*OFFICIAL* Alienware Area-51M R1 Owner's Lounge

Usually faculty members ask why are you carrying heavy and bulky laptop[AlienFX off and it looks like China based rip-offs], I tell them its very old laptop and they say okay carry on... We're used to thin laptops and seeing bulky laptop is first time for me!

 

Is that confirmed or just speculation? I sadly have never looked at the VRM on the Max-Q variant so I'm not sure.

@Papusan, that really didn't shed any light on anything. We already know that the cards are downclocked via firmware to run at lower voltages/temps to hit noise specs. It still doesn't change that it's not a cut down process like the M cards of old. If you're going to hate on Max-Q, you may as well hate on every laptop GPU that has come before. If the Max-Q variant allows for more options, especially in the thin and light area, then I'm all for it. For me it's nice to be able to do some solid modeling/gaming on the go but nothing serious. If I wanted something serious, I'd do that on the desktop with proper hardware that has proper cooling. But like I said, different strokes for different folks.

Anyway, I've derailed this thread enough, a couple more days before NDA, I hope it's interesting.

 

Remember when laptops with 980 desktop cards was released in 2015? We had m branded cards in same number series (etc 980m) with equal lower performance as today’s Max-Q vs. N branded graphics models. They was cheaper.

Today we have same lower performance with Max-Q vs. Normal graphics but at same high prices.

This is Wrong direction! You pay same for less performance. Give us back m cards at lower price point. The <not> cut down silicon doesn’t bring what people want. Only higher prices.

 

Aside from the very late released GTX980 they were ALL M variants with much much lower performance than the Max-Q. They were not cheaper by any means though. Laptops with a 970M/980M were expensive, I only eyed them for a long time before deciding the just stick with desktops...

 

What was the performance hit with 980m vs. desktop cards with same number series?

If the Max-Q branding wasn’t thrown out we probably would have differences in prices. And Nvidia know that.

Now everything is priced equal. Lackluster performance doesn’t matter.

 

I mean the 1060 Max-Q is much much faster than a 980M. And the 980M was roughly equivalent to the desktop 960. The 1060 Max-Q is just a small percentage away from the full fledged 1060. I see it as going in a good direction. I see Max-Q products in low end Dells and such, I'm not sure how you can say they are priced the same.

 

You look at the weaker and cheaper ends of cards. RTX 2080 Max-Q and N cards will most likely be priced about equal.

And I’m not sure 980m had 960 desktop cards performance.

 

I welcome you to look it up. It was marginally faster than a 960 but much slower than a 970. Also getting a gaming laptop for ~800 bucks was unheard of back then. I remember paying much more for a 860m, 960m, etc...

 

980m vs. 960 desktop cards. Release a not cut down chips with less performance but at same prices (Max-Q) was Nvidia’s smart move milk more money. If I buy a slower Cpu I expecting pay less. I won’t pay same prices for lesser performance. Nope won’t happen. BGA or MXM design doesn’t matter.

 

Going from memory the top dog card ‘m’ variant card was usually the 2nd tier desktop card spec wise, just underclocked a little.

680m = gtx 670
780m = gtx 770
980m = gtx 970

They were abundant and cheap enough to do your own upgrades. I remember nabbing a new 780m for $550 and picking up x2 for the old m18x. The 980m came out the gates abit pricey but eventually came down.
This was the golden era of laptops.

Now the cards (MXM) are about $1100 to buy and performance dictated by firmware and power output. The nomenclature is almost meaningless.
But on a game of averages a 1080 would still probably average the next card down on a desktop. But just look at the pricing now.

 

@Papusan
I love how you derail most every thread with you BGA hate and is filth posts, not sure what Max Q GPU’s have to do with the M51.
There is a place for everything and it’s good to have a choice is it not?
If you want something thin and lite there’s something for that along with DTR that use your beloved “grown” up CPU’s.
Choice is good right?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...1m-owners-lounge.826831/page-43#post-10853867


http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...1m-owners-lounge.826831/page-43#post-10853885

 

Thank you for not ignoring those posts. A response was appropriate and you were not "derailing" anything. Neither was anyone else.

 

2....more.....days!!

I had two quizzes on Wednesday and a midterm on Friday.

