AW M15x Throttling Issue Investigation - Stock clocks and overclocked.

*face palm*

 

what i still don't understand, and i've tried everything, is i can't get my gpu to go back to how it was day 1, i think imma system restore to day one and just back up my stuff, it won't fluctuate anymore, no matter what i do powermizer no powermizer riva tuner no rivatuner doesn't work. plus i'm afraid of flashing cuz of my a03 bios.

y facepalm, i'm sorry idk what i'm doing, i'm just messing with stuff. i just wish i could get it back to normal so i can test it before i try overclocking with rivatuner by flashing it.

 

nvm didn't work just caused my display driver to crash if i clocked it to high, btw joker i finally took the plunge and flashed, what are the max clocks on your system??

 

how hard was it to flash it? just curious about it, don't feel i need to just yet.
also i think it would help if you post your specs.

 

I can hit 750/1640/1100 stable on mine. Take yours in increments to find your max. Anyway guys, my M15x return labels FINALLY showed up after a grueling 1 week of calling Dell. My M17x i7 system has also been ordered so it looks like my time with the M15x is coming to an end soon. I plan to hold on to it for 3-4 more days before I ship it back to Dell. I'll continue to update the thread should any new fixes or tweaks surface. If you guys discover something important and want it on the first page, PM me and I'll add it.

Thanks again to everyone that helped contribute to the investigation and especially Unclewebb for developing ThrottleStop.

 

Man that sucks. the M15x community is losing a valuable asset. who's gonna help us with the throttling now.
anyways wish you the best with your M17x, looks like a super lappy.

 

What's left to fix? Run ThrottleStop and run RivaTuner and now you can fully enjoy your M15x.

I can't wait for Joker's M17x arrive to see how it responds to some tweaking.

 

But *DELL* should be fixing this
As it is, I can't even ever know if it's been fixed in future models :-/

 

I will see that with the M15x refresh with i7 620M when Dell will valide my exchange of my SXPS 1645

But according to my commercial, the M15x with i7 620M have always the same chipset of M15x i7 QM but in rev B3 for support new i5/i7 and the new features.

 

okey guys I am getting a refund for the M15x atlast... as u can see a few pages back i told they will be sending me a replacement.. but after a few more calls (and a few emails) i managed to get a full refund authorized. i just received my RMA number and tue pick up... so my time with the ALMOST POWERFUL(without the fix of course) is also coming to an end... by the way it took me a month to get this thru...

 

When you are running the prime 95 and furmark, does your laptop sound like the fans are running 100%? When I play 3d games, even world of warcraft my laptop sounds like this after about 30 minutes of gametime, and the GPU temp is only around 60C, same with all 4 cores of the cpu, and the fans are going crazy... any way to change the settings? Do all our m15x's act liek this? I get a dud?

Thanks

 

Just had to say thank you to you and joker for making me aware of this fantastic little tool.
I dont have a dell, I have an acer 8930 with terrible throttling issues until I ran your throttlestop, I tested it for 6 hours and didnt throttle once (I also had powermizer off but powermizer off didnt stop my throttling).
I turned throttlestop off and played the game again and it throttled..
Turned throttlestop on and NO throttlng again, I really cant thank you enough, I didnt think it would work because of me having an acer and not dell but it did, Im not a tech or programmer and dont really no how its stopping it, id love to know how this program works, thanks again and sorry its abit off topic but I just had to jump on this thread to thank you

 

i write & produce muzic... So i neened a portable machine so i take to d studio & plug in & play... But would u believe it i have tried 3 diffrent USB sound cards & the performance is unusable. drop out of sound. I cant believe this is a machine i paid £2,600 for... Am in the process of getting my money back

 

Seen at least 2 users with this:

http://www.google.com/products/cata...ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAwQ8wIwAA#ps-sellers

and they seem pretty happy.

 

Hi Joker, A long time reader here of your Thread.

Finally got my lappy on friday. Decided I would play around with it before installing your fixes so i can compare the difference btwn then and now. Anyway...

I have a problem, I followed your instruction to a letter (at least I hope so!) When i got to Rivatuner GPU Clock adjustment part. I couldn't put it higher than 480/960/380. You said the default Clocks should be 500's something? (I've added a picture to help you out to understand what i mean) Second question, You said to make the value 200 for max clock, I cannot see the "200" as it will only register one digit at the time (added a picture as well) I really hope this is a simple problem or I missed something?

I got i7 820, 4GB, 1GB 260m.

ALSO, i wanted to say THANK YOU for doing this! Tremendous stuff!

