M17x and DPC Latency

I called the customer service number (1800-812-393) and pressed number "5" from memory to be put through to DELL reception. I then got transferred about 6 times and abused the 7th person as they asked me the same questions as the other 6... i told them that this is ridiculous and that all i want to do is get a refund on my alienware m17x and to put me through to the right person. My exact words were:

"This is ridiculous, i have spoken to Kendra, Najjir, William ... etc (make sure to write down names in case this happens to you btw) and all i want to do is refund my m17x laptop - put me through to the right place how hard can that possibly be!"

After that i got put through to Victor and he was the right guy, couldn't understand him, but at least i was in the right department.

Quite frankly if I ran my business this way i would have no clients and DELL are just pathetic and un-educated in their customer service department.

 

Yep, It's running background at 33% usage.

 

Are you sure you don't have any other programs running in the background? Programs that download and do updates in the background could be a possible reason, being infected with malicious software is another reason also. Check your disk writes and reads to see what happens.
The latency is not related to the cpu usage.

 

A clean install in the manner you stated did NOT work for me. I still get the stutters/pauses/low FPS...

I have had this thing for about 4 months and have yet to be able to do a SINGLE thing I want to do with it without some sort of issue.

Do they have an online chat deal like the old XPS line did? I really don't want to call, would have to call from my cell...

 

This is true. I probably will do that if it comes to it. I'm also not looking forward to the six hours of phone calls. ARG

 

if you get it in 6 then thats not too bad..... took me around 12 hours....

 

hi wolverine
have they sent you an email yet with instructions? been a week since i called and they said yes to the return :/
i;ve rang twice to see, and both times they just say, yes, wait for the email.....both times I had to wait for 40 mins :S

 

If their systems work like ours (with that much latency), we may have to wait for many weeks till they update us. I am too waiting for an email....

 

I have not done anything about the refund yet. I have the last tech looking at my system today then the refund will start i guess.

I wasn't aware of the email process for refunds, i thought you spoke to someone and said "I WANT A REFUND" and they start the ball rolling...

 

bah
i rang them up AGAIN.
my refund has been approved, its just a matter of waiting for instructions...
just trying to hurry them up, so i dont have to pay my cc, otherwise my creditcard go into positive...which i dont want. guess ill badger them for a cheque instead.

 

ive started emailing dell for an approval for the m17x i7 ones for replacement(when they launch here) since the atis are not available in my country. hopefully those will not have any dpc latency stuttering issues or new issues.

ive had enough of the stuttering .. i cant play almost every game i like which needs sli properly when i need to destress in school..

can i assume that being an intel chipset the i7 m17xes will have like an intel integrated 4500m for stealth mode?

 

No the IGP's on the i5's are apparently not usable on the M17x, and there isn't one on the motherboard AFAIK, so that's a no go, just the dedicated cards for this system.

 

Yep, the dream of having the ultra power + 3hrs of battery life dies with M17X-R2. If the stuttering is fixed - screw the i7, I'm keeping my system for as long as I can.

 

wow thats crap..

but doesnt the m15x have an i7 with integrated graphics as well? or am i mistaken

 

I just installed the latest 196.21 with the modified inf driver and there is no difference concerning the latency. The same spikes as usual when downclocking...

 

just a quick question, is it true that all 4870 m17x owners do not suffer dpc latency and stutters even if they have a qx9300?

 

Well, BIOS A03 should have solved the stuttering/DPC Latency for the Quad Core CPUs, no matter what video card.
The big thing that's left is Nvidia GPU/drivers causing DPC Latency and audio/video stutter when changing clockspeeds (which apparently doesn't happen with AMD/ATi cards/drivers) among other things.

 

Hi Guys, Been following this and a couple other threads here for some time now with my M17x. I have had the same issues and a few worse. I finally called into Alienware and requested the new cards. (I had the 260s). They are replacing the 260s and 280s with ATI cards if you request it on their dime. Be sure to tell them you noted that they pulled the Nvidia cards from their website. They are not even selling them anymore. Get the new cards. It will fix the issue from what I read but I will let you know.

 

Hi was looking around new drivers for M17xR2 and seen Audio driver IDT 92HD73C1 Audio i installed on my M17x and checked DPC Latency it seems better on my system.Link below if you try it report your results from using driver.
http://support.euro.dell.com/suppor...typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=375504

 

Guess It's my lucky day. 1 Hour on the phone with alienware rep - got 4870's en route to replace my 260m's Yippee. Rep was reluctant at first saying fix was on the way...but my argument that waiting half a year for my machine to work did the trick I guess, with a few profanities thrown in for good measure.