I have another midterm this Friday....I should stay off NBR until Friday evening.

I hope some members here get the laptop soon. I'm sure lots of media outlets will be reviewing it eventually. Jan 29 isn't just for this laptop but all gaming laptops (RTX mobile series).

Let's see if we're actually lost performance this gen on mobile compared to last gen.

 

Feeling hot hot hot.

Lol

 

Take the heatsink off and count the number of core phases. For example, Clevo 1070 MXM vs. 1070 Max-Q.

 

I doubt it but maybe those of us that ordered the first day they were available might get them before our estimated due date. Would be nice if they were prebuilding the preorders. I can hope anyway. I can't wait to get my hands on mine.

 

I understand there is a use for a thin and light. None of my Dr’s would ever carry a Alienware or Clevo monstrosity into an exam room. My AW 18 has been in many board and executive meetngs. My AW18 has been to Hawaii several times lol

 

all this bickering, speculations and confusions are caused by Ngreedia's stupid NDA. They obviously failed to deliver on par desktop performance and decided to drag almost a month to let things cool down so jensen the big showoff wont take the heat during the launch event. RTX 2000 is a very power hungry gpu, much more thirsty than pascal counterparts. We all know it, there's no denying it, not even repackaged max q can save the day. you drastically decrease the TDP, the performance will go down the hill equally fast. And i agree, max q variants get sold equally expensive than non max q counterparts because it's fundamentally not a cut down GPU. it's the very same gpu which means the cost to nvidia is the same, so the cost gets passed down to laptop manufacturers then to us. We shouldn't be angry with laptop manufacturers or one another. we should be pointing fingers at Ngreedia, jensen and his greedy team. come on AMD, we need you to save the day! Give us a GPU miracle like what you did with Ryzen that kicked intel's axx!

 

I doubt they aren't considering this. It hasn't been that long yet since AMD put up a proper fight. Even Windows was recently proven to be having issues with properly utilizing AMD. Would really love a fully fledged Ryzen DTR in the future. For now, I'll settle with Intel.

 

Well, luckily for me, microsoft has hit their self-destruct button with Windows 10 (from forced updates and telemetry, to aggressive and abusive advertising), thus making my transition to Linux complete. I'm finally free to customize and use my systems however I see fit, in a highly efficient and reasonably safe manner. Yes, it takes a small learning curve to get the skills, depending on what you want/need to do, but hey, you can't pilot a spaceship using a bunch of tile ads, cortana and Candy Crush! If I could have things my way, I would make ALL Alienware laptops fully compatible with Linux (they mostly are, but things like Command Center may still need some love) and create new partnerships in the gaming industry to encourage more and more top gaming vendors write games for linux. That would teach Microsoft not take their customers for granted.
My next Alienware will never boot windows.

 

Here is a better comparison:


That shows just how far we've come when it comes to GPUs in laptops. People have been spoiled by pascal in the fact that you can get Desktop performance in a laptop. I'd rather have a Max-Q that's almost as fast as the desktop card than a "M" variant that is two series slower. Plus there are still non-Max-Q cards out there so we have the best of both worlds really.

Here you go for today's 1080 options:

 

*High end* Max-Q lose more and more against full desktop cards. And at max price.

GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q is a desktop RTX 2080 but up to 50 percent underclocked

 

I'm not debating that it's underclocked. Anyway we've derailed this enough.

 

The 10 series is vastly different than the 20 series. The 10 series cannot be compared to the 20 series cause of the DLSS and RTX cores, making the way the architecture works vastly different. They do the same work, but how they get to their end result is different. That's why intel is stuck @14nm and AMD can produce 7nm chips already.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ts-video-articles.805342/page-3#post-10536125

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Opini...-efficiency-minimum-performance.232038.0.html

Edit: It's along read, so if you want to skip everything and go to the conclusion:

"All in all, from my perspective this appears to be largely a gimmick for sales to customers — the work for cooling is there, I will never in my life discount this — but why wasn't it there before? Why are the 1080 Max-Q cards still called “GTX 1080” despite every known example performing like a GTX 1070? An average of 1400MHz on a 1080 (notebook) Max-Q is not a “slight” drop in performance for efficiency compared to a properly engineered laptop with a GTX 1080; it is a huge drop, approaching a 30 percent reduction in performance but for the same price! And, more importantly for marketing, for the same name."

