*OFFICIAL* Alienware m15 R3 / m17 R3 Owner's Lounge

I have an m15 r3. I have the 300hz panel and there is no intel gpu in the device manager.

 

Sounds like a bunch of nonsense. The 240 Hz MSI GS66 has Optimus, and apparently Acer Predator Trtion 500 has a 300 Hz panel and even a MUX switch.

https://www.ultrabookreview.com/39425-msi-gs66-stealth-review/

https://www.ultrabookreview.com/21576-laptops-with-144-hz-screens/

 

Is this the Alienware m15/17 r3 Owners lounge or the Optimus lounge? Maybe discuss something cool like thermals

 

Your comment makes about as much sense as "Is this the Alienware m15/17 r3 Owners lounge or the Thermals lounge? Maybe discuss something cool like Optimus "

Thermals are important for sure, and, as usual with the m15, we won't have to wait long for ample information on that (especially if the 10th gen CPUs are not undervoltable in these machines either), but so is the fact that - without a clear indication of this in their marketing materials - Dell is pushing 300Hz displays on unsuspecting customers which, unlike competing products, do not support Optimus, never mind a MUX switch, resulting in abysmal battery life.

 

No one is discussing thermals so that doesn't make sense

people have been successfully undervolting 10th gen CPUs (most seem to achieve -0.080) in these machines as reported on reddit.

I will happily take a 300Hz panel with low response time and have it plugged into the wall to game non stop as this is a gaming machine (note target audience) so you look to push out gaming performance. Have it thin and light is great for portability as I travel a lot (well did up to Coronavirus) but I would never game without it plugged in so for me personally battery life/optimus/mux switch is a moot point on a gaming laptop.

 

Anyone who buys a gaming laptop and complains about poor battery life is beyond me. There isn't a single gaming notebook with a dedicated video card that gets more than 2 hours of battery life while running on dedicated gpu and pushing it. So I don't know why this always comes up. If you want 6 hours on a notebook don't get a high powered gaming notebook.

 

The deep mystery is very easily explained. Are you ready? OK, people do not game all the time, but also do other stuff, often on the go, or in the air. They don't want to manage multiple specialised laptops either. They quite like having one powerful device that does it all. And the requirement is easily satisfied via a decent battery + Optimus by many products on the market, including some variants of the m15/m17.

 

In my experience with my 15 R3, I've actually seen it do 6 to 8 hours of battery life just doing coding, browser, and office work. And I'm forced to use the dGPU because the laptop doesn't have a MUX. Sure, when pushing it, I can see it do a couple hours, but I'm content with what I have. It is possible for a gaming notebook that can get good battery life. Granted, I have also undersvolted both my GPU and CPU, so that probably plays a factor.

 

Optimus adds great stutter to many games and general windows use..

 

15 R3 or m15 R3? What display?

 

That's absolute nonsense. Gsync, on the other hand, adds huge input lag.

 

15 R3 (Kaby Lake) with a 60 Hz G-Sync display, but I keep G-Sync off. I don't have an m15 R3. Don't know if I will. Depends on if Dell decides to replace my 15 R3 with the m15 R3 if my laptop ever breaks.

Granted, I don't know if the more powerful Comet and Coffee Lake CPUs suck up more juice than Kaby Lake, resulting in worse battery life.

 

The 15 R3 has a beautiful 99Wh battery, but that 8-9h is still suspect. I remember I was getting 10-11h on the R2 with Optimus when the laptop was brand new. People report 2.5h battery life with 15 R3 and gsync.

https://uk.alienwarearena.com/ucf/s...tegrated-graphics-with-15-r3-and-g-sync-panel

What's the miraculously efficient dGPU then?

Anyway, the battery in the m15 has been butchered. My 2070MQ will struggle to draw less than 8W at the minimum, in top of 12W baseline system draw. 4h of battery life would be amazing, but quite unlikely (maybe idling at 10% display brightness).

 

Keep in mind that I have a 90+ wHr Battery. I usually saw around 12 to 15w being used. I also tend to keep my display dim, RGB off, etc. I do whatever I can to keep the battery life as good as it can be through software optimizations.

It sounds like an outlier, but I frequently saw 6 hours (sometimes 7, rarely 8) of battery life through my time studying for my BA. I imagine there are other factors with the computer that contribute to the battery life, but my eyes don't lie.

 

That's the draw I see in my optimised m15 with Optimus. Add 8W+ for dGPU just displaying the desktop.

 

perhaps you should look at a different laptop scenario that might be better suited to your use case (like an XPS 15 + Aorus Gaming Box). This is my current setup (XPS 15 - 9570 with PCH mod + Aorus Gaming Box 1080 + Samsung 1080p 144Hz monitor) and it works well, even the EGPU is portable (comes in small camera like shoulder bag). That way you can get good battery life when doing other tasks unplugged and then when you want to game you can plug in the EGPU via TB3 (ideally into an external monitor). If you primarily use a laptop for gaming then I think you should accept that battery life seems not to be a priority for the Alienware development team (or any gaming laptop dev team?) as there is high end hardware crammed in a small footprint. Alternatively you could modify your thinking to my suggestion if it works for your use case.

