*Official* Alienware Launch Discussion Thread

17 with the bottom off.

 

Do you have a desktop IPS screen to compare it to? If you're coming from TN to IPS for the first time, the colors may seem oversaturated at first. They were to me - now I'm used to it and like it and find TN panels dull.

Otherwise, check the Windows Mobility Center. Past AW's had a setting in there for color mode.

 

I'd be pissed if I received one with those scratches. Probably some jealous dude at the assembly line "cough, foxconn" did it.

 

Use Nvidias control panel to adjust colors.

 

But we have Optimus so intel is running the day to day task of looking at your monitor or viewing pics or like surfing here at NBR with the white background. Will NVidia still have something to do with that?

 

You can adjust desktop colors as well as in game colors and movies ect through the Nvidia control panel.

 

The steam sale makes me want my 18 more and more!

 

Did someone say Steam Sale?!

PRAISE LORD GABEN!

God bless Gabe Newell!

 

Hahahaha! Your welcome!

 

So question guys, I've been looking in the thread for the 17 owners and I ordered a 17 back on the 3rd of this month, and what I'm seeing so far Is a but disappointing, according to the people that received there 17's, dell throttled the 780 to start down clocking itself once it hits 66c with Optimus enabled and 77c when not enabled, and its causing a severe decrease in performance, any thoughts on this or if its happened in the past, also does anyone know if its really worth it to jump to the 18 with sli 770's? Thx

 

Two cards are always better than 1.

 

Is it only on the 17 or is it the 18 as well? And wth is Optimus?

 

I can feel the vibration going on in my AW 14, i guess is he 7200RPM hdd causes this.
So does anyone happen to experience this as well? Is it normal?

 

My AW17 has been shipped this morning! No idea where to find the tracking number though... any ideas?

 

Sign into Dell and look at your order or check your email. It may take a little while after it ships to update the tracking number though. You can try calling if you don't see it anywhere and they can probably give it to you.

 

Well according to the people who got there 17 it's there, but I was curious if the 18 owners knew about it.

 

The only thing I wasn't expecting from my new 17 was that the battery is not swappable D:

It's underneath the back panel, and it looks like there are a couple more screws to take it out from there. That's going to be annoying.

 

Not always.

 

In fact, I'd argue that one card is ALWAYS better than two cards of an equivalent power (so 1 card with 2000 shaders at 1ghz vs 2 cards with 1000 shaders each at 1ghz). The thing is, it's easier to make the two separate cards, so that's what we get

And two cards will almost always be faster if all 3 cards are the same (so 2x 780m vs 1x 780m), so it provides a higher bound on performance. But still, I'd rather have one huge card than two small ones, all else equal.

 

I wouldn't say a single card is always better, either. It mostly depends on the application, among other things.

 

Two 770's will out perform a single 780. By much? Probably not a staggering amount, but maybe enough.

 

It's always better to have options. When one card is better, you disable SLI or CrossFire. When it's not better to run one card, you run alternate frame render and kick booty. That's the beauty of having a multi-GPU option. You have the best of both worlds at your fingertips. Best for both of them to be beasts. Using two inferior GPUs to match the performance of one superior GPU on purpose is not a good approach. But, having two superior GPUs at your disposal will get a lot more mileage out of an aging system and minimize the need for upgrades to keep pace with advancing single-GPU performance.

 

All, I wanted to report that I received my 18 yesterday, and I have to say I am very impressed. The build quality is better than either of the previous Alienware PCs I've owned (M17XR2 and an M18XR2). The new keyboard is a HUGE improvement over the previous designs. The system outperforms my old M18XR2 in real gaming by almost 100FPS on World of Warcraft, 40 FPS on Battlefield 3, and almost 100FPS on League of Legends. All of these titles I run at Max Settings. My intention is to try to coax a bit more out of the GPUs this weekend. I believe I saw somewhere that someone was able to push them up 135Mhz on the stock voltage, which would result in a pretty good performance gain I'm sure. The MIMO AC card that came in the new system was saturating the wired link to my desktop at 920Mbps on a 1Gbps link after some basic TCP/IP tweaking. If anyone is waffling on buying one of these systems, I would certainly recommend it.

 

I'm glad to see that someone has a good first impression of his machine, and I appreciate your comparison with the m17x r2 and m18x r2. Reading about so many problems has soured me to Dell. +Rep

Are you getting good temperatures?

 

Thanks! That's really good, meaningful feedback. I like that a LOT better than anecodotal comments. The comparison to your two previous beasts is also extremely useful as opposed to a first-time flagship Alienware laptop owner that does not have a good frame of reference to draw from. (I would expect a first-time owner to be more impressed without something awesome to compare with.) +1 Rep

 

You're only seeing 40 FPS on BF3? That's what the Alienware 14 gets with the 765M.