 

Double click on the maxclocklimit box and type in 300 (you can use 200 but I prefer 300) and hit okay. That will fix your clock range problem.

 

The range opened up!

So I adjusted the clock to 550/950/1350, then clicked "Apply".. seems to work, then clicked "OK", it automatically reverts back to 383/301/767
I also tried to restart the lappy after applying it as well, nothing changed?

Am I missing a step here?

(I attached the picture too)

 

Click on the stealth button to enable it and then disable it. Seems to be a stealth mode bug that gets in the way sometimes.

 

Instructions on the first page tell users to use a maxclocklimit of 200. Might want to change that to avoid further confusion.

 

AHA! Found the culprit! It was Alienware AlienFX Fusion. For some reason, my power plan changed to "Power saver" mode! It didn't matter how many time I pressed the stealth button it wouldn't change. I changed it back to High performance, and bingo, it worked like a charm (your fixes)! Thousand thanks for very quick replies! *off to play with my kickass "now" ALL POWERFUL toy!*

 

What???
10char

 

Guys, we need to add to this thread the new AW M11x!,yeap, an 11 inch throttling little beast!, hahaha

 

Joker, what did you say to Dell so they would exchange your m15x to the m17x?

I'm thinking of perhaps doing the same thing, how much did they make you pay for the deal?

Thanks for the help Joker!

 

Do me a favor and PM me a screen shot of an M11x throttling its guts out. Include ThrottleStop in monitoring mode with the first 3 boxes unchecked while running Prime, Furmark or whatever it takes. Every day I seem to be able to add a new model to my growing list of Dell laptops that don't live up to their specifications.

 

i will like to say thanks uncleweb and joker for this fix is working perfect

 

joker i would also like to know what you said.

 

Hi everyone... Please dont blame me for not reading the 78 pages this thread contains.

I bought a m15x one year ago, back then the only OS i could get was Vista 32bit.

My CPU is T9300 2.5GHz
Video Card: 8800M GTX 512mb
4Gig Ram.
(If anything else is required let me know)

1 Month ago, I installed Windows 7 and all of a sudden. I'm getting lag spike. ALL THE TIME. It occurs every couple minutes...but it's not related to what i am doing... I can be on the internet and BOOM... lag spike.. its like my FPS was dropping by half or more. When it happens while playing games it last a bit longer (between 1minute and 4mins)

I cant.... figure out...what's the problem...

I did get ThrottleStop but it didnt helped.. actually there was no difference at all (yes I turned it on)

Thank you very much for any help you can give me...

If any other information is needed please let me know.

I'm currently running Win7 64bits and I have every driver i can possibly get.

 

I didn't do anything special. Just told them I wasn't happy with it.

 

Vico: Did you run a ThrottleStop log file when gaming? Leave the first 4 boxes unchecked so ThrottleStop can monitor your computer and then send me the log so I can have a look. Check the Log File and the More Data options. Run a log with GPU-Z as well to see if your GPU is being throttled or dropping down to 2D clocks when it should be using 3D.

 

You will need to tell me where to pick up the log. But this is what i came up with GPU-Z

#1: I forgot to turn ThrottleStop off but the pic #3 is the screenshot with TS turned Off. On the right you see all my spec for my Grahic Card.

#2 Same as #1 but the right window is the sensor... I'm not very knowledgable (SP?) in computer part but isnt 102degree freakin high and potentialy dangerous for a CPU?

#3 ThrottleStop turned off with the Sensors window on the right.

#4 That's the DPC - which i have no idea what it is exactly.. but there was a thread about that for the M17x so I checked it.

#5 That's TS not running with the Sensor window while I'm not playing - watching something - I only have those 2 programs running + internet.

Thanks!

 

SLFM stands for Super Low Frequency Mode. You shouldn't have that checked when you are testing. With your 0.5 half multipliers at full load it probably won't have any effect but just in case.

Your GPU is running too hot. Are you running Furmark or something like that? The GPU-Z graph looks fine but I'm not sure it that might be causing some issues or not.

A T9300 supports a feature called Intel Dynamic Acceleration (IDA). Your default multiplier is 12.5. When only one core is active and the second core is in the C3/C6 sleep state, the first core is allowed to use a 13.5 multiplier so your computer should speed up from 2500 MHz to 2700 MHz. This is very similar to how turbo boost works on the Core i7 CPUs. When both cores are loaded and in the active state or if you don't have C3/C6 enabled in the bios, you will be limited to a maximum multiplier of 12.5. You can also be limited to 12.5 based on CPU core temperature or CPU power consumption.

