*OFFICIAL* "All Powerful" M17x-R2 Edition Owners Lounge!

Just to follow up on personal info being posted, forum rules:

Thanks.

 

Weird that the 210w is 119 and the 240w is 59.95...... any ideas on that?

 

Thanks! I saw that article earlier and have been waiting for USB 3.0 on the M6500 but the reps haven't gotten back to me about when it will be officially in the machines. So if the website doesn't list them, it is not official unfortunately. >_< Here in Malaysia (and from my searches online, anywhere across the globe), the only brand I know that has actually started selling USB 3.0 laptops is Asus with the N61Jq. That will change pretty soon though. The new HP Envy also has USB 3.0 already but only the older Envy models are still being sold here. It's only a matter of time before the Alienware machines get them too as it is the new standard. Since the transition is so soon, I'm willing to wait for USB 3.0 to keep my laptop future-proof (at least until the end of this year! *LOL*) ^o^

 

Doc, I use ATI CCC on Desktop Properties then "color" tab, I then choose "Reactivate ATI color controls" then do the adjustments one color at a time, but I actually like the default settings for my RGB, I am not compering it side to side with any other monitor and I love the look of it, the whites seem whiter, and not the bluish white I was used to with my older lap. I do use ATI CCC to correct the colors of my HDTV in my bedroom when watching a movie, loving the HDMI output and how I don't have to do anything, just select the HDMI port on my TV remote and my lappy automatically detects and sets proper resolution. I just calibrate the TV to match my RGB best I can with CCC, I also did some calibrating withing the TV menu to closely match my RGB om laptop and then saved that custom profile for HD movie viewing.
I am still on stock ATI drivers since all its been good from day one with them, might try 10.3 when I get the time.

Jose

 

If they offer the 5870 in march I am going to punch myself right in the face. Thats how wizzed off I will be that I didnt wait a month to order

 

I also think that the default settings are fine. I love how reds pop off the screen like its 3D. I sold my Asus G51 to buy this for the screen alone. I am happy I did. I am picky about lcd panels. I will only buy Sony or Samsung LCD tvs. I bought a Toshiba Regza for our bedroom a few years back and couldnt stand the blacks and the green push it had. My wife never noticed but I did I hated it. I got the new Samsung when the 120hz came out and loved it.

 

If they offer 5870 I am within my 21 days so.......

 

The rumor was always end of March. Some have speculated by Cebit which is next week.

 

I am through waiting on the 5870s. There is not one solid rumor regarding it. I will see it when it arrivies. I'll just go back to my corner now.

 

I have been waiting in my corner. My deadline is April Fools Day.

 

My 21 days was going to be up on March 2nd. I did not even get a chance to really use it because of all the bad parts mine came with. So I sent a message to the mothership to call this one back home. Ill reorder when they have a fix and the 5870's. Got to try out the 10.3 beta Drivers though. WOW. The FPS went up 10-20!! Can't wait for the stable release!

 

Any news about the revised BIOS?

 

Same to me, have been waiting since R2 was announced. My deadline will be mid of March. No more camping after that.

 

Is this DPC Latency issue affecting anyone? I was interested in this M17x-R2 and was going to pull the trigger on the i7-920XM / 8GB / 2x 4870s for $4600USD until I read about this show-stopping, horrible issue.

Im not about to spend this $ if any problem could potentially exist.

 

The DPC issue doesn't affect the R2 its uses a completely different processor, Core i7. The 920 does suffer some flickering in certain games but that has been resolved with a new bios which is waiting to be released

 

Has anybody checked his R2 for latency issues?

I have to disappoint you on that since DPC latency is a software related issue and has nothing to do with the hardware.

 

Well that's interesting because I didn't see any issues and I have yet to see anyone else complain about it with the new R2. Also a good amount of people that have the R1 who have gotten the ATI replacements have gotten rid of most of their latency problems.

 

Well I can't disagree on that.

The point is how can you be so sure that the R2 has no latency issues. Did you try any test?