 

40 FPS better

 

Ah, I see. My bad. On a mobile device...

 

Quote Originally Posted by JJDV View Post
So question guys, I've been looking in the thread for the 17 owners and I ordered a 17 back on the 3rd of this month, and what I'm seeing so far Is a but disappointing, according to the people that received there 17's, dell throttled the 780 to start down clocking itself once it hits 66c with Optimus enabled and 77c when not enabled, and its causing a severe decrease in performance, any thoughts on this or if its happened in the past, also does anyone know if its really worth it to jump to the 18 with sli 770's? Thx

Can anyone answer this? Thanks in advance.

 

I'm not sure about what was posted. At any rate, the 18 doesn't have Optimus, so there will not be any technical glitches like that on your system. It has manual switching and there are no functionality problems attributable to that.

NVIDIA GPUs from 580M to present (also most of their desktop GPUs) have not delivered full performance potential with a stock vBIOS. Even Titan is somewhat unimpressive until it gets unlocked. They all have either some sort of hokey boost gimmick, throttling or under-performance issue until the vBIOS gets tweaked and the "features" that cause the lackluster behavior are eliminated. I wouldn't stress on it too much. These GPUs should rock with the right tweaks for the 17 and 18. It's already going that direction with vBIOS mods that produce extreme performance increases for 780M.

 

I would also like to know how the 770m SLI performs. I don't think I've seen any benchmarks for that config. It's not on notebookcheck either. I'm thinking of getting a 18 but if 770s are not much worse than 780s that extra $400 could go to good use LOL.

 

Any vBIOS options for the 765M? Or, just wait and see?

 

Unfortunately, for the sake of comparison, there are hardly any machines out that are equipped with 770M SLI. You can find single 770M results on the Futuremark web site. One 770M pulls a 3DMark11 score roughly 6000 3DMarks. With that knowledge, you can estimate a 770M SLI setup will likely be capable of roughly 9000 3DMarks. That's less performance than GTX 680M by a little bit (roughly 10%) and it would be consistent with information floating around.

 

The only vibration I feel on my 17 is from the blu-ray trying so spin up. I moved 50 gigs worth of pictures and music to the 7200 rpm HDD without any vibration.

 

Interesting... its starting to sound like dual 770M is kind of weak, by comparison on Mobile Graphics Cards - Benchmark List - NotebookCheck.net Tech 770m is about 5000 and 780m is about 8000. Even if it was 6000 like you suggest (nbc says 5000 based off only 2 benches), and I think 780ms are more like 7500 anyway, its still pretty weak in comparison... or maybe the 780m is just a monster lol.

 

Was just screwing around in my BIOS on my 17, and saw that the 256GB mSATA drive is listed as LiteOn. Bit of a bummer, TBH. Strongly prefer Samsung's solutions.

 

Shouldn't matter as long as it is fast and reliable TBH.

 

They haven't had samsung for some time. I don't think they are going to carry them anymore.

 

It could be the LiteOn Plextor M5M msata, and judging from the review, it probably has faster write speed than the Samsung msata, although without a solid review one can't say for sure. Then again, Samsung should trump in terms of lower idle power, and perhaps lower load power too. Either way, if it is Plextor M5M, it's Marvell controller and Toshiba NAND flash, so it's not that bad.

AnandTech | Plextor M5M (256GB) mSATA Review
Samsung PM841 512GB mSATA SSD Review - Performance and Capacity in a Client SSD | The SSD Review

I am also having a hard time trying to find a msata SSD to put in my coming AW 18. I'm looking for a msata that uses least power during idle and under load, but still have one of the fastest average read and write speed. So far, I am looking at the Plextor M5M (potentially faster than the Samsung PM841 but uses more power), Samsung PM 841 (MZMTD256HAGM), and the Intel 525 (the all rounder).

The only thing I worry about the M5M is the consistency of performance when the drive fills up.

 

But do the moded vbios void the warranty?

 

Now, I'm not sure about you, but if I put a modded vbios on MY gpu, I certainly would not be advertising that fact to support. (And honestly if you don't tell them, how are they going to find out? Strip the vbios from a fried card?)

But with the reliability of GPUs I've had so far, I think I'll stick to stock.They might make it 6 months each that way...

 

Yes, See below after 6 hours of gaming on Battlefield 3, LOL and WOW

 

I just bought the Intel 525 240GB msata as the SRT cache for the HDD that I will get (WD10JPVX). The Intel 525 is going for a rather good price on the auction website now, so anyone who's interested should go grab it. Considering the fact that Newegg has it at 289.99 (Newegg.com - intel 525') and Amazon has it at 299.76 (Amazon.com: Intel 525 Series 240GB SSD OEM: Electronics), the offer I gave which was 210 was a pretty good price.