Try running a single threaded bench mark like SuperPI mod and take a screen shot of ThrottleStop about half way through a 1M test. If this is working correctly you should see a multiplier higher than 12.5. You will probably not ever see the full 13.5. There is constant background activity waking up the second core on a Windows PC so the multiplier will constantly be bouncing back and forth between 12.5 and 13.5 hundreds of times a second. ThrottleStop should report the average of that in the monitoring section.

From what I can see, the CPU is not throttling. It's running how it is designed to run and it's not using any clock modulation like the M15x uses when it is stressed.

 

No I'm not ( I don't know what is it tho...)

Is there a way how i can cool down my CPU?

And I dont know how to only use 1 core...

 

As long as C3/C6 is enabled in the bios, the use of 1 core and the higher multiplier will happen automatically.

Here's ThrottleStop 1.88 with a few improvements for Core 2 owners.

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/3/3/1794507/ThrottleStop.zip

If your graphics chip is running that hot when you are not doing anything then there's a problem.

You can try this version of RealTemp but it will probably report the same temperature for your graphics card.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/82de5l

There might be a fan problem or a loose heatsink problem or something like that.

 

Hi, sorry if this has been asked before:

I'm currently running the tests for throttling. Is there a point where the tests stop, or do I have to manually stop them?

 

i tried that joker, but they won't give me a full refund unless i order another system first, and i wanna wait a bit i think. they offered me a hundred dollars to keep it though lol.

 

Thanks for providing the GPU/CPU throttling fix, but I have a question regarding the GPU throttling fix:

Rivatuner seems to detect my default settings as 383/767/1301. I've tried rebooting, switching stealth mode on/off, and the result is the same. Anyone else having this problem? And is it safe to just manually adjust to 550/950/1350?

 

You have to set the clocks manually.

 

you mentioned that you have your laptop for a year already. Most likely your radiators are clogged up with dust and the cooling becomes inefficient.

So what you actually need to do is the following:

Do this
http://4help.alienware.com/cgi-bin/...iZwX3NlYXJjaF90ZXh0PW0xNXg*&p_li=&p_topview=1

and this

http://4help.alienware.com/cgi-bin/...iZwX3NlYXJjaF90ZXh0PW0xNXg*&p_li=&p_topview=1

Check if the radiators are clean.

 

Non existent, check your alienware fx fusion settings, make sure it is in high performance, and check GPU setting in fusion as well under high performance, and turn both on for battery and plugged in settings to max performance. That's how i was able to fix it and set it up. Maybe this helps?

 

Why the GTX 260M have a TDP max of 65w to Dell and other laptop have a GTX 260M with a TDP max of 75w ?

Thanks

 

i did the same and they offered me a M17x-R2 with Core i-7. Waiting on a call to confirm everything.

 

damn, i need to talk to those reps you guys talk to, all they tell me is oh well if i want to return it i get 400$restocking fee. but did you guys order before you returned or after, maybe i need to keep pestering them. idk, i really don't wanna lose 400 dollars.

 

If you have been sold a defective product that doesn't deliver its rated performance, contact the Better Business Bureau. That seems to get Dell's attention.

 

oh thanks, i didn't think of that. but what do i tell them. and how would dell find out about it.

 

as long as you are in the 21 days return period it should not be a problem. Just tewll them you are not happy (especially with throttling) and that you want to order a M17x R2. It has to work. Also, try calling customer support instead of technical support

 

i have and everytime i do they tell me that i can return it but i have to pay the restocking fee, numerous times i have called and it doesn't matter what i say if i say i just am not happy with it they apologize and pretty much say oh well, if i say i want to replace it cuz i'm not happy with it they are like ok no prob that will be a 400 restocking fee and then once we get it you can order one. (i used dell credit). i'm getting really mad at them cuz all i hear on here are stories of how u guys got yours replaced or offered a m17 r2 and all i get is the same crap. sigh.... i have till the 24th for them to process the return thats when my 21 days is up. not to mention it was a christmas gift and the buyer was told it could be returned no prob.

 

Did you call Customer Service as well? Ask for a supervisor. Just keep pressing them

 

Tell the BBB that you have bought a defective product and the manufacturer is not willing to let you return it for a full refund and they are also not willing to fix it. Most users that have gone this route have had a call from Dell the next business day.

 

just filed it thanks unclewebb, imma call dell tomorrow and talk to them, maybe i'll get a good rep.

 

Thorpe, just so you know there is a backlog of m17x orders right now. My system has been in the build stage for nearly a week and nobody has progressed to boxing yet. I'm suspecting that there will probably be a delay that could take awhile. If you get a refund I'd recommend waiting for the 5870 refresh in march.