*OFFICIAL* Alienware X Series Owners Lounge and Discussion

The T junction for the Core i9-11980HK is 100C so I can see how 90C is possible for extended use but at that temp how long will the ancillary equipment last? I bought my 6950X from Silicon lottery and for the 2 years I owned it never overclocked under 43%. That said I had 4 RADS with 37 Noctua fans keeping the CPU nice and cool at a perpetual 28C. After 2 years of constant overclocking when I tore down my system my 6950X looked as good as the day I bought it. My Nvidia TXp's on the other hand had at least one sent back to Nvidia for replacement, and after that one of the cards had scorch marks underneath where the SLI bridge connected.

 

Go back about 6 or 7 posts because we went into depth about that issue. Short answer is were not 100% sure.

 

37 Noctua fans, does your computer take off like a helicopter when you set your fans to 100%

 

I did go back a couple of pages but didn’t see it. I’ll look again but I appreciate your reply.

 

Right, so no firmware updates either.

You can RAID away if you like, but arguably the only practical benefit is having a single volume without having to play around with LVM, at the cost of a slight loss of reliability and total loss of ability to upgrade firmware (which one would hope to be able to do if the drives underpeform in the critical 4k benchmark). To each their own I guess.

 

@ekkolp Thanks for the suggestion to reach out to Alienware on Twitter. They ended up sending me the ssd cover in two days time after getting back to me.

 

https://dell.alienwarearena.com/ali...llenge-physics-with-high-density-performance/
Dell posted an article about the X-15 and X-17 design and it confirms that both ssd slots are PCIe 4.0.

 

Did you mention them the partnumber? C99KM

 

Text copied from my Reddit post:

This is the first time I have purchased an Alienware laptop and tbh it has put me off ever buying one again. I received the first laptop on 6th July 2021 and immediately noticed the following issues:

1. ⁠Left speaker was blown / rattling
2. ⁠Scratches on edge of laptop lid
3. ⁠Chip above light bar at rear of laptop

I phoned up support and after first suggesting a technician could fix the specified parts they then advised me they could send me a brand new laptop but would have to wait a month for it to be built. In the mean time I could keep this laptop and send it back once the brand new replacement came.

So today I received the “brand new” replacement laptop and it’s in even worse condition than the first laptop. I didn’t even bother turning it on and instead phoned up support to make a complaint. The replacement laptop has the following issues:

1. ⁠Electrical tap hanging out rear vent
2. ⁠Scratches/chips around charging port
3. ⁠Paint flaking off / chips above rear vents near hinge
4. ⁠Paint bubbles that are chipping off and leaving black “dots” on laptop lid

Support have said I can either get a refund or get another replacement laptop. As I’m currently working from home and need a laptop for work I’m giving them one more chance in the hope I actually get a working laptop that isn’t damaged out of the box.

Tbh I find it unbelievable that they can value these laptops at £4000 before discounts and have zero quality control. Who in their right mind thinks it’s ok for laptops of these conditions to leave the factory.

It has really put me off the brand tbh. It’s my first gaming laptop after being with apple for the last 10 years and it’s been a terrible experience so far. I’m not getting my hopes up that the next replacement will be any better but they have reassured me that every replacement laptop is a brand new laptop and that there isn’t even enough parts to make refurbished laptops yet even if they wanted to.

Specs in case anyone is interested: 2TB ssd 4K screen i9 cpu 3080 16gb graphics card 32gb Xmp ram

Also if anyone has a bent laptop lid; it is a defect. The replacement laptop had a flat lid that closed properly.

Link to pictures of both laptops:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

 

Yeah, I mentioned the part number and verified with them that it was what they were sending. It should be arriving soon. Fedex is out for delivery right now with the package.

 

Perhaps the UK is in a special relationship with AW, as a dumping ground for US returns? Both of my AW laptops arrived with abysmal QC issues.

 

Installed Crucial Ballistix BL2K16G32C16S4B 3200 MHz, DDR4, 32GB (16GB x2), CL16 with no problems. They are working in XMP mode @3200MHz CL16. Latency is better but all in all I hoped for better results.

 

Seems like it. Do the US laptops get manufactured somewhere else? I know the UK ones get made in China.

 

The Crucial Ballistix improved my Time Spy core:

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/21978411

old score with original 3466MHz RAM: www.3dmark.com/spy/21939876

 

I guess I will keep the Ballistix.

 

ACC of course showes the wrong values of the Ballistix...

 

@ bsch3r did you compare RAM performance in games?
I'm very interested in that scenario, wondering if it's worth the change from 3200 CL22 to 3200CL 16 in gaming.

 

What better results were you hoping for? 34ns latency is excellent, my HyperX 2666 CL15 is showing 64ns. 51M users can only dream of such memory, sadly.

 

Pretty safe bet it's all made in China. They are a global company, so probably send the returns back to China, where they possibly get "rebuilt" and sent back to customers - not sure how else to explain cases like yours. There have been quite a few similar horror stories here too.. Could just be horrendously bad QA overall.

 

Not yet, still experimenting and need to install that Seagate FireCuda 530 first.

 

AWCC memory latency reading has been repeatedly reported as inaccurate.

 

Sorry for the bad photo quality, it´s 84ns...

 

Oh my, that's terrible.. The limitation must be on the motherboard side. Could be the High Density Interconnect mobile phone technology they are bragging about lol

51M R2 with HyperX would be getting in the region of 50-60ns, if memory serves... still limited by the motherboard, but to a lesser extent.

 

At least still better than the original 3466MHz RAM.

 

Yeah. I mean it's all just quite sad marketing nonsense.

