Alienware M17 *OFFICIAL* Owner's Lounge

its not expensive to do

just a pain to fit

 

Alright guys, i called the alienware techinical service, they are worthless, all he could do was recite the waranty over and over, i called about the voiding the waranty if i replaced the thermal paste, the guy had no idea what the hell i said, "you want to put thermal gel where?". ugh! I am sure you guys replaced the thermal gel on your system, do you know if it voids the waranty or just do it and stay quiet? Its fairly easy to do i know how to do it.

 

no it doesnt void your warrenty, as long as you dont damage anything or smear it on everything you will be fine

 

Well then that guy didn't know a damn thing. thanks for your reply.Oh and whats the highest temp anybody's gpu reached?

 

98 degrees for me

 

You and your furmark! Pfft, use Linpack/IBT, now that's a man's way to toast your gubbins

 

I have reached 97C , hopefully the thermal paste will help. I dont want my lappy to melt apart, so soon, need it to last me the next four years. Hate being a poor student. T_T

 

thats very hot for a p8600 i had that and never hit above 70

i only hit upper 90's as i was burning in my Artic Silver on my quad under load

 

NOO, not my cpu my GPU.

 

oh i think with a very heavy overclock i hit 92

 

Can someone make a Video
to Help others on how to overclock
need step by step instructions Please

 

Ditto. I would LOVE something like that.

 

For any of you using UltraMon, there is a new update for the beta. 3.0.7 now.

 

Any chance someone can send me a copy of Zfactor's 0.28 modded overclocker's bios?

 

Guys, talk to me about TV tuners. Yeah, I should've gotten it included when I ordered my rig but didn't. Soooo, which after market units out there are up to par?

 

A couple of months ago I swore I wouldn't buy another, but dangit, I simply could not resist and pulled the trigger!

I'll be upgrading the memory myself to 4GB. Any particular brand name people would like to recommend?

[1] M17

Dual 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4850 - CrossFireX™ Enabled!
Intel® Core™2 Extreme X9100 3.06GHz (6MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
Design & Display: Black Skullcap Design
Chassis: 17-Inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 LCD
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium (64-bit Edition) with Service Pack 1
Memory: 2GB Dual Channel DDR3 SO-DIMM at 1066MHz – 2 x 1024MB
System Drive: Single Drive Configuration - 256GB Solid State Drive
Optical Drives : 8x Dual Layer Burner (DVD±RW, CD-RW)
Wireless Network Card: Internal Intel® Ultimate N 5300 a/b/g/Draft-N Mini-Card with MIMO Technology
Warranty: 2-Year AlienCare Onsite Service and 24/7 Toll-Free Phone Support

SubTotal: $2,898.00
Shipping: $85.60
Discount: $0.00
Tax: $0.00
Order Total: $2,983.60

 

I think Moo said, that the T9600 can be overlocked as far as the X9100 but I am not too sure and I think it was related to the m17x but still, may be the X9100 is overkill.

My stolen 2 cents

Greetings
Julian

 

the x9100 is stable @ high overclocks then the t9600 and in the m17 the x9100 will overclock to almost 3.9 ghz

with the Zfactor BIOS

 

Gents, how do I know if I have a TV tuner installed. Here's why I ask: I was installing Win Media Center and it said it detected a tv tuner but no signal.... I have the coax port on the back of my rig but I didn't order the tv tuner.

 

sorry only just saw this part.

I'd recommend Crucial, Corsair, Mushkin, G.Skill and Geil personally, although never touch the ballistix range.

 

Am I wrong that even though these are ATI cards (3870/4850), we still need PhysX installed to play some games? I thought PhysX was a NVIDIA only thing.

 

YEs and no. Physx as well as a hardware accelleration technique, both via CUDA on Nvidia GPUs and Physx cards, is also a software physics engine, much like Havok. Some games us the software API even if they don't make any attempt, or try to use hardware

Thats why you may need to have Physx installed for some games. Don't worry about it

 

Ah, thanks for the clarification! Do we need to do anything fancy to install the new 9.7 software on Windows 7/Vista? The Mobility Modder was needed for 9.3 but do we need to do the same thing or just install it?

 

Download the latest mobility modder (1.2.1.0). It has support for our 4850 cards. Turn UAC off before running it, open the ATI download which will extract the driver files to somewhere on your machine, usually C:\ATI, then point MM towards the extracted drivers, and run it. Once it's done working, you should be able to install the 9.7s as though on a desktop.

 

Anyone have any ideas?

 

Fail to post in the right owner's lounge. Well done

 

Well, I performed a visual check of the TV tuner card and it is not installed. So I am a little puzzled as to why, when I installed Windows Media Center, that the app state TWO tuners were found. Perhaps due to to presence of a driver? Nevertheless, I picked up a Hauppauge 1500 Express Card over the weekend (really sick of all the usb crap plugged in) and it works great.

 

Rico257. In my Device manager on My M17 I have a TV Tuner Device with a Yellow ! next to it. It has always been that way since I've ordered it. I did not have the TV Tuner installed on purchase. The Coax plug is part of the chassis, and does not mean a TV Tuner was installed. Perhap's its detecting the port to which you would plug in the TV Tuner if you so desired to get/install one.

 

the HD are cloned all they do is add the correct HD

basically they hook the HDs up to a machine and it clones them all the exact same way ...


So according to windows there was a tv tuner installed but the tv tuner isn't there ...


