M17 Underperformance issues

Ok good deal. so far north bridge is maxing at like 73C which isnt much at all imo. if it spikes ill take it apart and add a copper shim in... wonder where i can actually just go buy a sheet of copper .. =/

also, is it actually bad, to take off cpu fan/heat sink after the thermal grease has cured, and put it back together, or if you take it off, is it neccesary to re-sanitize and re-apply after taking it out?

EDIT: WOAH! just saw that one my GPUs maxed at 93C... seems kinda hot.. but still in the safe zone.. then again, i did just apply the AS5 yesterday

 

Here in canadar, we use "Metal Supermarkets" http://www.metalsupermarkets.com/

... or in rochester... apparently: Rochester 291 Buell Road (585) 328-1660


You can get the gpu temps down somewhat using filed-down copper ram sinks. the clearance is about 5-6mm.... so even low profile sinks need to be taken down some. Best wait to see how the cured temp looks as its a significant amount of filing. After sink number 8, I was ready to stop that's for sure.

Don and others have said that opening up the bottom panel to allow more airflow to the intakes helps quite a bit (gpus and main). If that's too far for you, even removing the filter material that is glued over the slits helps.

 

Also the problem only exist on the speaker and it works perfectly through the headphones. Anyone on the same boat as me?

 

if it works perfectly through the headphones, id say its like 99.9% hardware related.

 

Yes i suspected that toO. Called up Alienware but they couldn't do anything about it and ask me to send the system back to the service center which I don't want to because it's near the holiday and I wanna game.

 

Yeah... unfortunately you're likely in one of two boats:

bad solder/detached wire on the speaker

or

speaker is cooked.

I'm not sure what activities will or will not void your warranty... you could follow one of the guides linked on nbr to open up the machine and check it... if you can't find anything obvious then its time to get your money out of technical support

(you may just want to go straight to technical support if you aren't hot to tear apart your notebook)

 

I'm deffinetly removing those heat traps over the vents those things are like heat trap gallore

tried blowing through one side... didnt feel anything on the other..

 

How-to guides

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

 

Yes but there is no guide on how to open the up and reach the speakers though.

 

alright, I seen a lot people talking about the copper shim, may i know where can I get it ? and I dont know what size to get, please help.

 

As schurke said, ~.5mm clearence and basically get a piece of copper bound it down to that size, sand it down and walla, or buy copper ram skins and file em' down

 

@ shinj - if you can't get the top panel free after removing the keyboard, you will probably have to get at them from the bottom, pulling the base free

@ nodeffect - as Alexk7 said that I said - but get your copper from something like www.metalsupermarkets.com - they have real stores all over north america, a few in the UK if you want to go in and get it cut. They're usually pretty helpful.

(the filed ram sinks are for building on top of the ram-covering-copper of the video cards, the broad flat parts... yields about... 5 degrees for a few hours labor :S )

 

guys k-tron had a bunch of pre cut shims. shoot him a pm he is a good guy to deal with i have sold him stuff before and it went very well no issues. honestly there is 0 need for the ramsinks. i have tried them and its not worth the time or money imo

 

Ok thanks Zfactor

 

second on the don't bother with ram sinks for the gpus. The yield to time ratio is way out.

for the love of god do not buy heatspreaders for the ram sticks. the ram at 1.5v is warm but no where near hot. heh.

 

The static noise goes away after I switched on my computer for a long time. The noise is only around when I first boot up the laptop from cold. Weird huh~

 

could be a cold joint or something like that

 

Any idea how to fix this? willing to take the laptop apart

 

i'm following the thread to see what's up with everything. thanks zfactor for helping everyone out. so it seems that it's a voltage issue with it randomly throwing volts all over the place?

 

seems to be 2 version of the .28 still around. this is the correct one..

http://www.box.net/shared/6vxjipj8tz

so i tested system again with a x9100 checked everything. voltages are normal now. hardly anything to complain about with the x9100. i dont see the drops i saw on battery either. things are within spec that way and dont go below about .2v either way!!! so it is looking like the extra power the quad needs under demand is not getting to it. im not sure any of this will be even within most people's grasp to do the mods. also im not sure if cost with it will be effective. my friend is deciding now if he wants to spend the cash on the parts needed or not. but i would bet money on it that this is more of a hardware power issue than anything else in the long run. he came back early and wants to get his system back together so i cant do much more right now. if my findings are correct there is nothing a bios can do to fix that. the reason why some dont see stutter on the aw bios imo is due to the fact that the aw bios is very tame compared to the flex versions to start with. aw looks very conservative with their settings used. id like to see a direct comparison from tests ran with the current aw bios and any of the .28 versions doesnt matter which im more looking to see specific things. and if anyone wants to do this do not overclock the cpu. run both at stock speeds. this is with the quad now not the dual.

 

So as of now, theres the quick fix of replacing it with a dual core, or the long route as of what you said?

Sounds like M17 users are going to need to make an investment at this point with a dual.

either way - if you continue to do research on the issue - let me/us know your finidings, maybe the fix wont be as hard to do as some may think =)

 

what test do you wan me to run i,m willing to give you the result about the aw one
btw mine barely stutter so it's more to see if it can help other people

 

what im looking for is any synthetic tests you can run with both the aw AND the 28 bios on the same machine with only a quad pref the qx9300 but any will do, the qx9300 will have the most voltage requirements though. i still have his board here and im trying to get him to leave it for a couple more days. imo this is not a very well designed power section though

if i was still in ny i would have met up with you to see what we can figure out..

also ocz wants NOTHING to do with these systems anymore. so now no help will come from them at all. and it doesnt seem aw does either from what most people say. so looks like we are on our own from here out.

