*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 Owner's Lounge

Haha! I feel a lot of purchases are hanging on ninjas comments this evening!

I'm literally inches away from clicking buy on this or the blade 15. And honestly, people love the blade and it might not have as many issues as forums often suggest. It's pretty much those 4cm extra in the m15 that's putting me off! But if it goes full power without throttling and going at 51db like the blade, then this could be the right laptop for me!

 

Was going to get the Blade 15 as well, but decided on the m15 just to have the 2nd m.2 slot and not have to deal with a 3rd party warranty provider. At least I can get up to a five year warranty on the Alienware. Also the Blade's pricing is way off, needs to be more competitive. I did order my m15 through HIDEvolution to get the cpu/gpu thermal applications/pads applied.

 

With the undervolt and quiet mode enabled the performance is better than my omen 15 with exact same specs. CPU and GPU sit at about 80c

And yes the 1060 can be undervolted in msi afterburner

 

I'm no scientist but I think Alienware decided to go with the glossy bezel so you can spot ninja assassins sneaking up on you. I like my glossy bezel because I can see when my boss is looking at what I am doing. One day he did it 22 times. I must slack off frequently.

PS @ninja2000 PICS!!! I

 

I think @ninja2000 has a good unit, he better have cause he paid big bucks for that machine!

But knowing AW I'm still sceptical. It still looks like a Lenovo Y720 for me.

 

haha I may have got lucky, but it does need a bit of tweaking, out of the box it runs very hot. Also the £1800 I paid is £400 cheaper than razer blade 15 with equal specs and a much better warranty.

Ok, I am going to start posting pics. Here are some stock cinebench and 3dmark11 screenshots (with XTU in background)

 

and 3dmark11

 

Looks like another system that needs a good repaste and maybe a repad. 5c core temps difference.

 

If I keep it I will repaste it but a 5c across cores isn't that bad (compared to some of the 15/17r series) I think they will adjust the fans too as it shoots up to 100c and then throttles a little to keep it at 100c. With an underclock though I was sitting at 3.8ghz at about 80-85c

 

Yeah but those lowest cores are at 90c which is already quite a bit better ofcourse. My current repasted 15R3 has a core temps differential of 2c. I dont get why they never change to a better paste from the factory and pads.

 

Ninja, how are the temps with the undervolt and freq capped at 3.5? Have you checked temps with turbo disabled?

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3DM11 Physics score.

5C ? My math say 10

 

It's advertised with anti-ghosting so I assume that answears my question, but could you do the test in your free time?

 

Haha you're right, i was looking on my mobile phone, didnt notice the other temps. 10c is quite a bit.

 

HeHe. If you saw the 3DM11 test you could see that the Gpu in combination with the Cpu hammered the cooling in the thin chassis so bad that when the short Cpu test without graphics run the cooling couldn’t keep up. Hence the flawed and awful physics score.

 

What BIOS version are you running? Dell has a BIOS update on the site that proclaims to help with thermals. Might be worth a flash.

 

Great thank you. One follow-up question if I may. The Blade fans are known to have an irritating high pitched whine to them. Does the m15 have that or is it just a whooshing sound from moving air?

 

Im nto running the AW m15, but the AW15R3, but that one I repasted, repadded and all, bios versions didnt change anything for me.

 

Hopefully its just the usual terrible paste situation and not an undersized heatsink issue.

 

Would you be able to advise how is this m15 doing in terms of performance, thermals, cooling and fan noise for a noob like myself ?

In short, if you take the best laptop of the same kind (not sure which one that'd be, maybe Zephyrus?): how far is this m15?

Sorry for the noob question, I just can't say whether the results you posted are bad, good or exceptional. Thanks !

 

I can’t see repasting changing temps all that much. Thin laptop like this needs a vapor chamber like razor 15.

 

Vapor chamber is razerblade 15 isn't that much better of a solution. It ended up distributing the heat over all the components and it's the 1070 Max q laptop with THE highest surface temperatures vs the msi stealth thin, the zephyrus and the aero 15x.

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If you see a 10c core temp difference then you know for sure it can be improved. Its and indication of poor service contact.

 

I know there is a thermal paste that's good for uneven heat sinks... Can't remember which one, maybe IC diamond? Cause it's thick

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IC diamond and Phobya nanogrease.

 

Might buy some Phobya nanogrease soon and be ready for that repaste. I'm more concerned how the 1070 Max q handles games on 144 hz screen. It feels like it's not enough power to reach 144 on a lot of games (average of 90 fps on ultra for most games) and there's no gsync so either you take vsync and get studdering or you live with tearing.

