WYLCaRD

Thanks for the advice there Brian. After the attempted bios flash, my system now starts up then stalls just before windows loads up. All I get on the top left is a flashing cursor. However, after a soft reboot (Ctrl,Alt,Del) it loads properly and still runs ok. Tried having a look at the bios and nothing seems out of place. I guess my system is that old even the bios can't be updated (A03). Oh well, at least it's still running. Also, with the spikes, a friend suggested running the game without SLi using just one GPU and guess what? It worked! What I can't work out is why Alienware built the M17x with 2 GPU's but a powersupply that's too weak to run them both at the same time under heavier conditions. With the one card running, I was even able to increase some detail levels and have no performance hit at all. Stoked!

Thanks for the suggestion mate! I was lucky enough that when I drained the battery then plugged it back in, the beast booted up properly. *Phew* Some cold sweat moments there though. Trying to find out more on updating my bios at the moment as I'm running an A03 on my R2.

Thanks! It's ppl like you that make this place tick. Anyway, I did a little more research and found that I may have to upgrade the CPU because the Q9000 doesn't like too much thrown at it. Possibly a QX9300 I'm thinking, which I'll have to gather more info for. Also, I managed to recover from an almost disastrous bios reflash while trying to update - posted on another thread. Got the bios (A09) off the Dell US site but it apparently wasn't compatible. I was wondering if I need to update the bios sequentially? That is going from A03 (which is what mine is) to A05 then A06 etc? Or can I just go straight to A10 and bypass the rest. I'm seeing on here that the A10 seems to be a popular version - with unlocked varieties to boot. Thanks for the help.

Hey all, tried updating my bios and to A09 and it came up that the bios could no be d flashed. That's when I noticed my keyboard stopped working. Cursor was still going so I shut down and the screen starts doing all funny stuff before freezing up and now nothing works, not even the power button. Is there any way to recover it or do I send it back to Dell? It's out of warranty as well.

Thanks for the reply. As I'm not familiar with PC geekspeak, treat me like a 6 year old. How would I 'repaste' the CPU? Heating sounds like the most likely culprit along with the cores in the CPU not optimised for the game software. Will rigging the cooling help?

Hey there all you Techmeisters! I've been experiencing some major CPU spikes while playing Battlefield 3. It seems to occur at 10-15 second intervals. I've turned everything to low or off with only the screen resolution staying on 1920x1200 because the resolution didn't make any difference to the spiking. In game, I've done a performance overlay and the spikes really do go off the chart when it hits. Frame rates drop from 60-70 down to 10 and I even loose audio till the spike settles. Obviously I get killed a lot because of it - nothing worse than having someone in your sights then *boom* CPU spikes and you're dead Anyway, I've tried Razer's Game Booster and Process Lasso to inhibit background programs from interfering - this is after I've already shut down all non essential processes and services - and no difference. It's like there's a bottleneck in the processing. Anyone with the same issues? My system's got a Q9000 quad CPU, SLi GTX 280's and 8Gb RAM. Mind you in between spikes, the game runs pretty sweetly. Cheers.