 

You heard it from me here first though But room for two M.2 drives hardly constitutes multiple. Time to update the service manual with real details instead of copying & pasting from other models.

 

If this helps anyone:



Here is at 4.3 core and cache:

 

From my AIDA report

 

I agree with you that those sort of marks should not really be present, but my thought is you'll be driving yourself crazy trying to find a flawless laptop... try not to sweat the cosmetic stuff if you can (as long as it's not on the screen of course ). If it has awesome performance and thermals, a sweet keyboard and screen... the rest you'll forget about once you're gamin'.

Good luck!

 

Guess Crucial is giving out safe BS answers because I contacted them to question if this memory worked with the X17 and they said it did not.

 

Is Aida64 drunk?



Does not detect my latency.

 

You need to download the newest beta. Just google it.

 

Thank you! Yeah it seems like all of them most likely have marks on them. The bent lid and broken speaker on the first laptop and the electrical tape on the second laptop were the major reasons for returning. The fact that they leave the factory in these conditions does make wonder if they even check these laptops properly before they leave the factory.

 

Hard to blame them, and to be fair the memory grossly underperforms in the laptop. 83ns latency is a sad joke, nobody who puts that RAM in the X17 and verifies the performance will be able to say it is working as intended. At least it did not crash outright I guess.

 

You were right, thank you.



Ahh my slow CL22 memory does not like this test.

 

You received an absolutely BS advice there, along the lines of "brain off and let's go".

The laptop should be in absolutely perfect cosmetic condition, my AW laptops were - no complaints there. You're not paying this sort of price for a used or damaged product. Your mistake was in not returning right away and falling for the swap or we'll fix it later trick, and now they have you on the hook. Tell them you want to return because you reported the issue within the return window. Try to make noise on Twitter (DellCares). Don't let them get away with this.

 

Yup. Seems these days it´s pointless to call companies, it´s not only Dell. It IS working stable at it´s XMP profile at 3200 CL16. Only the latency should be better in the AIDA beta benchmark, provided the results are valid as it´s a beta and is incompatible with the X17 in the latest official version.

 

As the name implies, pretty much the whole point of low CL is low latency. AIDA doesn't have another random access benchmark to demonstrate the benefits of low latency RAM presumably because latency is a great proxy, and while you did register 100 extra TS points, arguably this is disappointing albeit in line with the meagre latency result.

Super unlikely for the latency measurement to be somehow broken just for this module. It's a fairly simple test.

 

Agree. Any better MEM tests out there? Somehow I don´t trust AIDA here.

 

Sorry, I edited that part of the post. Latency is fine as a proxy of random memory performance - the test is quite unlikely to be broken. You can check SiSoft Sandra. Even the free version has the latency test, you can use that to verify the AIDA result.

 

Sandra Lite is a mixed bag compared to AIDA, it has another test type, and offers interesting insights, but results are not broken down into read and write. Anyway, here are some results on my HyperX Impact 2666 CL 15:

Memory Latency: 20.9ns (whereas AIDA reports 64ns)
Memory Transaction Throughput|: 8.13 MTPS (an attempt at real-life scneario benchmarking, nice)
Sequential Memory Bandwidth: 31.4 GB/s (not quire as useless as sequential SSD throughput, but still secondary to latency IMHO and roughly in line with AIDA)

Curious about the difference in latency results - must have something to do with the test process. Are we testing reads, writes, combined? Feel like writing my own benchmark to settle this, maybe later.

 

This is the most significant mem test for gaming. I have two 3090s in my two desktops. One is a 5950 @4.8 on 8 cores and @4.7 on 8 cores--mem is at 56ns and my 10900k is @5.3 with mem at 37ns. 10900k gets more frames period. It is the memory not the cpu single core as the AMD single core is higher.

 

Has anyone encountered the issue of their keyboard randomly just stop working completely? This happened 3 times while playing Modern Warfare. All the lights still work but key presses do not register for the whole keyboard. Rebooting seems to fix the issue. Temperature was not a culprit either since the GPU was ~74C and CPU was ~71C when I was playing the game. Note that the power profile and thermal profile were both in balanced mode when the issue comes up. I haven't tried recreating it with other profiles yet.

I also took the laptop apart to see if there were any issues with cables not being seated properly and I did not find any issues whatsoever. I will keep testing to see the issue arises after I reseated the cables.

Just to reiterate, the whole keyboard stops working(lights still works just the keys stop registering) suddenly after playing Modern Warfare for a while. I do not get issues with specific key strokes not registering intermittently.

Someone mentioned it might be a power saving bug. So I went to device manager to check the power management on the keyboard. Power saving was unchecked on all devices listed. Still trying to diagnose what caused the earlier issues.

EDIT: Pressing FN+ESC+F1 seems to fix the issue as well. The keyboard issue people are experiencing seems to be a software bug rather than a hardware one. I have the Cherry MX keyboard btw.

 

Hmm... Sandra Lite is crashing when running mem test. Anything else except Sandra Lite runs fine. Must be because of the name, same as my wife´s.

 

Is the attachement an AIDA64 score?

 

The current version of AIDA does not work with the X17. I emailed their support who sent me a link to a BETA version which does work.

Which now I see you already have.

 

Yeah, @ bsch3r told me that too.

Thanks!

 

That's not a sign of system stability IMHO. That Sandra is quite mature, unlikely to throw random fits

 

Another consideration is that AIDA is in beta form which anything beta should never be considered accurate without doubt. Especially with software.

 

I keep hitting the damn mute button on the keyboard. Without fail every time I type.