 

Typical of companies just dropping something when it was their poor design flaws in the first place... heh... but anyways, i have a Q9000 in mine, with the AW bios it was a stutter frenzy. i upgraded to the .28 bios about a week ago and saw like a 75% decrease in the stutter. It is still there, but better.

Some said copper modding the north bridge helps, but then again this is when they thought it was a heat issue, which it may be as well, but i have to agree its power related.

I'm going to copper mod the north bridge once i get the dimensions for the shim... i dont have callipers or any measureing tool... so if anyone has the dimensions please let me know.

I'm mainly doing the NB as an enthusiastic upgrade to the thermal pad, not in hopes of reducing stuttering, but then again, if it helps more power to that.

 

Hey Z, the PSU is getting the correct and proper amount of power to the laptop, right? This problem is after the juice enters the laptop?

 

correct its after the brick. and i now have .29 and ill be tearing it down this week

 

honestly the size doesnt matter much. just make a very thin shim you will be fine you dont need calipers lol..

 

hi all can i jump on the band wagon...

i have only p8400 still that came with me laptop so i dont have qx9300.

is their not a program that can monitor voltage if so could you not leave that running in the background and when your stuttering happens( supposidly 1 fix is to pull the power lead out and put it back again) and see if it you can monitor it... or what happens to it...

now i know you lot have ripped the m17 apart and may have tried this so im just saying incase no one has looked.

 

you should not at all have this issue with the p8400

 

lol i know z bud i was just saying what i had in my m17... ive been reading this post every time it appears as thats the upgrade i want nothing else but i dont want to blow $600 on a processor and it stutter becuase i will if it stutterd rip me laptop apart and try to fix it myself and probably break it in the process

i want youlot to fix the problem so i can go and get one

 

Any chance u make a changelog or something to say what the differences are between your 0.28 and this 0.29? And ofc can we get a link to 0.29

 

when im done with it ill post a link. i have a few people running it for testing now. i may make a few more changes though before posting it up.. i also want to move some things and add the oem slic table back in..

 

For zfactor's new bios, continue reading here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=443656

For m17 benchmarking and overclocking, continue reading here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=442146

 

Yes, Zfactor has tweaked the bios as much as possible. The .29 bios has lowered the stuttering by at least 95% for me, and even more for others.

So if you dont mind doing the AC adapter trick every few hours. This pretty much eliminates our quad core issue, as apperently its hardware rather than software related.

 

Nice job zfactor.


you get repped

 

thanks don. i cant do much more without chancing breaking the bios more than helping things. id say with the copper mod and this you should not see any stutter at all at least 99% less

 

Z-Factor, I have read your tread about the .29 bios, can I upgrade it with the OCZ whitout danger or it for AW only ?

 

why hasnt intel released a driver for the processor as when ive looked theirs about 10 different laptops with all the same problem i.e flextronics asus msi ect

 

Anyone here tried lowering the CPU voltage on 3.0GHZ? Mine current voltage is 1.2 which is the default voltage on zfactor's 0.29 BIOS. However the temperatures are kind of insanely high, lowering the voltage will reduce the temperature right?

 

ya and you can go down by some i'm actualy on 1.1625 i was not stable at stock with original settings

 

You're running that reduced voltage at 3GHz or at stock speeds?

Thanks,
-Rob

 

Anyone ever have their dual radeon config give an error message and crash?

In my device manager I have this error for ATITool Utility (its in its own thread, like disk drives, display adapters, computer, monitors, etc):

ATITool Driver

------------

Infrequently, but pretty randomly windows will seize up for a couple seconds and then give a popup window that says

though it usually will also say that Windows Aero theme has been disabled.

Any ideas on what's going on? I'm running driver version 8.520.4.0 (stock I believe)

 

U running Vista or win7?

If u using win 7 i would sugest u get the ones for ati mobility on the ati website for win7. Think they are the 9.9 ones. When i go any higher with the mobility modder i get blue screens afther awhile and i also get screen tearing when i alt tab for example from full screen Wow to desktop so im still using the beta win 7 ones and they seem to work ok for me

 

From what i have seen the 1.2v at 300 ghz is stock with the normal 0.28 OCZ so u shouldnt habe any problems with these settings. Imo if u will reduce voltage at 3.0 u wont have enough and u will bsod.

What are your temps?

 

I don't got any of the problems you describe and the 9.12 mobility modded drivers work great combined with my Windows 7 Ultimate.

 

running vista home 64bit... it happens sometimes while just browsing websites, other times while navigating in the explorer... seems kinda random, but I don't think it's happened while gaming, though if it does, maybe the popup doesn't show up and interrupt the game.

 

my temp for CPU are 55-59C idle and 90C max

 

well u are one of the lucky with 4850 cards in your whitebook im stuck with 3870's ( ps if anyone has some 4850 for sale contact me plz)

 

Call Alienware.

 

Keep calling AW untill you get hold of downs monkey rep that sells you the cards anyways.

I tried for 2 months but then gave up and sold my liver to get a pair of ebay lol .