Could anyone who's interested go click on the offer price and try a lower price? Just go to the famous auction website and search for Intel 525 240GB and it should show up as first result. I am really interested to see how low the reserve price is.

Since I can't afford the $599.99 Crucial M500 960GB, this combination of Intel 525 + Western D WD10JPVX 1TB will give me very low power consumption with good speed on my coming Alienware 18.

Edit: Nvm found out the reserve price. I didn't overpay much after all.

 

Has anyone had an issue with wireless jumping around? My steam download seems to keep going from like 300kbps down to 100 back up to 300 etc.
When I do a speed test I get around half what my pc and ipad get. (AW17)

 

Nice temps, PWn3R - 71c/69c is quite impressive after 6 hours....seems the cooling is up to the job on the 18.

 

I just fixed my own issue - it was conflicting with my router setting of b/g/n - after changing to b/g it worked fine. Is this the adapters issue? Looks like it was getting confused or something? I am concerned because obviously when out and about I can't just change router settings!

 

Well that's incredibly annoying. I ordered the 17 with an accessory battery on the representation from Dell that it was swappable like the outgoing model. Do these reps just make stuff up?

 

Most likely they are not educated enough about the new models -in fact at most companies, sales rep are not tech-savy. They don't have a clue how to use all those high-end models they sell. This applies to both Dell and Apple phone sales, plus most brick & mortal stores such as PC World, in my experience...
You can return the battery back... and if you are in the UK, you can even sue them under contract law

 

Yeah, mine seems to just drop the wifi entirely every couple of hours. And it has MUCH lower dbm (signal strength?) ratings than my outgoing r3. (I had the default wireless card for the r3, 2x2 intel wireless n)

I'm currently dealing with a rep over my replacement (I lost a LOT of features with the new machine, and they don't seem to care - though I really do), and I can confirm that he has no idea what he is talking about. And he's supposedly a higher level tech... Good luck getting a refund on the spare battery though!

 

Looks like there is a problem with my Alienware 14 and I don't know if you guys are having the same issue. It has something to do with the GPU Boost 2.0 and gpu core clock.

I had MSI Afterburner running in the background when game was running and the gpu usage clock was constant at 99-100% so that wasn't the issue. Even had hwinfo and the cpu never throttled and all 4 cores was at constant 3.2ghz-3.3ghz.

Now here is the problem I discovered and it had something to do with the core clock of the gtx 765m gpu. We know that the base gpu core clock speed of the 765m is 800-850mhz and it goes higher than 850+ with gpu boost 2.0 and the max it went to is 901mhz.



Now here's what happen in the first 3 minutes of testing a specific game and what happened when I was observing.

At 901mhz, I was enjoying max fps and full performance on 3dmark11 and I was getting a score of 4,100 just to get that info out of there. Testing of WoW standing in the same spot without any people that way i'll get the same steady frames per sec and I won't have to blame the fps dipping up and down because of how many things or other players are on the location. Now here is the problem, the first minute on WoW on the same spot running at high settings at FULLHD, the frames per sec was steady 85fps simultaneously with the gpu core clock at 901mhz. And then after the first minute, my fps dip from 85fps to 70fps with the core clock dropping from 901mhz to 797mhz simultaneously, then at 3 minutes, the fps dip again from 70fps to 45fps with the core clock dropping from 797mhz to 588mhz simultaneously.

Now when all of this was happening within the 3 minute frame, my cpu temps are only at 87c and was running perfectly fine at full speed at 3.2ghz on all 4 cores and it was steady and the gpu temperature was at 67-68c. The thing that I don't understand is that my gpu usage is still constant at 99-100 so I know that wasn't the issue but the damn core clock was dipping lower and lower.

Now I understand if the core clock goes from the high boost range then back down to the base of 797-800mhz then back up again, but this one went way below the base gpu core clock speed and at 588mhz core clock, my suppose to be steady frames per sec of 85 to a terrible laggy 45fps.


What in the hell is going on here? Remember when all of these was happening, the gpu usage was 99-100% straight on the msi afterburner graph, my cpu speed was also steady 3.2ghz all 4 cores no throttle. My temps was 87c on cpu and gpu temp was at 67-68c.


Is this a glitch or some kind of gpu temperature throttling limit that Dell/Alienware put again? Did they purposely design to throttle down the gpu core clock speed when the gpu temps reaches 67-68c? If that is a yes then I am severely disappointed. All current owners of the new Alienware 14 should do the same thing and test it with any game that you prefer, make sure to use hwinfo and msi afterburner graph to monitor and test and i'm sure you'll understand what i'm talking about.


I'm including a snipping tool shot of the msi afterburner graph screenshot of my Alienware 14 so you guys see what i'm talking about





OR

http://i824.photobucket.com/albums/zz166/alcalite/Gpuboost2coreclockissuefpsdips_zps399982b8.jpg