 

I'm not sure how vastly different they really are when it comes to Max-Q vs non-max-q, but then again until tomorrow the only people that know for sure can't say anything. I'm not sure how linking an opinion article on NBC and a rant on NBR proves your point though. My original question was why the hate for Max-Q. Every review/test seems to show the Max-Q variant sitting right in the middle of the respective non-max-q and then the lower end tier. It's not two tiers slower like the old "M" cards were. My point is we should be thankful we have options and that said options are much better than what we had two generations ago.

 

Like decaf coffee. There is a time and a place for Max Q GPU’s.
Time = never
Place = in the trash

 

It's not a rant, it's being stated that it's an opinion. This already shows your ignorance of something very simple: language. but except from that: "My original question was why the hate for Max-Q. Every review/test seems to show the Max-Q variant sitting right in the middle of the respective non-max-q and then the lower end tier."

Why are the 1080 Max-Q cards still called “GTX 1080” despite every known example performing like a GTX 1070? An average of 1400MHz on a 1080 (notebook) Max-Q is not a “slight” drop in performance for efficiency compared to a properly engineered laptop with a GTX 1080; it is a huge drop, approaching a 30 percent reduction in performance but for the same price! And, more importantly for marketing, for the same name."

"It's not two tiers slower like the old "M" cards were. My point is we should be thankful we have options and that said options are much better than what we had two generations ago."

Why are the 1080 Max-Q cards still called “GTX 1080” despite every known example performing like a GTX 1070? An average of 1400MHz on a 1080 (notebook) Max-Q is not a “slight” drop in performance for efficiency compared to a properly engineered laptop with a GTX 1080; it is a huge drop, approaching a 30 percent reduction in performance but for the same price! And, more importantly for marketing, for the same name."

it's not about performance, it's about price. If you still cannot understand that, than you should buy an crippled machine with an Max-q. I'm thinking that my 1080 can keep up with a underclocked max-q RTX 2080 easily (can run 2100Mhz core and 670+ on memory easily)

 

I think you need to cool your jets a little my friend. I've already said that it's a shame that NVIDIA and the laptop manufacturers do not clarify if it's a max-q variant. Anyway, I'm done posting about this topic, I've said my piece and I'll leave it at that.

 

I have a few Gelids here and have not used them yet because they appear to be as hard as the Arctic thermal pads? I know exactly what you mean and Dell do use very compressible thermal pads in many spots already.

 

On paper arctics are softer but they compress less deep than Gelids. Dell pads feel. Soft but they have some form of a cloth weave inside which makes them less than ideal. Also they use too thick pads on some spots.

 

If anyone honestly thinks using the battery you will be able to play AAA games you are barking up the wrong tree. You want to game with potato graphics then that’s what you will get. Surfing the web with tweaking should allow you to get 2 hours battery life.

 

As much as I want this as well, it is but a distant dream. Sadly the market share determines the kind of support it will get. Just like what happened with AMD right now.

 

I'm honestly surprised at how often this is poping up. I get some people want more power than the max-q cards on the go. And that's fine so long as you can plug it in somewhere. But, then when someone makes the comparison to something like a macbook or a gs65 and how good its battery life is. . .it's like what?!

 

They will not. They care about "thinness", and like the Apple and the Dell XPS, it is a race to the thinnest, not to the coolest.

Not true. My two AW17R5s both throttle under extreme heat (ie playing games) with both CPU and GPU at 80C. It is the VRMs that cause issues.

 

The hate for max-Q is simply this:
You pay the exact same price as for the non max Q cards, yet get worse performance.
That's basically it. If max Q were 20% cheaper than non max Q, no one would be complaining.

 

Also the 1080 max-q atleast performed like an overclocked 1070. This time around the 2080 max-q looks like it maybe alot worse. Honestly I'm gonna be surprised if they even match a desktop 2070. That's not gonna end well for anyone paying such a high premium on max-q just for a thin and light laptop. At that point why bother putting anything more powerful than a 2060 in a thin and light?

