Area-51 m15x Update from Alienware

Hmm.. i think frontpage reported there is a slowdown with SP1 updates rather than boost. Either way I still don't have Vista. Hopefully everything is fixed by the time black and SkullCap is available.

 

@Lessaj7

Wow!!109 deg C and it didn't downclock!!!!!!! Insane!!

 

can anyone here teach me how to update the AW bios.

 

I couldn't discern from your post whether you are still having the downclocking issues or not; are you?

A 65*C idle temperature is perfectly fine; my m15x pre-BIOS update (I have not updated it yet, will be taking care of that tomorrow) idled at 60 - 61*C.

From the image you posted, your m15x is following routine behavior - it gets up to 87 - 88*C and then the fans kick into high gear, bringing the temps down to the high 70*C range. 88*C is not dangerous.

Your notebook looks fine to me . . .

Thanks to everyone for posting their testing results. As I noted, I will be flashing my m15x tomorrow and running tests throughout the day.

 

Yeah! Now for AW to start shipping again...now I am eager to get my machine now that it seems this issue is resolved.

 

They should begin shipping when the final version of the BIOS update is released as noted by AW-Frank.. Within a week is the ETA on that..

Cheers to him and the AW team that got it cracking so fast =)
Good to see my college laptop is gonna be/will kick a$$ !!

 

Sorry for noob question, but what flashing mean? Thanks guys.

~Brutality

 

Basically it means updating. Like for example on the M5550 I flashed my BIOS from 2.02 to 2.07 while on the phone with Tech Support. You can pretty much replace flash with update but not all the time.

 

Can someone from NBR that has changed their compound to AS5 do a test confirming this? It seems highly unlikely that an AW compound would bet better than AS5. I think in pretty much every situation AS5 works better than what the manufacture uses. This was especially the case on the M5550 where the AW compound had gaps between the heatsink and the GPU and AW actually replaced my compound with AS5 which helped the temps but not enough.

 

AW-Frank I have a question... why is it that the full configuration for the m15x is not release yet?

 

The process where BIOS/firmware is updated or changed, we call that "flashing"... but basically it's just erasing and writing over your flash memory (non volatile computer memory).

 

I installed the beta bios earlier this afternoon but the problem was not fixed for me, guess I'll be in contact with ALienware alot this upcoming and next week to try and get this resolved.

Scrog-

I posted reults in the thread I made on m15x gaming.

 

Heh

It should be around 75-85, NOT 105c, it's insane!

How did you manage to get so high temp?

 

I beleive he raised the front of the laptop, thus angling the back of the laptop closer to the surface, and thereby impeding the airflow for the fans. or blocking the exhausts or something..


have to parrot.. 109!! holy silicon fondu batman!

 

Maybe AW can advertise a new feature for the M15X.... In built BBQ rolf
Best thing is you don't need to use up a usb port (",)

OB

 

I recall there being two users reporting that applying AS5 doesn't make a difference or allows the temps to go higher faster.. They in turn reported this to AW-Frank and thus the reply on this forum that caused you to question the validity of his statements.. Pretty twisted cycle huh ?

In other news.. How many of you have not had positive success with the BIOS update ? Note: I ask this to those users with m15xs that previously downclocked at or below 85C..
From one or two posts earlier in the day it seems that their laptops still downclock because they DC at temps lower than the one at which the BIOS update kicks the fans into a higher "gear"..

Hope that made sense

 

Fusicon, We haven't forgotten about you, please be patient with us as the 8800 GTX throttling issue has been our priority. Thank you.

 

I am still having downclocking issues. If you see the 3rd marker, you can see in the 2 higher graphs it downclocks.

I actually played crysis for a good 30 min after posting and my downclocking is actually worse! (more frequent). Again, I was originally downclocking at around 84c... if the fans kick in around 88c it doesnt really help me. In anycase, I've let AW know through emails.

 

@Scrog & mr_fro2000, By any chance did you modify the thermal compound that the system came with to something like Arctic Silver? We are not voiding warranties if you did so please be honest, it will help us root cause your issue.

 

I did not...

If you want, I captured the downclocking/temps after 30 min of gameplay which shows a very high frequency of downclocking. Let me know if you want me to send this screen capture to you (later today... I'm at work).

 

We will look into is immediately, if you haven't already done so, please send the screenshots to to [email protected].

 

Maybe mr_fro2000 and Scrog you have a real problem with your laptop.

Alienware-Frank why in europe Alienware don't say officially to us why our laptop are not curently in production????? They always say a différent problem ( case out of stock, processor out of stock, power supply out of stock.......)

thanks

PS Sorry for my english)

 

I think in Europe customer support is out of stock...

Ordered 5th of February 2008... proudly holding in phase 4 and getting ready to spam AW emails with complains... (again).

 

I have flashed the BIOS of my m15x and have great news. NO MORE UNDERCLOCKING.

