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OFFICIAL: Alienware M17x R3 / R4 - Owners Lounge


Brian

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi. New AW17 owner, just opened the box yesterday. As I'm breaking in my system, I had a couple of quick questions.

First, my bios is currently at A11. Looking around, I see it's at A13 on Dell's website. Any particular thoughts on if I should upgrade to A13, or stick at A11 for now?

The second thing is, I want to run some benchmarks to see how it's running and check the temperatures. Other then 3dMark, what are some good benchmark suites to run?

Thanks!

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Congrats on the new machine! I don't know about your BIOS question, there's a specific A17 owners lounge over on NBR forums where there might be some info. AS for benchmarking programs or similar for checking to make sure temperatures are good & also to check you aren't getting any throttling then I would recommend the following:

1) GPUz for GPU temperature & clock monitoring: when in the 'Sensor' tab you can increase the size of the window to see a large history of temperature measurements (change monitoring interval to 2sec too, which allows for a greater time frame of info to be displayed too).

2) Run Unigine Heaven Benchmark. It provides a 100% GPU load, but a realistic gaming type load, and it runs on a loop too which is great for temperature & stability testing. Run that for 20mins while having GPUz running in the background. After the 20min run is complete, exit the Heaven program & go look at your sensor graphs in GPUz - you should see a stable temperature, and a stable Mhz clock on both your Core & Memory. Check that the core & memory frequency that you see in the graph is the correct advertised figure for that card - ie not dropping clocks & throttling.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hello!

First post, Looking to upgrade 680M to 780M in my M17x R4.

But kinda worried on a few things...

1. Will I loose the use of onboard audio?

2. Will I loose the Integrated Graphics (intel HD4000)

What Do I need?

This is what I have:

I have the Dell A12 BIOS

The Drivers from Here

What's the process to install?

Thanks for you help guys!

POJ

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Hello!

First post, Looking to upgrade 680M to 780M in my M17x R4.

But kinda worried on a few things...

1. Will I loose the use of onboard audio?

2. Will I loose the Integrated Graphics (intel HD4000)

What Do I need?

This is what I have:

I have the Dell A12 BIOS

The Drivers from Here

What's the process to install?

Thanks for you help guys!

POJ

Have you already bought the 780M, it's not much of an upgrade to the 680M, especially not after you've flashed a modified vBIOS to your 680M & overclocked it? My advice to you is to not buy the 780M, especially now that all these new Maxwell cards are coming out too. 680M is still a great card, and most definitely with the modified vBIOS. It's not worth the hassle with 780M.

EDIT: you can get 880M performance with your 680M with a modified vBIOS and a good overclock.

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Thanks for the reply, Free is always good! Could you please point me in some direction of some guides for this?

Hi, you can get the modified vBIOS from here, and it explains how to flash your GPU too in the first post of that thread (or rather a link in that first post to the instructions):

http://forum.techinferno.com/general-notebook-discussions/1847-nvidia-kepler-vbios-mods-overclocking-editions-modified-clocks-voltage-tweaks.html

In terms of overclocking, if you've never done it before here's a cut & pasted overclocking guide I did in one of my posts many moons ago:

If your temperatures are OK, then you can start to overclock.Overclocking process is as follows:

1)Determine your max stable overclock of the core at stock voltage.Increase Core Clock by 100Mhz, run 3DMark11 through till end, if no visual artifacts or crashes and if temperatures are ok then increase core clock by a further 50Mhz and repeat process. Keep repeating this process until you see artifacts or crashes, at which point back down to your previous stable overclock & do further more vigorous stress testing. Best way to do this is run a game that pushes the GPU to a constant 100% GPU utilisation (GPU load in GPUz) - eg TombRaider, Far Cry 3 are good for this - if the game is stable for 1 hour you've probably found a stable core overclock.