 

Haha awesome!

 

But still I disagree that the R2 has a better latency than the R1 with ATI cards

 

I'll run a test when I get mine, or I guess I should say if I ever get mine.

BTW, hows that ssd working out for you?

 

I can't wait for your results...
Imagine the R2 to suffer from latency too and have to wait for that long to find out? That would be really frustrating....

This SSD is the fastest device on this rig. More than satisfied.

 

Well I gamed a decent amount over the 2 days that I had my first one, me2 cod6 & fallout 3, and did a lot of multitasking but to be honest didn't run anything to see how it was doing. I can say that it definitely didn't affect my performance, at least from what I could see.

What sort of boot times do you see?

 

For a reboot, not just boot, 30 sec

 

Haven't seen it on the Dell website yet. Hopefully, it will be very soon. To be honest though I've been running all my games with a single 4870 since I ran into the flicking issue. And it's been running all the games I throw at it with ease. Two is going to be over kill.

 

Canadian Lurker here, have any canucks been able to get any sort of discount on the M17x-R2 (through phoning a rep or otherwise) like our neighbours to the south seem to be getting?

 

Core i7 940XM @ 2.13Ghz Mobile Chip is comes in Q3'10

 

By the way dell doing thing it will not be out untel Q/11 And no one will get it 2 months after.

 

Current CPUs are already over kill my needs.

 

No latency issues have been seen so far by anyone that has the R2 as far as I have read. I haven't seen any problems with mine. Ran the latency checker and it has been all green across the board running multiple programs. I believe there have been pics posted by other members showing this.

 

I know, I have an R1 and neither do I encounter any issues and yes I have seen the pictures, I have also seen a 10K+ μs max latency on an R2, but I also have to say that DPC latency checker is not that accurate to solely depend on that to confirm if you have latency issues or not.
That's why I am asking if anybody did actually bother to do an in depth search of this matter by tracing the DPC/ISR latency on his R2 rig.

 

Just installed Dirt 2 this morning and wow this thing runs fantastic! FPS always stayed pegged at 60+ during races with settings at 1200p, 4xAA and max everything (it would only let me put post processing at medium). During replays it would sometimes fall to the 45-50 fps range but during actual races it never did or if it did, it was so rare I never noticed. I'll have to put up some videos on youtube soon.

BTW when the bios update does eventually surface, those of you with a 920xm configuration should check GTA IV. I've noticed that it still occasionally flickers. If I turn down the CPU 5% OC (using the bios) the flickering becomes almost absent. That said, I've fired off an e-mail to nagshead but haven't heard back from him. Hopefully the final bios release takes care of this but it is one area everyone should check.

 

Glad you're enjoying the new BIOS. But, you're making the wait all that much harder. Stop that.

 

Thank you SOOOO much guys! I'd have never found that...I mean even with the part number I couldn't find it by searching on Dell's site!

Wish they still had a configuration option when ordering the system. I *LOVE* keeping one adapter at home, one at work, so I have one less thing to carry around, it doesn't get the wear and tear on it, etc. Plus I've seen several people who's power supplies have died on them and they're in trouble-if I have two or three of them, I just switch while I order another.

Really weird that they show the wrong adapter when you go through the 'correct' way, and that it costs twice as much...

Cool! (Geez that article's dumb though...it goes "the dual core 720 might end up just as fast!" Um...no.)

The question remains...where the HECK are the 32nm quads? THOSE need 32nm a lot more than the duals do, which would have been just fine at 45nm I'm sure.

Oh well...I'm not waiting considering I really needed it in December. Of course by the time the Radeon 5870s get in stock, maybe that new CPU will be there too

 

First post here!

m17x - R2 ordered.... the wait is awful! ETA so far is 03/22/10. Been ordered for a week already!!