 

I agree, it's all about $$$. There's nothing wrong with AMD, but it takes two more pieces to make things work - BIOS and Operating System support. And the latter is still lagging behind. I have zero issues with my Ryzen 2700u + Linux, simply because of how fast the kernel is evolving, even if BIOS issues still exist. It took me literally 15 minutes to sort it out and forget. Took another day to unlock the TDP, which the vendors tried really hard to lock down at 11-12W to justify the price difference between the AMD and Intel chips. Fortunately, AMD designed these APUs to be adjustable and fully configurable. Meaning, you can change pretty much anything from TDP to clocks from within the OS without the need to have a special tool for that (like XTU), even though they have their own tool, which still doesn't support the mobile APUs. But who cares when you can do these things with your own simple scripts and have a full granular control over the processor. You don't get that with Intel unless it's a K chip and even then there are limitations, not to mention the price difference and extra heat budget.

If Dellienware is watching this thread, they should heed this and look into adding the next gen AMD CPUs (such as Ryzen 7 3700X , 12/24 , 4.2-5.0GHz 105w) to their flagship machine. Make a truly unique system with extreme overclocking capabilities. And don't forget about the looks, - Nebula Red goes well with Ryzen and Radeon!

 

First RTX Laptop benchmark, sorry if I use this thread Moderators, rarely look at MSI forum. Jump to 4:25.

Edit: Found Timespy which aren’t egpu setting from Asus 2070, some are from triton 500 are locked.
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/5938526
https://www.3dmark.com/spy/5842428
Well one more day

 

Alienware just posted the below on their YouTube channel. It's game play of Fortnite on their Area 51 (i9-9900HK / 2080 RTX).

At 1:17 they have the settings they are playing on shown (1080p / epic). The frame rate varies depending on what's happening in game. I wonder if anything can be extrapolated from the video with regards to the laptops overall performance. If not, we'll begin to know tomorrow...

 

How do we know for sure that the review embargo ends tomorrow? I remember hearing somewhere that these GPUs "launch" on January 29th, has any media outlet committed to this date in writing yet? Just truly curious, I'm new to this world.

 

I have the Gelids, and I pressed them with my fingers, and they did not appear softer than the Arctics. Maybe I should give them a try and see.

However on some locations Dell use another kind of thermal pad, much, much softer. Do you know what that is and where to get it from?

 

Ngreedia is not the only one guilty of this act of extreme greed. Intel is another culprit with their recently launched KF parts with iGPU disabled due to defect and die harvested (meaning recycled part) but end up selling it at exactly the same price as proper K CPUs.

It's bad enough they are releasing a product that should not have existed but released due to desperation (9900K) and pressure from AMD, now they are trying to maximize all the profits they can get from that power hungry and very hot CPU. now what do you all make of this?

 

I just sit back and watch the world burn.

 

The "embargo"is indeed lifted for all info on the mobile RTX on the 29th

HOWEVER, there is no guarantee that anyone has been reviewing the Alienware during the embargo, and has it released right when it is lifted tomorrow.

More realistically, Alienware has not sent a review unit to anyone yet, or if they have, it has gone to the mass media and reviewers that say everything is "WOW" after firing up a few basic games and benchmarks. People like @B0B tend to get the leftovers, or have to buy and review their own unit. Notebookcheck is also usually a little slow on the uptake due to European market releases being slow.

 

unfortunately that's pretty much what we can all do now. it's a pity things have come to this stage

 

Embargo is 9:00am EST

 

I'll be waking up to some interesting stuff

 

Gelids shape when heated up.

The white pads you mean? No clue where they got those from. But i dont know the rating of those either. They seem to only use those on cpu related components.

 

Not only, there are also some "blue" pads, on the VRMs above and below the GPU, they appear thick and spongy, no way is my Arctic or Gelid so soft. So Dell use 3-4 different kinds of pads:

1) blue, extra thin pads right above the GPU for the VRAMs in a trapezium shape and also below the GPU for the chokes
2) blue, standard "thin" pads over the other VRAMs around the GPU in rectangular shapes
3) blue, thick pads and very spongy over the VRMs, above and below the GPU
4) white, soft/spongy and thick pads for the VRMs above the CPU

Because of the lack of precision in the gaps that need to be filled in, I believe we need soft/spongy pads everywhere.