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As pointed out earlier on here, vapour chamber is not necessarily the best solution. Reasons n > 1. It's more than the 1 drawback cited by the other commenter above here.

Realistically the best you can really do is straddle those tiny intel cores with 2 heatpipes instead of 1. And Braize / solder a little T or v in the middle there between them. Like a fish bone between the fillets.

Rhe 2 direct contact heatpipes have to be pretty flat / paper thin. Due to severe z-height space constraint limitations. (New 2018 macbook pro heatsink is a good example). So then you have to make both those heatpipes as wide as possible, and as long as possible. In order to contain the largest possible volume of fluid / gas.

That is the only aspect of the alienware m15 thermal design which can be further optimized at this point. Unless they can also engineer better fans.

Because everything else about the m15 heatsink assembly seems to be optimal. Generally speaking.

So yes - petition alienware / dell for a better heatsink design for future revisions r2, r3. Because on the next node shrink (10nm intel and/or 7nm samsung / tsmc), well the cpu cores will be even smaller. And we cannot even cool these 14nm cores properly as it is. [within this category of products, I am talking about].

To help make these thermal designs more effective, perhaps Intel should also start spacing out the cores away from each other on the die. As far apart as they can be. But they did not do that last time. Perhaps it would add something the ring bus latency, to space them out and they felt that was too much of a compromise IDK.

Personally I don't really see that as being significant rationale because if you do have to share the same die between consumer desktop and consumer mobile. Then you shuold optimize for mobile because more people seem to be going for laptops rather than desktops these days. At leasts according to tech news reports regarding machine sales numbers, and market segmentation trends.

Well what about AMD? When you look at the ryzen 1000 and 2000 die. It seems the cores are already a bit spaced out. However their die arrangment might be changing anyway for their 3000 series. It's not publically known yet. So it's not possible to make any kind of meaningful speculation.

 

Yeah you are right, a vapor chamber only has real benefits if the heatsinks attached to it are bigger. Its only a method of moving heat away from the heatplate similar to heatpipes but it's jsut that. If there are no radiators to cool it down with you are left with still hot thermals. The Razer blade 15 temperatures arent really good because of the extremely tiny heatsinks attached to it.

 

Guys we have seen this time and time again. The Alienware laptops CAN achieve good thermals but we know the bottleneck is always
1. Thermal paste
2. Uneven/warped heat sinks

But both of those issues can usually be remedied with a good thermal paste and some good balancing of heatsink pressure.

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Ok you guys sound like you know your stuff when it comes to thin and light. Would you say I should just give off the idea of a razer blade 15? I love the fact that it's small enough to fit in my fjallraven bag. Whereas the m15 I'd have to stick in a neoprene bag as it's too big for the laptop insert.

But sounds like the razer gets super scary hot under load. There's plenty of happy owners on the razer forum here. But do you think I'd be spending my money better with Alienware? As it's (in theory) quieter and has better thermals (from the reviews I've seen so far). And you can have a 3 years warranty for about £380 at the moment. With accidental cover.

 

Both get hot out of the box without the change of thermal paste and optimizing everything. Its the nature of thin laptop unfortunately. So for not it comes to preference. Which would you prefer? The M15 with multiple drive bays for SSD's, a numpad etc or do you prefer the Blade.

 

Realize that the thermal paste should generally be replaced every 1 or 2 years. Or even sooner, depending upon the paste.

Perhaps the blade seems to be more hassle to do that specific job on. I'm not sure. But so long as you don't break anything.

For ordering spare parts OOW, and just general after sale service I would say that dell are probably the same, or 'somewhat' better? Than the company razer. But if you ask me I believe that razer's biggest drawback seems to be the quality control. At least if you at the build quality of their other products. It's earned them a bad reputation. But the same can also be said of previous revisions of the 'full sized' alienware laptops. So if you were to give the m15 the benefit of the doubt for not carrying that over to their newest product. I suppose you should be doing the same for the 2018 blade 15.

After having 24x units of the previous blade 14 predecessor. Linus (LTT) released a video showing the shocking large number of bad units. It was really horrendous. So either they repeated that with the new model or they didn't. I think Linus probably had more enough of them by that point though.

Hmm. So where does that leave you? Well I would say:

Try to handle an m15 in person. They should not be that difficult to find out there in the wild. If the larger size is a deal breaker for you.... then it's a deal breaker for you. And you have no option / choice to make there anyhow.

Clearly both of these models are still far too new to develope comprehensive picture of reliability / faults yet. That would take another 1-2 years. Especially more time needed in razer's case* because they will shift substantially fewer units than the m15 will.

* remembering that many of Linus' failed units did not devople a fault until some significant time later. After weeks / months of employee usage.

