Area 51m CPU advice needed

I bought a Area 51m R1 2 months ago with just the basics. (all I could afford). I have an I7 9700 with a 1660 Ti graphics card and the base 16 GB RAM.
My question is, is it worth is to downgrade to an I5 9600k(or kf) or save up and get the 9700k. From what I've read the 9600k is comparable to the 9700 when overclocked, but I'm curious if the thermals would be better with the I5 vs the I7.

P.S. probably not going to get the gpu upgrade for at least a year.

Thanks for the input guys.

 

Downgrade the CPU to make money? Seems kind of strange unless someone gave you a killer deal on the i5.

Why not save up for a Alienware Graphics Amplifier? I am still learning about those units but thought they could drive the internal display too. Not sure if 51m supports that.

 

I don't quite understand your line of thinking here. Why would you downgrade from an i7 to an i5? How are your temps? Are you overheating? Is that why your trying to lower the CPU?

I don't even know if that CPU will work on that MB, I don't think it was ever offered as an option so it may not even boot with it installed. It should, but I honestly also wouldn't be surprised if it didn't. The 9700 should be more then enough for CPU horsepower unless you really really want to OC it.

I would leave it as is and see what comes down the pipe for GPU upgrades down the road if your thinking of upgrading that anyways.

From what I have read no they don't work on the internal display, which makes no sense why they would not try to get around that. You need to use an external display to use the GA on the A51m.

 

Ugh dumb.

 

9600k works fine, but avoid the KF models. Using them will disable thunderbolt.

The internal display of the 51m is hard wired to the internal nvidia dGPU. There is no hardware provision for easily rendering an image on one Nvidia GPU and outputting it on another over PCIe. If there were, we wouldn't need things like SLI or NVLink. A few applications support this over software, but it is a less than good experience.

Realistically, the 51m is only offered with a 1080p display and the 2060, 2070 and 2080 GPU offerings are all very capable at that resolution. I for one am very grateful Alienware didn't sacrifice all the benefits of the current GPU arrangement just to more easily allow the AGA to send an image back to the built in display. I think if you consider the alternative would be to use Optimus or thunderbolt, we lose a lot of what makes the AGA / 51m combo special in the first place.

 

Overclock an locked i7-9700 ?

 

I was insinuating that the 9700 is more then enough, unless he wants to overclock, then he needs something else.

 

wait so you mean to see that if one buys the graphics amplifier it needs to be hooked up to an external monitor otherwise there would be no benefit to the laptop's own display?

 

I won't rule out there being a benefit in some very specific situations, but generally speaking, this is the case for any Alienware laptop where the built-in display is directly wired to the laptops dGPU such as the Area 51m, 15r4 and 17r5.

In the absence of a hardware method for rendering on one GPU and outputting on another like Optimus, there is the option of using software based methods like DXGI. This is possible with Windows 10 and the graphics settings options for designating high performance and power saving graphics settings. Using this adds considerable PCIe bandwidth overhead and a bit of latency.

I've tried this on the 51m and at 1080p, an external 2080ti is slower than the built-in 2070. In contrast, the same 2080ti with an external display plugged directly into it performs within 5% of a desktop 9900k system.

Also, you must turn off GSYNC for this to work at all.
https://www.dell.com/support/articl...er-not-working-when-g-sync-is-enabled?lang=en

 

Thanks for this, this makes sure I never buy a graphics amplifier again! I had one on my previous Area-51m which I sold because it was too big, I didn't even use it I just bought it initially *just in case*

 

It's definitely not for everyone but this arrangement does make the 51m one of the best portable workstations ever made when docked.

With the TB3 and AGA both getting 4x dedicated PCIe lanes, you can effectively give the 51m desktop quality expansion using a GPU compute card in the AGA (Tesla V100) and another 10gbe LAN / video capture / high speed storage / other 4x PCIe card via a thunderbolt enclosure.

My only real complaints are the lack of 10gb USB, the embarrassing bios support for anything over 2400 RAM and unnecessary throttling nonsense.

Frankly, I've asked my Dell rep several times to pass along just how awesome an interface like the AGA would be for the precision series. We don't need a 16x PCIe interface for 90w TDP limited Quadro 5000 cards...break some of those lanes off for an external PCIe enclosure so we can use real GPUs externally when docked at a job site.

 

I broke down and got one of those cool Alienware external screens. I probably would of not bothered had the internal display been accelerated, likely happier in the end. No clue yet since my AGA is empty and display will stay in the box.