The GPU goes up to the mid-80*C range and then the GPU fan kicks into high gear, bringing the temperatures down to the high 70*C range. I have been running the ATI Tool artifact scanner for the better part of an hour now and there have been no overheating problems at all.

I am going to finish my testing of the m15x today and tomorrow and hopefully have the review out this weekend.

:smile:

I talked to someone internal at Alienware and the engineers have verified that AS5 makes no difference and can actually make the overheating worse.

Don't use AS5. Just stick with whatever Alienware puts on there.

Definitely contact Alienware about that, your machine appears to be an anomaly . . . that is not normal.

 

Great news chaz, thanks for the update and cant wait for the review. Do you have any insider info if we might be getting at some point some nice tool to put the fans on max speed always? On my dell when I'm gaming I'm used to keeping the fans throttled up and it does wonders. I turn it to auto only when I'm not in any games .

 

I dont think we will be lucky enough to controll the fans in our notebooks..

 

So all heating issues have been solved?

 

Hi alienware-steve, I thought your space-ship flew off 2 weeks ago. Glad u are still here and I appreciate your PM on the bios issue.

 

I don't think we have a real problem with our laptops... we're having the same issue as everyone else except we're downclocking at a much lower temp.

Just FYI, I have NOT been using ATItool to test... i've simply been playing Crysis... could it be that downclocking is different for different applications? I belive Scrog also played multiple games to find his issues...

 

not for some of us.

 

Bummer...

 

wow, thats great, my m15x with 8800m gtx wont downclock anymore! That a very good news! Big thanks goes to everyone, especially Chaz who the only one of pro reviewers whod actually noticed the problem and helped us to get thru it with help Alienware-Frank! Thank you all big time! Really didnt expect to resolve it that quick!
mr_fro2000
im sorry you still having trouble, i believe yours lappe has 8700m when alieware-frank has stated that that beta bios will help most likely only 8800m gtx owners. So maybe final bios will fix for you.

 

Hey Alienware-Frank, when will new DRIVERS be released ? Besides the downclocking issue, many people have experienced poor performance in some games because only the old driver is available and the laptopvideo2go modified drivers cannot be used with the m15x since they cause downclocking and sleep/hibernate issues.

I think drivers are the next thing you should work on since they are essential for gaming. Atleast release some info so that the laptopvideo2go drivers can be modified for use.

Another question will the UK m15x's ship with the new BIOS ?

 

Any one try using non-AW drivers to see if it still places the lappy on stealth mode GPU underclocking mode yet? I'm pretty sure the BIOS update should get rid of this problem.

 

I don't have time to check, but if someone would do the honors that would be sweet. My guess is that it won't work. Just throwing that out there.

 

Thanks Alienware for the BIOS! It seems to have helped me as my temps have not gotten above 86c. I have noticed better gaming performance but I do not think that it's up to Alienware notebok standards yet. I was able to play COD4 at 1280x720 and would get little drag (I have the 1440x900 and it would drag alot at this resolution). Hows about everyone else that has updated the BIOS? I have the 2.4, 4g memory & 8800m gtx, Is this normal?

 

Yeah mine stop downclocking all together. Temp never went above 86c. good job.

By the way anyone using netlist memory. I have got 4pcs 2GB stick and all have BSOD. This netlist is from AW (I upgrade). Anyone ever get 4gb memory to worked.

 

I guess I need help on this one. I have not contacted Alienware because I do not know how to check to see if my card is downclocking. All I can say is the first time I sat and played Oblivion for a few hours my laptop got scorching hot on the bottom. I did not really notice any performance issues though. Can I assume I am having a heat issue?

I am not really good at this. But how do I check for this issue? Or should I just wait for the final on the Bios and install it on good faith? I dont really want to use my laptop for gaming until I am sure I will not be frying it....

 

Download ATITool 0.27 and RivaTuner (I dunno if they fixed it, so the Riva Tuner fix is on the forums somewhere). Then tell ATITool to do Artifact scanning and use the Hardware Monitoring in Riva Tuner to monitor the temps. To access the hardware monitoring, click the arrow below where you choose Monitor and it's on the right.

 

My preliminary testing is positive, didn't get above 81C, and the fan seemed to kicked in much more intensely, during about 30 minutes on COD4 good old War Pig level.

I'm going to keep testing though, as I originally didn't have this problem. We should realize that one negative test doesn't mean the problem is solved.

I'm also trying to warm this room i'm up a bit, my first test the room temp was below 70F (chilly!), so i'm going to try to simulate summer, or as close as I can get to it

 

Actually it is possible to use non-AW drivers...I got this information from another thread and I've tested it. Basically, here's the thing, disabling stealth mode only works for a certain nvidia drivers; otherwise the video card is constantly in stealth (underclocked). Of course the shipping driver (167.55) works fine but if you are having problems, you can try anything up to 167.61, which is the last working version of the driver (before nvidia changed some major bit of code); you can try 167.62, but i'm telling you that it doesn't work...