 

I had the blade and the fans are loud as hell.

 

got mine last wk.. ran a few benchmarks stock:

cinebench r15 - 1210.... after 5 runs still ~1205

3dmark with dell driver
timespy-5177
firestrike 13794

geekbench 4.3.1 tryout mode
opencl intelgpu-37737
opencl nvidia -140614

runs fairly hot out of the box with hwinfo reporting up to 98C on some cores
will do some more testing in the next couple of days

 

Hi guys. Been following this for a bit. Would like to know if anyone knows anything about the smaller versions?
I can’t be having a numpad. Had the left the keyboard like the r3/r4 my only complaint would be the dedicated mouse buttons.
Any news or we having to wait till new year?


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As far as the news coming from Alienware this basically replaces the m13 in the line up as the defacto "small" laptop. So it's this or the m15x right now.

 

So I got mine yesterday and wouldn't you know. Windows was messed. Wouldn't activate and then it wouldn't update. Not sure if anyone else had the issue of web pages not showing, windows store no connection. After a fresh windows install from USB to a 970 evo installing available drivers web pages still wouldn't load from Dell or Google. Seemed to be any secure page. Luckily I had my 17r3 with me. Ended up having to install Killer Control panel. Then I dug up the new Alienware Control panel. Then I was on to installing Nvidia drivers. The newest drivers failed to install. I downloaded Dell Nvidia drivers. Now it says I have a GTX 1070 and it dropped the max q. It was the end of my shift so I left off there and will get back to it tonight.

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Oh noes, should start reporting these issues to dell or frank on Twitter... Quite concerning. Did you get regular windows or windows pro?

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The R13 OLED has been discontinued for a while know, just selling out remaining stock. Yes, the m15 will be the new entry point for the Alienware laptop lineup, along with a forthcoming m17 and some new CPU/GPU options for the m15.

 

It was regular. There are many other reports of the same thing on reddit. This unit is for my wife and mine will be arriving Tuesday. Hopefully I don't have the same issues.

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This has been an ongoing issue with many of the new m15's being received. Many are posting the same issue with the Windows OS install not activating correctly - fresh install fixes it.

 

Someone should post a guide how to do this easily, I bought windows pro, wonder if that affects anything

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Should I be worried about it reporting as a 1070 and not a 1070 max q?

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Well it is easy but Dell made it difficult by not having all drivers and programs together. I left everything on the USB drive ready for the next one.

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You should install the nVidia GeForce Experience app and have it load the necessary GPU drivers - keeps them up to date and sets the baseline requirements for each installed game. I never use the stand alone gpu drivers from the Dell site.

 

That's what I tried and they wouldn't install it said install failed no compatible device. I noticed I couldn't get Alienware Control center to launch until I installed nvidia experience

 

i have to admit i did it have issues activating windows as well during setup, it wouldnt activate despite being connected to the net. i skipped activation , but later on i was having issues surfing the net on certain websites which was strange. it felt like , they were being blocked by some sort of software/firewall issue because i could get to the website then subsequently i was blocked.

i decided to reset the laptop to default and started again. i only manage to activate the 2nd time round when i had the ethernet plugged in, not on wifi. Now i've run into the same problem again of certain sites just not loading up. Really don't know what is going on. turned off all firewalls, smart screen but still can't get to a reputable website that every other device on my network can access.

as for the alienware control centre. i can't seem to click on the fx button. and it is asking to do an update but when i do that , it asks to sign into microsoft wtf . why do i need to sign into my microsoft account to update the alienware control centre ??

 

I had this issue as well. I installed killer control center to fix the web pages. Of course I had to do it on a different computer. As for the microsoft login, it's trying to add the app from the microsoft store but of course you can't get there until your web pages are fixed. As stated the problems just kept creeping in until I did a full clean install. windows activated right away just be sure you have all drivers listed, killer performance suite(killer control panel and drivers), alienware control center, nvidia experience, support assistant. Now that I think of it I haven't tried graphics amp, better find the drivers for them also.

 

You Should use dell drivers not Nvidia. Dellienware does not use the standard driver, cause if you check the driver dates, you would notice that dell it's drivers are not even present on the Nvidia website. That's due the fact that Dell customizes it's drivers and that's the reason why they make drivers in the first place. If you manufacturer has no drivers, then you should download the nvidia drivers, else it's going to produce a lot of problems when gaming or just normal usage.

 

Sorry, but this is ********... the only thing they customize is the device id inside the inf-file. There was a time where it was necessary to use those drivers, but those times are over! I always use the nvidia drivers since the m17x r4 and never had any issue.
U even need newer drivers for some games to work correctly.