Sorry i can't explain it better

 

I know the sort of machines you mean mate. Basically all the machines are pre-built from some disc images; this allows them to master new machines efficiently and easily; and they only need to pre-setup a few different HDD images for transfer; based around machine spec and included parts.

I'd imagine they may only use 2 or a few more to be honest; RAID/Non-RAID

 

Makes sense to me. Thanks guys.

 

Oh BTW, for anyone using the m17, I'd suggest sticking with the AW drivers over upgrading to the latest Realtek official driver. [Audio] The differences between them are minimal; but the M17 seems to use some custom setup which doesnt quite agree with realtek default drivers, and will disable realtek enhancements.
Usually I'd advise to stick clean away from these; and avoid all audial presets as they're hideous; however if you change the EQ to powerful; this is actually one of the best sounding laptops I've heard; as it raises the bass and primarily midbass volumes to acceptable levels without unduly ruining sound quality, although it can bring out defects in poor quality audio, and is a little too prominent with the top end treble, much like a crystaliser or a higher quality sound setup. The reason this makes such a difference is most guitar and also a lot of male vocals are predominantly within the mid-bass section, which is why default sound settings have a somewhat nasal quality.

I'd advise clean sticking away from all the other spacial and EQ settings though, effectively with this laptop the front speakers are tweeters and the 'subwoofer' is a unified mid-driver, which works reasonably well, as lower bass is unidirectional anyway. Whilst not great, Id say with this EQ (don't use headphones with it on though!) the speakers are easily equal to any £30 set of 2.0 speakers from the likes of Logitech or Creative, certainly not HiFi but listenable; they're actually better setup like this than some old Itrigues I had years ago.

Anyone else experimented with this and come to the same conclusion?

 

Guys, tried running Dracula Origins this weekend - NOT. Didn't like something; could never get the menu to come up. Ended up uninstalling it. But now Media Player won't play live TV correctly. The audio is fine but the video freezes at the first image. What can I check?

 

Need some help. Got a new internal hard drive for my m17, a secondary drive, and I was looking around for any guides for installation, but the only link around on the forums, links to something that doesn't exist on alienware's website, namely the link on Julian's m17 how to guide thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=357687

Alienware's website doesn't even bring up a thread about reseating or replacing/adding hard drives to the m17 model using its search function through its FAQ. Only for keyboards, the optical drive, and some other misc parts.

Anyone have a link/guide/walkthrough? Thanks...

 

http://go.notebookreview.com/?id=52...F9zZWFyY2hfdGV4dD1tMTcgSERE&p_li=&p_topview=1

EDIT: Well that used to be the link. It looks like they've removed this F.A.Q. maybe...

Got it from here as well as from the AW Support forums where I also asked about installing a 2nd drive.

 

Does that link actually work for you? because neither in IE or Firefox does that work. It just loads a blank screen.

edit: after I log-in of course. I get a login page, I login, then it loads a blank/white page.

 

Its not really that hard however.

This is the procedure for non-RAID configuration:
On the bottom of the laptop find the Number "2"
Unscrew the screw there, slide out the 2nd HD Chassis.
Put your HD in the chassis, attach with screws.
Slide back in.
Put Screw back in for Chassis near Number "2".
Boot up computer, partition and format.
Done.

 

Marvie, thanks for the info and the quick responses. I decided to just do it and while going at it saw your second post. There isn't much to it, I just need to get some screws for the drive to be connected to the plastic slot/casing. Thanks again

 

Am I right in thinking the M17 has just gone up about £200 in the UK? (was £899 a few days ago, is £1098 now)

The base model includes a BD drive now, but I can't see any other spec changes, and that doesnt justify a £200 increase

They must have run out of DVD drives, or else they just figure it was too cheap and want to make some more profit..

 

Well if the stock model is the BD drive that would in and of itself explain the £200 Increase in cost. Its about a $300 upgrade from stock in the US from the 8x Burner to the BD drive.

 

It comes with a BD drive which did actually cost about £200 to upgrade, so the cost is about right.

 

Mr E, my M17 came with a bag of screws and an alienware sticker in the contents box that came with the laptop (one the t-shirt, manual et al were in). Alternatively, use 2 of the 4 in opposite slots from drive 1

 

Actually a standalone slimline Blu-ray drive typically costs about £150 to buy yourself so it's not suprising. The cheapest blu-ray slimline drive I've ever seen cost £100 and that was IDE and clearance, we need an SATA drive. Dell/AW are always going to make a profit on what they fit; so its a relatively fair price.

 

Is overclocking a laptop a waste of time? I see some of you have your Q9000 clocked up to 2.5ghz. Is it a noticeable difference?

 

in 3dmark06 and CPU intensive games like GTA 4 yes

 

Moo, I've never overclocked anything other than a cops radar gun. Is it pretty straight forward or should I simply leave well enough alone? Is there something posted out here that details how to?

 

here is a guide

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=325944

 

I've been searching around google for a temp monitor for my 4850 card and found nothing any one know where i could find one?

 

I've found that the only way to get temps to read out w/ the 4850's is to use Everest.

MAKE SURE YOU DISABLE CROSSFIRE IN CATALYST BEFORE YOU OPEN EVEREST OR YOUR COMPUTER WILL FREEZE. probably a driver issue or something

after you open everest, go to the sensors tab and it will give you your temps, once you have temp readings you can re-enable crossfire and it wont freeze up

Njoy

 

nice thanks
my system iddle around 50 for the cpu and 59 for gpu
and get around 70 under load, same for the gpu for opengl and or directX