Since the only driver version leaked in this range is the 167.59 (which I am using right now), give it a go from lv2g. I don't notice a big change but it does seem more stable in game (no problems with sleep or hib).

 

This is around the end of 40 minutes of BioShock, after I did the Bios upload. Hopefully my downclocking blues are over!

 

Alienware-Frank,

No I have not applied anything to my laptop(artic silver).

Scrog-

 

On the positive side of things, i was cojntacted this evening and was given a patch to disable the media center launch hardcode, and it worked great.

This was the good news, bad news next...

 

Sent the following the the Alienware m15x mailbox, and the tech who sent me the BIOS update, sorry its so long, trying to be thorough about this.

Long story short: still downclocking in COD4, unless its freezing in my office. Doesn't downclock in other games at the same temps however, very odd.

---------

I was able to patch the BIOS successfully, and checked for the correct version per the instructions. In all the screen shots below you can see cpuZ reporting the BIOS version (center of the screen).

One note is that while I have a notebook cooler (Zalman NC-2000), i did not use it during any of these tests, as I wanted to actually the new fix, as opposed to the fix when being augmented by external cooling.

Another note before I forget, I did all of my testing running the "War Pig" level of COD4, a fairly intensive level. I am running to an external display at 1680x1050 resolution, all gfx feature of the game at "optimal settings" (which it basically as all highest settings), and I usually experience a rough average of about 60 fps while playing.

Test Session 1 was done with ambient air temps below 70F, as I had just returned home and the heat is set to 65F while everyone is out for the day. I didn't screen shot this, but the the GPU temp never exceeded 81C, and the frequencies stayed at their standard, no downclocking at all. After idling for about 5 minutes back at the desktop (fans had slowed down), the temp of the GPU was back down to 67C.

Test Session 2 was done quite a bit warmer, I rolled a portable heater in, and got the room up to 86F. Excessive as it may seem, thats not even as hot as it gets in here usually during the summer months. Before starting the test, the GPU was idling at 72C. I jumped into game session again, and was actually hopeful that it was running fine, as I didn't really notice any period where the FPS dropped significantly. The ambient temp actually climbed a few degrees to just above 90F in the vicinity of the notebook, a good indicator that the fans were exhausting hot air. However, when I came back out of the game, I saw the graph in screenshot "86F Ambient". Note that the GPU temp never exceeded 89C, so the cooling was working well even in the very warm room, but the downclocking still occurred.

I decided to let the room cool off to a more reasonable ambient and test again. While I was waiting, I played a very simple game "Dungeon Runners" that shouldn't really tax the system, also at 1680x1050 resolution. After playing for only a few minutes, I saw the graph in screenshot "86F Ambient 2 - Weird". On the left side of the graph you can actually see the tail end of the previous session where the GPU downclocked, at around 86C. Futher along the graph you can also see two spots where the GPU temp got up to 87C while in this low-stress game, yet the GPU did not downclock.

Test Session 3 was done when the room had cooled down to around 80F Ambient. You can see the results in the screenshot "80F Ambient". The GPU temp still was able to get up to 89C even though the room was much cooler. The downclocking did not occur quite as often as when the room was wamer, but it certainly did occur.

I'm sorry this gave another negative result, I was very hopeful that the problem would be solved.

---------

Will keep testing a bit to see if I can flush any more data out.

 

anyone knows where can i download the bios update?

 

if you click around earlier in the thread there is a media fire link, but make sure you know what your doing or you can mess stuff up.

 

another screen, this is after quite while, back to room temps. but you can see that the gpu still gets up to 89C, but now doesn't downclock. This was in COD4 again

What is the correlation? Why does sometime it hit 89 on the GPU and not downclock, other times downclocks at lower temp? Damn, just getting tired of troubleshooting this, so stopping for now.

 

A note from someone who interned with Zalman last summer (fun stuff):

turns out AS5 isn't the end-all, be-all of thermal compounds...

we had gallons of the stuff in r&d, and when we were testing a competitors product, we got laughable results with AS5- it was a huge heatsink fan setup, bigger than the 9700... it was hilarious to see such a large chunk of metal cool a cpu slightly more efficiently than a stock HSF (we joked about it all lunch.

Then some cracker-jack used the manufacturer's grease (after using the AS5 Cleaner) and it out performed most of our models. Boy did that confuse us. we thought the CPU was dirty or something, so we cleaned it adn tried AS5 again... turns out...



AS5 is not always the best choice


(much like Charizard was not always the best pokemon for all your young'uns out there)

 

@Exiled - Thanks man, that's really what I wanted to know. Finally some reasoning behind not using AS5 for the m15x GPU.