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Well we've done it, the M18x-R1 just crossed the 9k GPU barrier with a SINGLE video card! Major props to @svl7 for his vbios, to nVidia for building Kepler (what an amazing GPU) and to Alienware for designing some awesome cooling, without any of the aforementioned this wouldn't be possible.

Vantage world record for a single mobile GPU as well:

Second post ('Test versions') updated with three new Dell 680m mods. If you decide to flash any of it, please let me know how it performs, else I can't improve them. I don't have a 680m myself.

2*8gb = 16gb

I've used it and it doesn't work. Can't actually boot into windows when flashed unfortunately.

Quantity Item Number Description 1 000DICE Box containing 10kg of dry ice, cut in 10x15x5cm blocks Should help those high CPU temps you get at 5GHz :D

@svl7: Yeah, I remember that 3DM scores peaked at +100/200 MHz with M17x R4 stock BIOS as well, so the throttle seems to be in effect.

This is why NBR is a joke of a forum. All those people that blindly post at that place w/out looking for much better alternatives (ahem T|I) deserve to get shafted over and over by those mods. If any company asked us to censor posts on T|I, we'd tell them to get lost (posts breaking NDA/law are exceptions).

svl7 here is the gpu-z log file for the Dell 680m. Dell 680m 850-889 3dmark11.txt

In my m17x R4 (with stock bios) the card starts to throttle, if I use more than 80 Mhz oc. 800 plus turbo is without problems. Anything above is sh......

What I find especially puzzeling is the fact that the "deep" throttling with brief spikes down into the 200eds happens primarily with benchmark tools: for me, most prominently with 3DM11 and Vantage (as many other have stated, above +100 MHz OC Core, + 200 MHz OC mem), and less so with Unigine Heaven (for me, it's "stable" up to 900+ MHz). In games, I've yet to experience this behaviour. What's more, a higher OC yields a definite performance increase in gaming as expected, so it is only because of the throttling that 3DM scores start to go down again. However, there's another "soft" throttling that's especially apparent for me in WoW. Rather that erratically fluctuating between around 200 and max for less than a second, the GPU will clock to different freqs for extended periods of time. Most often when doing so, it will stay above default at 720+ MHz, seldom it will clock down to around 650 MHz. I am not sure that this is the same underlying mechanism, it could just be the "bored throttle" with less demanding games. It does, however, happen even when power settings are set to prefer maximum performance rather than adaptive and not only in less demanding scenes.

GPU Boost is from 719 to 758

Hi! As someone already mentioned seems like there isn't that much love here for the little man, M11x. Since I just received M11x-R3 as a replacement for my old cursed R1, I thought I can give some short info about the differences and similarities between the two releases. (Even if its what, 9 months after its original release.) Comparing to the old M11x-R1, this one has: - significantly better screen - Klipsch audio (the on-board speakers sound fantastic), - nicer matte exterior - gigabit lan instead of 100mbit - USB 3.0 - lacks VGA port - faster CPU - better battery life - most importantly faster GPU; it's now nVidia GT540M instead of GT335M Specs. Intel Core i7 2637m 1.7GHz (2.8GHz Turboboost) nVidia GT540M 2GB GPU 8GB RAM 1333 MHz 750GB HD 7200RPM Looks. New matte surface looks really nice and does not have old gloss. Screen. Significant improvement from R1 in terms of both viewing angles and color reproduction (even though R1 I had had kind of blueish tone; but we're assuming here an average M11x does not own a professional screen calibrator) and I didn't manage to do much better using a Windows Calibrator. Its a bit brighter too. The brightness levels match when R3 is set to about 75% of its max brightness. It's difficult to give a good impression of the screen quality through photos but I'll give it a shot. Here we see, from left to right: M17x-R2 RGB LED, Thinkpad X200T Samsung PVA SuperBright screen, M11x-R1 screen, M11x-R3 screen: This is how far screen can be pushed on each laptop and how the picture looks like then: The two things about the screen that I don't like is that it is still glossy and that black colors are poor (like on any "standard" screen). Performance. Stock Settings. GPU clock: 672 MHz, Memory 900 MHz, Shader 1344 MHz. 3DMark06: ~8500 3dMark11: 984 Fan is roughly the same level as on R1, it has a deeper hair-dryer tone when its working and I didn't find it distracting (it's a bit less loud then M17x). (Updated data will come during next couple of days; lost the screenshots when I restored the hard drive.) EDIT: I tried overclocking the CPU in BIOS, but for some reason it won't let me change the settings. Any ideas? Also, which software do you guys use for overclocking the nvidia cards? EDIT2 (04/03/2012): Overclocked. GPU clock: 815 MHz, Memory 1050 MHz, Shader: 1631 MHz. 3DMark11: 1169 (about 19% increase) Crysis 2: DX11, high resolution textures, all settings maxxed out on Ultra, around 15-20FPS outdoors with action going on. (no screenshot provided) Battlefield 3: Ultra settings with Shadows on High (see screenshot for settings; close to maxxing it out), getting around 25-40FPS outdoors with lots of action going on. Tested single player only however. Overall temperatures look pretty good. With this overclock (if I try going higher, the card automatically downclocks on stock), I am getting around 70-75 C max on full (100%) GPU load and no artifacts whatsoever. With stock setting its only few degrees less. Also, this is with CPU on stock settings, haven't played around with CPU overclocking, which is possible using the standard Alienware BIOS so no modding required. I'll try to get some more games on this computer just to see what we can expect. So far, it definitely looks like a beast with a nice overclock potential without requiring anything special -- I simply used MSI Afterburner and worked like a charm. EDIT 3: Added the screenshot of the M11x-R3 screen information if anyone is interested in the exact model.