2)Now determine your Max Stable Memory Overclock. Leave your core at your maximum stable overclock for this process. Increase Memory Clock by 200Mhz, and do the same testing procedure as above using 3DMark11to work out an initial stable max overclock. You can increase the memory clock in bigger chunks in NVidia Inspector,because there's a peculiarity with GDDR5 memory in NVidia Inspector whereby a 200Mhz increase is actually equal to a real 100Mhz increase- it's do with a very technical fact that I don't fully understand with GDDR5 being 'quad-pumped' (4 times faster than DDR3 at any given frequency) - (you'll see evidence of what I'm talking about when you view your memory clock in GPUz, where it displays the REAL memory clock). Anyway, in NVidia Inspector, increase the memory by 200Mhz the first time you test, then in 100Mhz chunks thereafter. Each time you complete the 3DMark11 test view the GPU score, if it's not increasing anymore as you raise the memory clock, then stop your memory overclocking where it is. This is because GDDR5 has memory error correction. As memory overclock increases the rate at which errors occur outpace the rate of error correction, thereby resulting in a lower or not increased GPU score, so overclocking the memory beyond that point is futile & only serving to greater stress your card. Once you've reached your max stable overclock in 3DMark11 then do that 1 hour of gaming like your did for the core clock (make sure you have your core at your max overclock when you do this too). If it's stable, then you've now reached your max overclock for both the core & memory at stock voltage.

Increasing the voltage will enable you to reach higher core overclocks, but will increase temperature too. Keep you GPU below 90 degC. Increasing the voltage only affects the GPU core, not the VRAM, so adding more voltage will only enable you to get a higher core overclock, won't increase your VRAM overclock.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi!

my 7970m in my m17x r4 died on me last saturday (pity me).. now I am looking for an upgrade..

here are my choices:

4GB AMD Radeon 8970M

4GB nVidia GeForce GTX780M

I do have a couple of questions/clarifications for those who have upgraded their GPUs:

For 8970M

1. will I be encountering any problems when I will go with 8970M? I have read somewhere here in techinferno that there are problems with brightness controls?

2. what 8970M card will go smoothly with my r4?

3. Will I be losing enduro mode if I upgraded to 8970m?

4. Do I need to manually config the fan control for the GPU?

For GTX780M

1. I have read a lot of info about upgrading to GTX780M. And I am ready to buy the correct heatsink and correct x-bracket. My inquiry is, what GTX780M do I need to buy? from Dell or from Eurocom or from MSI?

2. Do I need to manually config the fan control for the GPU?

3. I saw a sweet deal for GTX780M, seller said that it came from an Alienware 17 laptop. Will it be compatible to my R4?

4. do nVidia cards have trouble when using the SLEEP function?

thank you very much in advance,

:)

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I just ordered an AMD Radeon 8970M from upgradeyourlaptop to replace my dead 7970m. I was supposed to order GTX780M but that would break my bank (gpu + x-bracket + heatsink). Any recommendations before my installation?

Hi there,

Ask them to flash the proper vBIOS (M17xR3) http://forum.techinferno.com/alienware-m17x-aw-17/4734-8970m-problems-my-m17x-r3.html#post66413

Hello, I have upgrade my 580m to 870m on my r3. Everything seems perfect except it gots throttling after it reaches 78 c. and it keeps low clock rate remains unless I restart my pc. Is there any solution for this phenomenon?

Check thermal pads and paste (78C) then flash 870M unlocked http://forum.techinferno.com/general-notebook-discussions/1847-nvidia-kepler-vbios-mods-overclocking-editions-modified-clocks-voltage-tweaks.html#post23432

vBIOS Flashing guide http://forum.techinferno.com/nvidia-video-cards/2166-%5Bguide%5D-nvidia-vbios-flashing.html

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  • 2 weeks later...
guys just wondering is it worth it to upgrade from I7-3740QM to the later i7-4XXQM? would it boost my gaming speed or would it be better if to upgrade the video card instead? thanks.

Definitely the video card, and also I'm not even sure if you can upgrade the CPU to the next generation CPU on a laptop - don't know if it would be compatible, but definitely upgrade the GPU before the CPU in your case.

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