Quix Omega

Don't bother overclocking the processor, that won't help. Overclock the graphics card.

Sounds like you got a top-notch one. Mine starts artifacting after 1150Mhz on the GPU. No artifacts with the RAM clocked up to 1500. I'm running 1100/1400 daily right now and it seems perfectly stable.

The thermal paste goes on the TOP on the chips, between the chip and the heatsink. The GPU IS soldered on to the motherboard.

Propping up the notebook works great, I've found unused Jenga blocks are a good option but preitty much anything will work, I've noticed a 5-7C difference, no idea what that is in imperial. You guys just need to switch to metric like the rest of the world

There is no option to disable battery charging. If I recall correctly, there have been some questions on this over at notebookreview.com and Luis @ Alienware answered that this feature is not necessary on the R2 because it doesn't charge the battery if the battery is full. You can search for that post over there if you like, I may be remembering it wrong.

m15chief, your CPU doesn't affect your 3Dmark11 score very much. But truthfully, you're better off with a slower chip in this sort of notebook. The performance difference is very small and they put out less heat. A high end CPU isn't really neccessary to feed the mid-range GPU. Shared cooling means that less CPU heat means the cooler can dissipate more heat from your GPU (which is why ratinox is testing without boost to eliminate this as a possible issue). I've run a lot of tests on my m14x R2 and it's not throttling under any load I put it under so I'm running with turbo boost enabled. It's nice to see what a little tweaking can do, this is nearly GTX 675m performance. I can see why Nvidia locked these down.

I would not recommend buying an Alienware m14x R1, a lot of people have had overheating issues.

I've used Arctic Silver 5 many times without any issues. IC Diamond is pretty good too, I use it on laptops because it's very thick. I'm not worried about it moving around when I transport the laptop around. It is true that it can scratch the CPU if you don't use it correctly. With the IC Diamond my temps are down about 8C on both CPU and GPU on my m14x R2.

You might want to try loosening up the screws slightly, if they're really really tight it can cause problems with vibrations. I don't mean make them loose, just tight enough, not over-tightened. Also, make sure the tape, cable and anything else are not interfering with the fan blades when it's assembled.

Yeah, these little guys are quite impressive. Considering the (relatively) low price and size there seems to be a lot of overhead in this design.

Well, I followed all the instructions to the letter and it seems to have worked. I haven't noticed anything unusual other than that the GPU clocks seem to be set to 950/1000 stock, not the 950/1400 mentioned in the first post on this thread. I managed to clock it up to 1030/1500 for a quick test without issues but the GPU starts to artifact with the clock above about 1100. All in, pretty good. Edit: 1130/1500 http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6039838

This sounds good. I'll give try it out when I get home.

+1 from me.

I repasted my system with IC Diamond about a month ago. Temperatures are down about 5C at load, my m14x R2 didn't run that hot in the first place so this lowers it down to surprisingly cool territory. I would have just used my old tube of AS5 but it had already separated. I have several systems with AS5 installed on them including a server that has been on 24/7 for 8 years without any important drop in effectiveness. As long as I don't have to replace the IC Diamond in the next 3-5 years I'm going to use this notebook I'll be happy. Repasting notebooks is a huge pain, i can't believe people have the time to do it on a regular basis. Maybe I'm just getting old.

Wake on wlan is not supported on the m14x R2 (at least on BIOS A10). You do understand it would drain the battery constantly, right? It would only really make sense if you left it plugged in all the time.

Watch the battery life on the Y500, it doesn't have Optimus. The Y580 does and should be ok.

That should be a good machine, I took a look at one but since no one has figured out how to flash the ones that ship with secure boot with 3rd party bioses I decided against it. I give svl7 a good chance of getting it to work. The Insyde recovery flash should work on that too, I'm pretty sure it's an Insyde bios.

Good, the last thing anyone needs is a notebook with horrible overheating problems. I think it's not quite time for these thin, powerful computers. Maybe Haswell will run cooler.

I had several of these over a few months this summer while Dell tried to actually find one that would work properly. Any Bios newer than A04 throttles the GPU in favour of the CPU and A04 runs the GPU at full boost and throttles the CPU to 1.2Ghz (at least the quad core unit I had). I also had problems with the screens, lots of dead pixels and overall poor screen quality, the Wi-Fi performance ranged from bad to totally unusable (Apparently different units are worse than others). Additionally I had issues with build quality, all but one had at least one part of the system that was not assembled correctly, including one where the touchpad was unusable because it was installed too far to the left so it stuck down after every click. That's the troubles I had with this thing, I'm sure there are some people who didn't have as many issues but I eventually just gave up and they gave me a full refund (after two months). As for heat, I saw some ridiculous temperatures. The cooling system is just not powerful enough for the components in the system. It's all cooled by one tiny fan and it vents directly into the back of the screen cover. I've seen it get to 95C on the CPU and 85 on the GPU at the same time. Who knows why I bought another Dell after this, there just wasn't anything else that interested me. Haven't had any issues with the Alienware, except that it shipped out missing a screw that I've since installed myself. I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't disassembled it to repaste it.

If you buy a mSATA SSD consider buying a Sandforce model, because they're limited to only 4 channels the compression really helps performance. I did a lot of research into this because I bought my ADATA SX300. It's still not as fast as a 2.5" SSD but it's pretty much as good as you can get in an mSATA drive.

You might be able to convince them to replace the entire unit. It really would be cheaper for them than continuing on.

If the parts are out of stock get them to replace it with a new unit. They'll normally just give you a brand new unit if yours isn't very old and they're out of parts. I haven't had any issues with my m14x R2, which is good because I probably would have given up and bought a Mac if I had problems with it after all the issues I had with my XPS L521x and the 2 replacement units with the same problems.

Considering the specs of the 730m it would be a downgrade. They'll probably end up putting a Geforce 750m, which will be a re-branded 660m or something of the sort. It'll be available when Broadwell notebooks come out around June-July. It could be worse, at least they reduced the series numbers on these. The Geforce GTX 460 and GTX 560 were basically exactly the same card.

I opened my m14x R2 with a guide for the R1 and everything looked identical. I certainly believe the board would physically fit and the cables seem to be in the same places.

Put a round dot in the center of the GPU die.