New Alienware 17 R3 owner - Questions

i have just received my Alienware 17 R3
UHD, i7-6820HK, 980GTX 8GB, 16GB, 512GB ssd and 1Tb hard drive

I am not feeling as happy with it as I hoped and wondered if there were some tweaks or changes needed to the system before I send it back.

First off the SSD seems really slow. It is the PM951 and I understand this isn't the best, but a benchmark is showing write times of 100MB and it feels no faster to load or use than the hard drive. Is it really that bad?

Then there is the fans. When playing wow on full screen, they kick in like a jet plane. Much louder than I expected, and there is a high pitched whine occasionally. I can hear the fans in the next room almost

I also don't feel it is as fast as expected. I know I can't play wow at uhd ultra, but When I set wow to ultra and 1080p I am seeing fps dropping to 40s in places. I have a Samsung gamer 7 with gtx675 and this just isn't the significant leap I expected for a three year older laptop

Any thoughts appreciated as nearly £2000 is a lot when it doesn't feel like the huge leap I expected

 

You may want to do a fresh install of Windows, just because. Then download all the recommended drivers from Dell's site and install them.

Here's the thread on m.2 SSD's....

Here's the thread to some OC settings you can try.

Read this post on this thread. Problem solved......here's the direct link.

Have you checked your temps? Use HWiNFO64 to monitor your idle and max temps when gaming and report them here if you can.

Your write speed is obviously abnormal. I'd contact dell to have them send you out another m.2 SSD. Then use macrium or a similar software to clone your SSD.

I have the same AW as you and it is excellent. In fact, I like it so much that I have two 17R3's. The 6820HK is a beast and the 980M GPU is excellent. You'll have a lot of fun with OC'ing the CPU and GPU...more info here.

I wouldn't give up on your rig yet....it's one of the best cost to performance ratio laptops you can buy...let alone one that looks good and well built. I'd highly recommend doing a repaste and you'll be very happy that you did. More info here....

 

I made a thread about the fans but it's long buried. Basically use hwinfo and you can set custom fan curves. There's also a command line you want to add to the config file but you should go find the thread or Google since I don't know it off the top of my head. If you're a temp nut, take it apart and put some high quality paste on it to further lower temps.

 

I have fully reinstalled as I have a Windows Pro licence and want a clean version of that. Was pleasently surprised to see the laptop has a TPM chip as I want to use bit locker and didn't think Alienware came with one. I am not at the moment as I know it will affect speeds

Okay, I have downloaded hwinfo64 and I assume I need to load sensor settings and log them for a while whilst
I play a game?

Also downloaded crystaldisk and as ssd and will benchmark the ssd and upload as experienced eyes will make more sense of it than I

 

You can also use AlienAdrenaline to monitor / record your GPU temps and other usages.

 

People get FAR too caught up in benchmarks. Not attacking you at all here, but why do you say the SSD is slow? By a benchmark? Or does it take a long time to load your games?

And WOW? I played that since the 2004 release and it is VERY intensive on the CPU. Your machine will have no issues playing it, but to say it is running on old code, would be an understatement. Your fans kick it to cool the machine. I am baffled by the people who think they are buying a gaming laptop and will get "silent" performance. You play graphic and cpu intensive games, you have to cool it off. If you go in your BIOS, you will see a setting in there to disable performance mode for the fans. If you do that, the fans won't blow 100% and will quite down. However, I don't care what laptop you purchase, they will all be loud on the fans when you are gaming.

Again, don't go by FPS or benchmarks, the machine you have will play absolutely anything at ultra, smoothly. If you are not happy with it, then send it back, but don't base it on games that are antiquated vs today's hardware.

 

The reason I am concerned is because the fans are significantly louder than any computer I have had in the past. I have had gaming laptops including a XPS dual SLI way back and it was never so noisy. When I turned Performance on the fans were full blast immediately and I didn't expect that. This might be normal or maybe I just need to make some changes, hence asking

Looking at hwinfo I think maybe the fan profiles may need tweaking? Are the default fan profiles a little too powerful?

The SSD and HD for crystalmark are uploaded as well as AS SSD. I agree about the fact people get caught up on benchmaks, however when paying premium prices (although I accept you can pay a lot more) I expected it to feel faster, and my harddrive laptop boots and acts as fast as this. Maybe I just expected too much, that I always possible

 

Dont use fan performance mode. Its way too loud. The standard fan profile is fine anyway.

 

Again, the fan curve is whack in the aw. Use hwinfo and customize the fan curve to your liking. Just make sure temps are ok during tests.

 

Oh i found the standard to be quite good. It always stays under 80c during maximum load while the gpu never is passing 65c.

 

Oh, I didn't mean to imply the factory fan curve sucks. It does the job cooling, but when you have fans roaring it had better do the job. At stock fan curves if I played any game in 4k even if it were really easy to run, my fans would be at max, and it's incredibly loud. If you're ok with that, then no problems there. But if it's too loud, that's when hwinfo comes in.

 

This might explain the issues I am having. The fans really roar when playing wow at 4K, pretty much immediAtely on starting the game but that makes sense if the fan profile is conservative

So, I can change the fan profile using hwinfo and it is quieter. So this may be a solution, but it will obviously get warmer, so I just need to adjust so the CPU stays below 80 and GPU below 65 are good values to aim for?

Maybe extra cooling is a thought also.

I do like the build of the machine, the screen is amazing. It's just a shame the standard SSD is a tad slow, but it looks like the machine can take 2 ssd so I could get a 950 and still keep this?

 

Check out the repaste thread on there. I posted detailed screenshots of my temps after running some benchmarks. You can take a look and see if those are too hot for you. They're all using my custom fan curve through hwinfo.

 

I am still torn as the laptop is really amazing apart from this. However, I know it's just my sensitivity

I have done some playing with hwinfo and can quieten it down, just have to make sure it stays cool enough. I spoke with dell technical support who said that the fan profile is noisier on purpose to mitigate against thermal throttling in the r2 variant and customers prefer the increase in noise of fan to this which I can appreciate

If I "under fan" what would happen, will it throttle or shutdown?

 

it will throttle and GPU temps over 80C start to degrade the chip slowly. But the AW15R2 and AW17R3 are fairly quiet machines to begin with for gaming laptops. I wouldnt tweak it to be honest.