Alienware 17 R4 bios problems?

anyone can explain to me the bios problems on AW 17 R4 ? i am getting a second hand 7820HK version for 1900$ and i am worried if i will get any issue later. it's a high price to pay so i want to know what should i expect. it has bios 1.0.5 and i've heard problems about alienfx not working not sure if it's related

 

Well, I got a used one as well on BIOS 1.08. With that one, I felt the fans were not getting up to speed as fast as necessary given the high CPU temps. Looking back, the very sudden temp spike might have been alleviated by the repaste, I'm not sure as I've pretty much immediately upgraded to the latest at the time (1.2.3) which did change the fan behaviour to becoming pretty loud, but brought the temp spike under control. I did the repaste and now it's better, but I still wish I could limit the max fan speed as I feel I could take some temp increase for a noticeable decrease in noise while gaming (not sure if max values were the same on 1.0.8 or not).

Now, the main problem is that the BIOS 1.2.3 brought initial fixes for the Intel Spectre/Meltdown bugs which changed the CPU microcode so they're locked out and there's no safe way to get back to the older BIOS versions. They were also problematic as I experienced occasional BSOD's.

BIOS 1.2.4 brought updated microcode changes and is again locked out. I haven't experienced any BSOD's yet with it, but my computer did freeze once while idling in desktop.

I can't comment on the BIOS versions between 1.0.5 and 1.2.1, but those were not locked out so you could try out (I notice 1.0.8 being mentioned by many as the version of their choice), but if I could go back, I would certainly wait before updating to these 1.2.3/1.2.4 to see if all the issues would get ironed out and if the performance hit caused by these fixes is acceptable.

 

do you recommend getting the AW 17 R4 ?

 

Well, apart from getting mine from some shady guy and having some nasty scuffs and marks and seeing it was pretty unprofessionally disassembled earlier (some screws missing, some in wrong places), I have no issues with mine apart from those BIOS quirks and that it REALLY needed a thermal paste change.

I'm not convinced mine actually needed a thermal pad change (as the Thermal Grizzly pads I used seem to be somewhat thinner than what they should be so it was a mess patching it all up), so if I could go back, I'd just do a repaste with some better TIM and see how it goes.

I would prefer if the GPU was replaceable, but I'm counting on using the external GPU in the future.

Oh, and my service tag is not recognized on the support pages, not sure how's that possible. Motherboard change?