Alienware M17 R4 - Does it have overdrive ?

Hello!
One of the best laptops in 2021 would be the 17.3" Area M17 R4. It has 150+15W RTX 3080 VGA (15.6' model DOES NOT, only the 17.3 !) and 330W power adapter. No other BGA laptops have this.
It also supports FHD 360 Hz G-Sync panel.

However my main concern is: Does it have LCD overdrive factory enabled? If yes, can it be disabled?

I had a very bad experience with the Clevo X170SM-G which display inverse ghosting on both the 240 hz and 300 Hz panels.
If you do not know what inverse ghosting is, here is a very detailed explanation:


The X170 displayed a very bad and very visible inverse ghosting with most titles I tried. I suspected this is because Clevo factory enabled LCD overdrive, however there is no option to disable it.
I confirmed this with games, benchmark software and UFO test.

I confirmed this with the new G733QS. That also displayed inverse ghosting (much less visible and much less game breaking than with the X170) which was gone if I disabled overdrive. MSI and ASUS allows overdrive to be disabled to fix inverse ghosting.

I have two questions:
1) Does DELL also enables LCD overdrive on this new laptop by default?
2) IF they enable it, do they allow it to be turned off or they are doing the same as Clevo and they are forcing users to accept the inverse ghosting?

Can anyone with this new laptop confirm which one it is ?

 

I'm an AW owner and have been for some time, but I don't know if I necessarily agree with that statement. Once you say "BGA", the notion of it being one of the best laptops for the year becomes questionable. You could argue it's one of the better BGA laptops out there, but even then we have the whole inverted MB, soldered RAM, soldered WiFi, and the now useless AGA port. It's also running with an Intel CPU, further pulling into question the notion of it being one of the best. I think it's safe to say the Ampere GPU has been hobbled for the mobile segment, Intel has lost its foothold on silicone supremacy, and BGA/soldered components that limit user upgrade options are bad consumer trends. The AW M17 R4 is a "good" BGA laptop in what it does, but is not an overall good product when it comes to value over time.

However, you're not here to discuss the merits of laptop design.

The M17 R4 has different screen options, so it might be important to know which display you're asking about. I'm assuming you're talking about the higher refresh rate model, which there doesn't seem to be a part number yet available for. AUO appears to be the primary vendor for AW displays, of which I cannot find a 360Hz panel (at least where I'm looking). Panel Look doesn't yet list that refresh rate as an available part, so it's difficult to determine what features that particular part comes with. AUO does make a 300 Hz panel, that reflects sub 10ms response times, which is pretty good when it comes to preventing ghosting. Reviews that are available for the M17 R4 don't seem to mention panel issues but Notebookcheck is the only site I know of that does real deep dives into display performance, which has not yet reviewed this unit.

 

The lcd panel overdrive causing inverse ghosting has been an issue with laptops for years now because some manufacturers factory enable it. Many Asus, MSI and Acer owners reported this before those manufacturers added an option to disable it. This is sad because 9/10 reviewers like Notebookcheck or the "experts" in youtube never mentioned this. The internet is full of users seeing this annoying corona effect in games, but reviewers "forgot" to even mention it. Only found 1-2 reviewers mentioning this inverse ghosting / corona effect, but even they only did this after laptops started to have an option to disable it.
To my knowledge, just like Clevo AW does not have this option yet so only way to found out if it has factory enabled overdrive or not is to buy it and test it. Clevo factory enabled this option in the x170 and can not be disabled so users have to accept a screen with inverse ghosting there. Some users even tried to explain that this is "normal" and it can be "fixed" if you lower the refresh rate to 60. I think these users just wanted to calm themselves that they did not throw out their money in a factory defective machine.
The question is, does AW also enable overdrive and force users to use and accept it like clevo does ?

Why doesn't reviewers mention this ?
1) the so called "experts" have no idea what to look for and probably falsely believe that what they are seeing is normal

2) they are afraid to mention a basic design flaw like this because if they rip the laptop apart and state that people need to avoid it, then they would not get a free review unit next time