Order places is

M17x-r2 | i7 920XM | 8GB RAM 1333MHz | 2x120 OCZ Vertex SSD RAID 0 | Dual ATI 4870 | Windows 7 Ultimate | Matrox Dualhead2go DP Edition | 2 x 24" LCD 16:9 5ms

Can anyone confirm if this m17x is even going to work with the Matrox Dualhead2go? I didn't have the patience to wait for the computer and run their tests so i bought the monitors and dualhead2go with 2x DP to AVI adaptors.. .so i hope they work!

 

which edition of Dualhead2go do you have ?

 

wow... Dualhead2go arrived as i typed that message.

Matrox DualHead2Go
DP Edition
Part: D2G-DP-IF

Since the monitors only have AVI or HDMI they recommend AVI port as prefered for gaming, etc so i bought 2 x
DualHead2Go DP Edition DisplayPort to DVI cable CAB-DP-DVIF

 

I can't confirm as i do not have the device, but judging by their website, looks like your will support any time of DVI and you can work in full hd resolutions.
Cool device
And welcome to the forums!

 

Do M17x R2s usually have the OCZ Vertex SSD's? I heard (read actually) that the SSDs used were some proprietary Samsung ones.

It makes a difference for me because the Vertex 1.5 firmware supports Garbage Collection which sort of acts as a firmware type Trim for RAID 0.

 

Thanks!... looking forward to picking everyones brains on how to pimp this thing out.

The other question i had was how can i load my SSD's in there as raid 0 and port the Alienware recovery partition over. I'm an experienced IT guy so i get the technical lingo but is this is CD i can use or a download i can install?

Otherwise i'll be putting in my SSD's Raid 0 and just dropping that recovery partition and hoping to find all the alienware software tools as a download to install on top of my generic win7 ultimate installation.

 

There you go :


Can run the wizard here : http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/support/compatibility/gxm/home/

 

They DO NOT come with OCZ Vertex drives... those are drives a bought 6 months ago or so and did a RAID 0 in my macbook pro... however there are glitches with them in my macbook that were never resolved... so my macbook is running some generic blackscorpio 320gbs

 

mfractal - SWEET thanks. I couldn't run it because i didn't have my system.

Nice! thats good cuz i'd hate to have to reallocate this thing haha.

 

Sure thing..
I actually don't have it yet too.. I went with the wizard.. (not the tool that detects your card)

 

Hopefully it'll be µPGA-989 not BGA-1288 or it won't be much of a player for R2 upgrades. I guess that's likely since it's supposed to be 45nm. Wonder how well it will work with the same 55W TDP as the 920?

Maybe when it comes out the price for 920s will become reasonable.

 

Use the Dell Datasafe Local utility to generate a recovery DVD. The recovery DVD will restore everything from your factory load, including regenerating the recovery partition and the dell datasafe local util (which doesn't come on the resource disk.) The only gotcha is that the recovery DVD requires a destination disk that is as big as (or larger) than your original, so if you bought a 500GB disk, then you need one at least that large or it fails. There is a way around this if you ghost the entire drive to a smaller drive (I used a 100GB) then create a recovery disk.

 

Nice thanks. I have a 1TB NAS drive, will i be able to use the Datasafe app pointed to a network drive? I think it also doubles as a external drive i guess i could do that as well. I was thinking ghost but i ordered the 250s or whatever it came with in a raid0, i won't be able to get 4 drives hooked up to this bad boy i don't think.

 

datasafe will backup to a flash drive or dvd. Don't know if external USB HDDs will work or not, but it completely wipes the drive and makes it bootable, IIRC. You'll need a 8GB drive to go down that path.

If you have a smaller drive laying around (maybe one SSD), maybe you can connect it via esata and ghost to a single, then boot that drive and create the backup disk from datasafe. it's goofy, but datasafe puts something in the image that won't let you go to a smaller drive than you started with.

 

boo then i'm screwed anyway. going from around 500 to 240

 

No, it just takes more steps. Definitely make the DVD before you pull the drives, but with the smaller drive, you may want to just do a clean install. You won't miss much anyway, and the restore partition would be a waste of SSD space.