 

In answer to the thermal question. On stock thermal paste with the i7 10750H and a 2070 Super the laptop will hit an all core speed of 4.2 ghz and will maintain that all the way up to 93c+. Even with an undervolt of -.100mv i still see high temps but they are much better than the previous temps on the m15r2. The cpu spikes to 85c in games but that's about the hottest it gets. I plan to repaste with liquid metal and I'll do some before and after screens.

Although not impressive temps the cpu seems to have a much higher throttle point then before and while 90c+ temps are worrisome it still performs pretty well. The tdp of the chip is listed at 107w in intel xtu. I got a score of 1430 in cinebench r15 consistently which outperformed my 9750h in my m15r2 by 200 points or so.

 

Look forward to the results. Seems like they did make it a proper ball ache this iteration with the inverted motherboard, tonnes of screws and little ribbon cables to remove to get to the dies. Good luck with it all.

 

It's almost exactly like the m15r2. It seems like a bear at first but it actually goes fast once you know how it comes apart. I repasted the m15r2 with liquid metal and i was able to keep the cpu under 83c at full load with a -125mv. The lower temps fixed the performance issues but i suspect I'll drop temps on this cpu but it likely won't increase performance much at all.

Ok here are some before screens
Baseline on balanced mode -100mv undervolt +100 core +225 mem GPU


3DMark11 Performance Run -100mv undervolt +100 core +225 mem GPU


3dMark Firestrike Full Speed Mode -100mv undervolt +100 core +225 mem GPU


Max Temps Full Speed Mode -100mv undervolt +100 core +225 mem GPU


Bit of a hot tamale.

 

Yeah, that woild be a fallback plan in the unlikely case all brands followed Alienware on the engineering path downhill. The advantage of my m15 R1 over your setup:

* All in one package, no need for an eGPU
* Supports 2 eGPUs thanks to the AGA and TB3 port

As.an owner of AW 15 and the m15 (excellent amd good battery life respectively), I don't accept that powerful laptops need to have poor battery life.

To be fair, this discussion has turned out to be a bit of tempest in a teappt, because apparently the m15 R3 actually offers Optimus with some display options.

 

Video benchmarks tend not to stress the CPU much. Could you run CB20?

 

Get the one that suits you. If you don't want Optimus get the 300hz, if you do go get the 144hz or 4K OLED. Maybe Alienware in their infinite wisdom decided to cater for both sides ;-) Happy dayz !

That is a reasonable undervolt and GPU boost and 81c max isn't bad either. Look forward to the LM temps.

Can you spit out some Witcher 3 (think I can half see that on your desktop) FPS + temps before and after LM ?

 

LOL at their inifite wisdom The problem is that other manufacturers offer 240-300Hz with a mux switch, so we are right to chastise Alienware for the ommision. Also, buying a 300Hz panel with the R3 one has no idea what the display connection solution is based just on their BS marketing materials, which can be misleading and annoying for a customer who expects Optimus on a non-Gsync panel as usual.

 

I think i will try kryonaut to see if i can get away with not using liquid metal. I'll repaste tonight

 

How did Cinebench R20 go out of the box?

Kryonaut won't last long.

 

Repaste with liquid metal failed twice. I applied a thin layer the first time and noticed the cpu was hitting 100c at idle. I repasted adding some liquid metal to see if i was too conservative and the temps are the same.

It appears alienware didn't bother engineering a properly fitting heatsink and just gloobbed on a ton of TIM to make up the gap. I am going to repaste with kryonaut when i get home and can lap the heat sink a bit since the liquid metal stains.

Here are some pics.

 

Repasted with Kryonaut. It's hot but it seems to maintain 4.2ghz up to 100c. Pretty dumb fix. Rather than lower the temps Intel just raises the throttle point.

Cinebench R20 Balanced Mode


Cinebench R20 Full Speed

 

Your higher temp after liquid metal are from the electrical tape on the metal rim of the cpu, the tolerance there is very small. I had the very same result but I used kapton tape. After I removed any tape on that rim my thermals got a lot better. Im about to hold 4.8ghz on an all core load now. Its hits 95c, but the performance is insane. I was not able to get an undervolt of more than about 90mv with mine, I have the i9. Also dont bother with LM on the gpu, I would bet money that it makes no difference since its die is so much larger.

As far as over clocking I am unstable at even 5.1 in disk heavy loads. So even at stock I can make the system bluescreen. I have to try to make it happen but i can. What odd about the crash is i can tell when its going to happen, windows just stops responding, but i can move the mouse and even open taskmanger but it will just stay a empty white box. Also it has to involve the disk in some way. Just a heavy single core load wont do it. I did try taking the nvmes the came with it out and trying one i had and same thing. I dont know what to make of that and have thought about getting dell to exchange the motherboard but at the same time I can just set it to an all core of 50 and everything is fine. If I use throttle stops benchmark it will hit 100c at 50 however, but its stable.