 

From what i can find out it doesnt matter if the system is avaialble in your country. Alienware does not seem to follow Standard Dell procedures.

They can and do have a custom system built with the same parts your original sysytem has.

m17x r1 not available in Uk but they are still building one for me!

much to my anoyance

 

Hi guys,
I have been following this thread for the last couple of days. I am a proud owner of an MX17. I bought it on Ebay almost a month aho. I'm from Spain, and they are too expensive to buy from dell directly. Anyway, getting back to the topic, what I have tried and seems to be working with regards to the Latency issue are the following steps :

- Updated the bios to the latest A03
- Downloaded the Nvidia Nforce drivers in order to install the ethernet and chipset driver : via the following link : http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_win764_15.51.html

-- Now, I uninstalled all the Nvidia drivers (thes include video, chipset & ethernet) from the install/uninstall section within the Control Panel.
-- Reboot into safe mode and with Driver Sweep, clean all entries related to Nvidia !!
-- Reboot in normal mode and firstly install the Nforce drivers and select both the ethernet and the chipset driver.
-- Once you have done that, install the graphics drivers of your choice, I have used Dox 195.62 v1.1. Please note that I chose to have the PowerMizer option set to NO (Powermizer OFF).
-- Install Physx drivers
-- I then installed Nvidia system tools as I normally use it's features


And that´s it !! ZERO latency !!

The onlu spikes that I have detected are when the screen comes back while it´s in sleep mode !! (I have the screen set to turn off within a minute of inactivity). Apart from that, I can assure you that I am having ZERO latency !!


I hope you guys luck.

Feedback would be appreciated.

Ricky from Spain.

 

for M17x nforce driver i thought u needed



Version:
15.49 WHQL
Release Date:
2009.10.01
Operating System:
Windows Vista 64-bit, Windows 7 64-bit
Language:
English (U.S.)
File Size:
210 MB

 

You are right on, but I had seen that others had tried this driver and all was well !!

Anyway, if you want, try those out and lets see the results !!

Bye.

Ricky

 

Forget trying different drivers and disabling services and components just to have a halfway decent experience with your M17x. They need to send you a working system. After a couple of days on the phone with those retards, I found someone that speaks ENGLISH and got the ball rolling on this. I'm now awaiting a replacement system with 4870's in it. I suggest everyone do this... Dell doesn't care and they aren't going to give you guys a real fix - I think A03 proved that...

 

Got one 4870 (the second is coming tomorrow) and I can tell you that the latency is much MUCH less than with Nvidia cards. I mean, you will not notice stuttering during games or video/audio playback, however at certain situations I can still get occasional spikes but mostly under 5k. For the whole day of testing got a single 55k spike and a couple 30K ones.
But this is without CF!
More news tomorrow.

 

wow, I will be bummed out if the new cards don't fix the stutter

I don't really consider the 4870 cards an upgrade

 

Yep, the performance is slightly better but also:

1) Idle and Load GPU temps are higher by 10c than with Nvidia cards.
2) CPU and MCP temps are actually lower at load (since 4870s rely on hardware acceleration more than software... )

Hopefully, CF config with another day of tweaking will bring some good results.
Otherwise I'll be knocking Dell' doors again!

 

Performance is better in benchmarks - some of the M17x vs W90 throw-downs I've read make me very afraid.

http://forums.legitreviews.com/about22118.html

 

That was back when the W90 was crippled by horrible drivers. With a new custom BIOS the 4870s in it can use regular drivers like the M17x can and it performs MUCH MUCH better. The M17x 4870s also have twice the ram

If you are worried about the difference, just ask Mandrake, he has extensibly tested both the GTX 280m SLI and 4870m CF in the M17x and can give a very conclusive opinion

 

Yeah, I trust him. I'll dig up his posts.

My 280m cards each had 1 GB and so do the 4870 cards - 2 GB in total either way.

 

For you and some people maybe, but there also seems to be plenty of people myself included, where A03 worked as designed and have no latency or stuttering. It's even fixed my inability to run 3dMark Vantage.

