a bad coded game and even my desktop has trouble running it. Haven't tried crysis 1 yet on my r2 but will later on.

All i see is benchmarks of new games so cant really compare any older games before 2009 yet.

Also metro came out in 2010 not 2007. same as dirt 2 which was 2009 unless you meant dirt 1.

 

I said crysis came out in 2007, yet it's a bit of an outlier, ahead of its time.

I was looking at the performance of more modern games since thats what people are likely to care about.

I did not do anything special I just opened up:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-335M.24060.0.html

and

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-435M.35836.0.html

And set them side by side.

 

Sorry thought you meant all of them came out in 2007.. Need more sleep... lol

Ya i looked at those 2 links even tho cant really compare them well because what systems did they use with those cards? the 430gt-540gt could have a better cpu system pushing it.

We need too wait till we see raw numbers of the m11x r2 and r3.

Like on vantage i get around 3700 too 3800 while the 435gt 540gt gets 3800 something.

Sure out of the box the 540gt will be faster at stock but have too know too that the 335gt overclocks nicely and better now with the volt mod and the i5 and i7 cpus in the r2 overclocks great too and has thottlestop. So its going too be a close call.

 

Proof or STFU?

NBR R1 preview
NBR R1 review
NBR R2 review
NBR R3 review

Let me summarize it for you:

For PCMark Vantage, the R1(preview),R1,R2,R3 results are 2697,3745,5457,10436 respectively.

For 3DMark Vantage, R1,R2,R3 are 2697,2845,4091 respectively.

Don't know where this mythical 15-20% came from, but it's definitely not from either of the Vantage benchmarks. Vantage clearly shows a disparity that isn't reflected in the real world. Just sayin.

 

Yeah the CPU is that much stronger.

However I was looking at the GPU performance numbers for the two cards as whole on average to eliminate the CPU as much as possible.

Now if we look at the GPU score for the M11X series which go:

2592, 2633, 3465

We can see a 31% jump (a far cry from the 300% you with blathering on about).

Now please note the Core i series in the M11X like to downclock themselves so those who have cut these limits are going to be FAR less CPU limited than these benchmarks (why I shied away from comparing the M11X versions directly)

Cod 2:

30 to 39 FPS (30%)

Bad company 2:

24.3 to 30 FPS (23%)

Risen:

21.2 to 27.3 (28%)

Looks like vantage is on the higher end but pretty much bang on.

So like in portal 2, go back to your primitive society and please send someone more worthy, cheers.

 

Actually the R3 is 3536, which is a 37% jump compared to the R1. The 300% I was blathering about was the PCMark score.

Comparing the m11x's as a whole is far more valuable than trying to isolate the effects of individual components, for those very same reasons. Noone is disputing that the 540 is a superior piece of technology, and that you stand to benefit in performance in modern (future?) games because of the gradual shift away from texture-heavy computations. Nvidia took a gamble with the ROP reduction, one that looks like it may have paid off (at least for recent games).

It comes as no surprise that a stock R3 outperforms a stock R2 (by 15-20%, as seen). What would be interesting to see is how much of that gap can be closed with a BIOS overclocked (ie/Dell supported OC) R2, especially since SB isn't expected to OC at all.

 

With an i7 at 166MHz, its mighty close in CPU. However, few people who, at least on this forums, OC an R2 do so without ThrottleStop, which, paired with 166MHz kicks butt. If SetPLL is used as well, there is further improvement. And, if the modded VBIOS for DavyGT is used, then the 335M OC can be as good as an R3 overall. However, when we start getting R3's, with people who OC in the BIOS and OC the 540M, who knows. Maybe the CPU OC will suprise us. Its known the 540M Oc's well.

 

To those comparing 3dmark 06 please make sure you are using 1280x1024 to compare and not 1280x768.

Yeah I looked at the average by mistake.

However I was looking at the R2 benchmarks, no idea about the game performance of the R1. I'd assume a few % below the R2.

Still pretty much bang on.

As for PCmark thats because the review unit included an SSD which skews PCmark's score.

 

What does this discussion mean?

That the r3 can not be overclocked?

My impression now is that the comparison is made from overclocked r2's against r3's, and so mplying that the r3's can not be overclocked. Especially when I read the quoted text.

I thougth that I would be able to overclock the r3 to have similar performance gain as with r2.

 

Sandy bridge cannot be overclocked via the reference clock (kinda the FSB) too many things are too finely tuned to this frequency.

It would have to be via the multiplier which I dont think is possible.

The best you can do is maybe lock it to a higher turbo state.

 

Apparently there is an option in the M11x R3 BIOS to OC the CPU. Not the multiplier though. That would be coool.

 

So from what I am seeing, you can OC r3, but not really to the same extent of r2 ?

 

@All - Performance in games is more than synthetic benchmarks and numbers. Each GPU has a threshold, 100 percent utilization. The question is how much CPU does it take to supply the data to maintain 100 percent utilization and what performance in game (FPS) does this translate into.

Example - Just Cause 2 (heavy gpu game)
Lets say at native rez, low settings, you get 38fps. (cpu is stock)
Lets say at native rez medium settings, you get 31fps (cpu is stock)
Then last at native rez high settings plus AA/AF you get 17 fps (cpu is stock)
You then overclock your cpu and net 400mhz increase. The above averages are still the same. This means your CPU is =/> the power needed to feed the data to your GPU and it's most likely at 100 percent utilization.