Video card wise I have the 2070 supper and I have it set to +150 core and +1000 memory. The memory overclock to me seemed insane but it holds and i can see in HWINFO my mem clocks got from 8000 to 9000.

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/12640167

 

You may be right about the electrical tape but when i checked the heatsink on repastes the gpu made contact while the cpu did not. It might be worth retrying with just the cpu and no tape. Hmm

 

I may redo mine as well but this time remove the black cover on the heatsink. I still see instantaneous deltas of 30+c and that seems insane to me. If i launch say r20 and hit go, it will go from 50c to 85c in one update. Its better than paste was, but not as good as i was thinking it would be. If i redo it ill post an update if removing that black tape stuff made any difference. It may not as the cpu is using 130w in r20. Thats a lot of power to come out of the tiny die. The cpu uses more power than the gpu in the case of a 2070 super but has something like a 3x smaller die.

 

Who knew that a metal lip could cause that much interference. @Codec was 100% right. My temps are miles better.

Cinebench R20 Balanced Liquid Metal


Cinebench R20 Full Speed Liquid Metal


I was however right about the performance increase. There is next to none in lowering temps by just this small amount.

 

What's the CB20 full speed score can 3239? If you open the link you posted you will see it's blurry. I'm getting 3060 on an equivalent CPU 2 gens older... One could argue the improvements Intel has managed are quite minor.

Could you post TimeSpy on the 2070S? You have the Max P 115W variant?

 

Thats good to hear. I just redid mine as well this time removing that black sticker around the cpu die. And for me that lower my temps by about 10c more. I think for me it may be because i put a bead of k5-pro, a liquid thermal pad. around the cpu rim to make sure the LM can not get out and damage anything. The gap around the cpu must be tiny and just that was leaving a gap. I seem to have hit a hard power limit now on mine with the extra thermal headroom. Running r20 will put the cpu around 4.6ghz and its limit reason is power, using about 145-150w according to HWINFO. It will start the test now at around 80c and finish at 95c, giving a score of 4666. So its still very hot, but i am also pushing 150w though a mobile chip so i am more than happy.

https://imgur.com/a/ehKQ2g8

Edit: Also ill add i am not using any dell apps on this windows install so i cant control my fans at all. Anyone know of a way to control them without the AW command center?

 

Can barely make out the score on this blurry image: 4450 or something? Nice. What's the CPU?

 

Its the i9-10980HK and it scored 4666. I also just ran the single thread and it got 534.

 

Thanks, sorry it was my phone... Def nice score. How painful was dealing with the idiotic inverted mobo?

 

I didnt think it was that bad, but i have been taking stuff like this apart for a long time. Also saw that you wanted to see timespy with a 2070 super so i just reran mine. This is with +150 core and +1000 mem.

 

With the 51M R1 you can use hwinfo to control fan speed. But you have to first uncheck EC support in the hwinfo setting tab. Maybe this works for the m17 R3 as well.

 

No dice it seems. Tried with it checked and unchecked but I dont end up with the fan icon in sensors. Maybe in time it will get added. When i messed with the AW CC before I formated the laptop it was just a hot pile of garbage. If i tried to do anything with the fans at all it would just stick the fans to 75% and not move. Even just going in a setting an offset of 1% would bug it out. I just want the fans to ramp up faster as it seems to almost ignore the cpu and go by the gpu. CPU can be at 80c and the fan is barley on, waiting until sometimes 90c before ramping up. With games it not much of an issue as the gpu will be heating up as well and it seems a lot more aggressive with the gpu side of things.

 

Cool, +17% over 8780/ 2070 MaxQ is def decent.

 

What Cpu clock speed did you run? Stock clocks?

 

I was using the following clocks in throttle stop. I may try overclocking with the cpu more later, as i haven't done much with it.

 

29% higher Cpu score with 2.1% higher clock speed. 4.7GHz vs 4.6GHz

 

Trying to go higher than 4.6 all core for me wont do much as i hit the power limit in most cases .I haven't tried to bypass the 145W limit as that much power in a thin laptop like this is nuts. I didn't think the gap would be that much, but I guess the mobile cpus have more differences other than clock speed. What do you get in r20?

Edit: After rerunning timespy and taking a look at the clocks with HWFINO running i am bouncing from 4.5 to 4.7 while the cpu test is running. It sets around 145-150w for the test. Temps max out around 85c.

 

I would try go down on overclock and re-run Time Spy. Because your TS physics scores doesn't match the clock speed.

Around 4980 with stock clocks (4.7GHz).

See also... http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...r2-owners-lounge.832848/page-68#post-11032495

 

I tried to do a repaste on mine with LM and temps got are stuck at 100c now does Removing the black pad around the cpu fix this ?


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For me it did help. Just make sure you don't have anything on that metal rim around the cpu. Even just one layer of Kapton tape caused me issues.

 

Thanks temps seem better I still get some throttling even with LM but not locked at 100c any more .


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I'm about to buy a m17 R3 with i7 and 2070S.
Do you confirm that with LM repaste, temps are goods?

EDIT: motherboard is still flipped up?

 

They are ok I still hit 99c


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