This is either a faulty batch of systems, or in my opinion, caused by a certain combination of drivers/applications installed. For example, I see from your sig you use RAID-0 whereas I don't, but if I use the nVidia SATA drivers I get crap performance and continual crashes - there are so many thousands of combinations it's almost a miracle that any system works.

 

2gb total but only 1gb of those 2 ever gets used in SLI/Crossfire configurations.

 

FYI - Sadly my 6month old M17x will be going back to Dell and a full refund issued to me. I had big DPC issues and they couldn't fix it to an acceptable level. No idea what I'm going to get as a replacement, time to start looking around I guess....

Any suggestions? I have a £2.5k budget.

 

So I downloaded the DOX driver 195.62 with PowerMizer OFF and have no latency issues anymore after trying every "solution" in this threads (thx guys for your effort)

I'll stick to DOX' driver until Dell and nVidia come up with something.

 

I know that. My post was in response to someone else.

Technically all 2 GB is used, but the most used by the buffer is 1 GB. Because the cards are rendering alternate frames or lines.

 

The W90 cards had 512 MB each, where the M17x cards have 1GB each.

Don't be confused into thinking that only 1 GB is being used and the other wasted in multicard configurations. The same full 1 GB of data is mirrored in each cards memory for use by the respective GPUs. This is necessary so that each GPU has the necessary set of data to render its frames. This is in no way a "waste"

 

just what i wanted to hear

 

It works, but fans are on constantly - it bothered me enough to revert to factory drivers and call support. THat seems to have paid off for me.

 

since you have ati cards on the way

isnt your motherbard based on the nvidia 730sli chipset?

 

M17X-R1 uses the same mobo/chipset to host ATI or Nvidia GPUs, so no problem should be here. It should work better with ATIs just because they stress the mobo/MCP less than Nvidia cards.

 

perfect, i hope nvidia will bring out their 196.21whql mobile soon

will be fun to finally play with my first alienware

 

The 196.21 drivers are nothing special, Im trying an inf modded desktop version of them now, they're similar to the last WHQL drivers, and if anything a little slower.

 

Ok Guys, I'm officially with ATI cards now, got my second 4870 with CF cable today.
So far, the latency issues are close to zero! More info after breakfast

 

how does the whole getting your cards replaced work, I'm not in the US, do they send the cards and you have to replace them yourself? do you send back the nvidia cards? i really didnt want to do this but the A03 didnt work for me and waiting for a fix is not an option, i've had my m17x for only 5 weeks so i might as well get a working system now before more time goes by and dell refuses to give me the update, how likely is it to get the refreshed i7 system?

 

They will send you the cards along with a tech to do the job, make sure to verify that they order 2 cards and the CF cable! They will take your Nvidia cards.
If you keep at it you might get the refresh system. I prefer to keep my machine as it has a nice battery life when booted on 9400 card. 3hrs of browsing is what made me buy it in the first place.

There will be many new models in the upcoming 1-2 years, and I just don't have the time for long conversations with Dell every time a new model is released. I might do it by the end of my warranty, when there's a totally new machine 3x-4x the power of mine, but for now - M17X R1 rulez! And is stutter-free!

 

thanks Aikimox, the R2 isnt much of an update so you're kinda right but its so annoying that everytime i get something after 2 weeks or so something new comes along, the only very promising thing about the R2 is the i7 which supposably beats the QX9300 at everything specially in video rendering which i do a lot of HD Encoding

 

Ive had my M17x since June 09, and the stuttering issues were non existent when I first got it, but now they are showing up randomly, sometimes they are bad, sometimes they are non existent. I checked my DPC Latency and I see spikes past 8k, sometimes around 16k. Im still on warranty, and I plan on extending my warranty. I really like this laptop, but the random occurences of stuttering and lockups are most troublesome.

My specs are:
QX9300
Dual 280m GTX's
4g 1333 RAM
250g HDD
1920 x 1200 Resolution Screen

Vista 64 bit Ultimate came with my laptop, but when Windows 7 came out I bought and installed Windows 7 64 bit Professional

Im using the 186.64 Nvidia Drivers for my video cards, pretty much everything listed under Current Windows 7 64 bit drivers for M17x in Batboys blog.

 

Apparently by requesting fixes to our $4,200 computers we are frauds.

Really wondering if I want to be part of this community anymore. I don't like being called a fraud.

 

Close to zero = not fixed

what a waste of time