Now you overclock you GPU and notice a 3 fps increase in each settings. You have now proven your GPU bound and not CPU bound. My "guess" is that the new I7 will be plenty enough with Turbo to meet the GPU threshhold of the 540m. Again you may want to google benchmarks for the desktop 430 as it's a very "close" model to give you an idea of performance.

Best Wishes,

StevenX

 

Yes, not very well. However, the 540M is known to be moe OC'able than the 335M. If we get a vmod for that, if it is possible, BIG IF, then it should be prettty fast.

 

For the R3, bios overclocking is going to be extremely limited and you won't be seeing anywhere near the percent increase in the base clock that you can easily do on the R2. The maximum multiplier is locked in both the R2 and R3. The turbo power limits are unlocked in the R2 but the maximum is locked in the R3 so this is going to be limited too. For CPU performance, there is going to be virtually no difference between an R3 as shipped by Dell compared to a fully overclocked R3.

A fully overclocked R2 is a night and day difference between that and how Dell originally shipped it. That's why it's kind of pointless for review sites to compare the R2 to the R3. The R2 has a huge amount of untapped potential in an enthusiasts hands while the R3 does not.

 

The R3 is still likely to be faster in games with an OCed GPU.

 

No. If there is a BIOS overclock option, it would look something like this, without some features. Overclocking in kHz would be very cool indeed.

Yes, that is correct. The overclocking on R3 can be counted on a different, much smaller unit then R2.

There will be no modded VBIOS until there is a BIOS release so it's on it's own for now.

 

Understood. You don't have any obligation to make one anyway. You've done the whole M11x community a huge favor, and were all thankful. Do you think that it will be a much different BIOS than the 335M?

 

Thanks.
The BIOS is still Insyde so the tools to mod and recover are still the same. Not sure about the VBIOS but everything will fit into place eventually for the better or worse. I'll do the BIOS mod once A02 BIOS is released but people still don't have the R3 in their hands, let alone testers. I don't mind doing it, I like doing mods.

 

Pretty much.

All of this CPU overclocking is way overrated.

 

Awesome! And yeah, it'll be at least like may fifth before anyone has systems. If I do get one, it won't be until there's some more details and reviews by forum members.

 

Ok guys, this is my first post and I'm VERY new to PC gaming so please be nice. I have a little dilemma. I JUST purchased an Mx11 I don't know if it's an R2 or R1 (sorry, I'm sure you can tell me), these are the specs;

1 224-9555 Alienware M11x, Cosmic Black
1 313-9589 Overclockable Intel Core2 Duo SU7300 1.3GHz (3MB Cache, 800MHz FSB)
1 317-7551 4GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 800MHz
1 320-9963 11.6-inch WideHD 1366x768 (720p) WLED
1 320-9857 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M
1 342-8741 160GB SATAII 5,400RPM

It hasn't even arrived yet, should I return it and get the R3 instead? Will I notice a big difference in performance while gaming with the R3 over the one I bought? I want to play games like Crysis, Crysis 2, The Witcher 1 and 2. I wanted to save the $400+ but If I am going to have buyers remorse and regret it, I'd rather be happy knowing the R3 was worth it (I'd rather spend 1100 and be happy then 700 and be remorseful lol)-Thanks!

 

Hi,

Welcome to the forum! That there is the R1. Definitely recommend the R3 or a refurb R2 (they aren't selling those new anymore), especially if you want to play games like Crysis 2.

The newer tech will last you longer and will be worth the extra cost.

 

i have a starting benchmark for R3 users to beat.

on my R1 ( pin-modded) at 1.73ghz and my GT335m at 605/911/1510.

i was able to achieve an average of 27.5 fps on Heaven DX11 Benchmark 2.5.
running in DX9 of course. shaders high, quality high.

im interested in seeing how the gt540 plays with a very heavy GT335 overclock.

 

Thank you! I wondered why the price was $200 off for the R1 I ordered, now I know why, it's outdated!

 

Have been ready to order since Feb, but waited for them to sort out the hinge issue, then heard the R3 was out soon so waited a bit more. Was pretty excited by the battery life in this review:

Review Alienware M11x R3 Gaming Notebook - Notebookcheck.net Reviews

but now I'm reading all the overclocking discussion of R2 vs R3, I'm kinda bummed that the R2 was so good in that regard and the R3 is, well, ... not so good. There's still time to find out better news once more reviews are out there, but it could be worse too.

Given I can't order a new R2 off the website (unless I find one in the outlet), I guess I should still be happy with an R3, right? I probably wouldn't even bother overclocking the CPU and just wait for mods for the GPU.

 

there is a 20% off code for the outlet...


R2s were under $600 with an i5/4gb

 

Says the guy with the 2630QM. There are gains with CPU overclocking.

You don't have choice now. I'll still wait for user reviews. Anyone remember the R2 early days where the CPU was throttling? This could happen except this time, Throttlestop can't help. Maybe it's already happening. Best confirm that.

If anyone buys one and it can overclock, they have a winner. My i5 is ~10% behind the R3.

 

Agreed, but then I have to wait a month or so. I was hoping to only wait about a week until a few more good reviews showed up.

You sure know how to put a guy at ease! (/sarcasm)

Will do, just hope it doesn't take too long. I had been waiting patiently, but I think my patience is running out now that I know I can have a shiny new toy!

nice deal! ... link???

I'm in Australia so would have to do a bit of fiddling around to get it shipped here and transfer warranty etc, but at that price, it should be worth it.