M15x A08 Bios Released - 3/9/10

Thanks for the feedback. NVidia's "Power Management Mode" is set to "Adaptive" by default and I have never changed that option to "Prefer Maximum Performance" instead. I've upgraded to A08 then reverted back again, since my initial reply. Same result. On A08 my GPU temp at idle is no less than 50c which in turn is causing my GPU to rev up every minute or so, then ramping back down after 10 seconds or more. Going back to A07 again for the second time now my GPU temp has averaged 40c over the past hour and has only hit 42c on the top end so far. The GPU fan has been whisper quiet the entire time as well. Hasn't kicked in once above the normal whisper quiet operation I've come to expect when doing nothing more than simple web surfing and such. Even tried the power drain trick before reverting back to A07 again. Didn't help. Anyone else expriencing the same issue? This is happening in my case, irrespective of the nVidia drivers used by the way. I've run the latest DELL and nVidia drivers, same result. No polling rate fix for me I guess.

 

its because you dont spent time on regular cleaning which takes 3 mins. You should just spray condensed air into the radiators twice a week

 

Polling is great for me now... Can't comment on throttling since it's not an issue on i5 CPU's coupled with GTX 260M's.

 

Heh, will do I just bought a set of 3 big cans of air from Fry's, so I should be set for a while

 

afaik both "antec formula 5" and "ocz ultra 5+" are just rebranded arctic silver 5, they have the same (otherwise) unique feel to them which makes it rather difficult to apply if you've never done it before.

that and they have the same description for the product almost word for word.
i may be wrong tho.

i found AS5 to be the least effective on my 5870, however it performed well on the cpu... that was after reseating the 5870 a total of 4 times! every time it did as you stated, upto 95ish

in contrast, ocz freeze and shin etsu 7783d both kept it under 80 in the same test. whats really freaky is that for the cpu, things were a lot closer.

oh and to keep things on topic with the new bios...
i've noticed not much difference in cpu performance loss with the 920xm if i use throttlestop.
i have however noticed a fair amount of extra heat! pushing my cpu above 80C with 4 cores at 24x multi.
Am i right in unticking Clock modulation and Chipset Clock Mod? since they don't seem to be using that anymore?
i just pump up the TDP/TDC to 85/75 and set the multi's to 24 and let it fly.

i've had two restarts requiring a battery drain to reboot when i've enabled the two mod 100% options. both times i saw the multi fly to something ridiculous just a split second prior to the shut off (something like 54)

 

With my 5850, I got a 40fps average in Mafia II benchmark. I thought this was pretty a-OK. Looking forward to seeing the touchpad getting fixed, but no throttling support for my 920? thats a problem.

 

As far as I know, the 5870 tends to run cooler than the 260M anyway, but I'll look into the OCZ Freeze.

 

One user said that bios A08 was not using any clock modulation anymore and another user showed me a screen shot of chipset clock modulation at 50.0% during a wPrime run with the new bios.

I'd uncheck both of the clock modulation boxes and then turn on the Log File option and go and do some gaming or benching and see if any clock modulation shows up in the log file. If your CPU is not being throttled anymore by either of these methods then there is no need to have either of these options checked.

I haven't seen any buggy data like that coming out of ThrottleStop but anything is possible. Hopefully it was CPU-Z that bugged out and not ThrottleStop.

If you ever get a screen shot of something like that or you see something crazy like that in the log file then send it my way so I can have a look.

Edit: Back on page 10 it was inap that was still having the chipset clock modulation issues. You'll have to ask him for details or if things improved with some different settings.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/6667709-post93.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/6667786-post109.html

 

you're right!
it is throttling, chip% hovers around the 75 / 87.5 mark with a spike to 100 now and then and low dips into 50

oh well...

on a side note, with the a08 i'm getting prime95 errors i didn't have before at 26multi, so 26 is now unstable for me arrrrghh!!!!!. works fine at 25 (apart from throttling).

now here's another question, does anyone else with a killawatt meter notice higher readings when forcing the cpu? i can almost swear they're higher, as is the cpu temps at forced 24x across the board.

 

Well, I tried updated the BIOS, but to no avail. I first burnt it to CD and booted from the CD but it just started up like it always does. Then I copied it to a flashdrive, booted from the flashdrive and again, it just booted up like it always does. Any suggestions?

 

press F12 and manually select the boot media. If that doesnt work, try redownloading the bios

 

I already did that. I even changed it to boot up from CD with F2. I re-downloaded the bios. All to no avail. I will give it another shot.

Thanks Wattos

Edit: Nope! Brings nothing. I just downloaded the BIOS for the third time, but it just boots up like it always does. It wonders me that the download takes less than a second, though. Maybe that's where the problem lies.

 

when you burn the cd, can you read the cd (in windows)? I had a faulty optical drive, where it would burn cd's, but would be unable to read them. And therefore, it would also boot normally when trying to flash.

Try burning Memtest( http://www.memtest.org/ ) on a CD and see if that works.

you can also try saving the bios to a file and then use something like nero to burn the bios

 

Yes, no problem. Besides, that shouldn't affect starting up from the flashdrive.

It doesn't really matter s my machine works like a dream, but still, it shouldn't be a problem upgrading a BIOS

 

hmm, what about power drain?

 

Yeah I would download again then run it and burn a disk again.

 

Hi bro.

I did that but it's still the same. It just starts up after I select boot from CD and that's the end of it.

 

Well, this is now starting to pee me off in such a way that if 08 is not on there within an hour I will sell this crap and buy another one.

9 attempts and no result.

11 attempts and running out of disks!

 

thats strange, try downloading from my link,

Download A08 BIOS.exe from Sendspace.com - send big files the easy way

after download did you run the exe.

 

Thanks bro. Downloaded it, extracted it, burnt the CD but somehow it refuses to boot from neither CD nor flashdrive. It just boots up.
(Yes, I ran the .exe)

 

i get its power drain time, hehehehehe
your the first to report problems with installing.

 

Ha ha ha! Yeah, tried that too bro. Didn't help either.

 

wow i'm pretty much out of ideas, but the computer can read the disk but it just won't boot?

 

Yeah, it reads the disk without any problems, the same with the flashdrive. It just won't use any of them to boot.

 

can you try your restore disk and see if you can boot from there so we can make sure the drive is able to read bootable disc and boot from it. Stop messing with bios for a second and see if you can get the drive to read a bootable disc aside from the bios. Also might want to try clearing your cmos by pulling the coin cell battery but first try a windows setup disc to see if it will boot from it. Also did you try a different usb flash drive and different ports as well. Do you have external cd rom drives by anychance

 

the only other thing is to pull the cmos battery out and power drain it, to let the bios reset, then hopefully it will work. but remember you will have to set the date and time back on your computer.

hahahah faiz beat me to it, hehheheh

 

I'll try booting from the windows disk first. Where exactly is the cmos battery?

 

its the black thing in the middle of the laptop if you remove the service cover

 

We seem to have found the problem. It did not boot from the Windows CD. After selecting boot up from CD is just booted up directly like it always does. So somehow my computer cannot boot up from any devices other than the HD.

 

Thanks bro. I don't think that will be necessary right now, though. As it won't boot from CD anyway.

 

You should still do it, it might be the reason your BIOS isn't booting from other drives...

 

i think you should still gave the cmos battery thing a try. just unplug the connector, no need to take the battery out.

edit: dang i'm slow today, hheheheh

 

OK did that and the system started repairing itself. Still not booting up from the CD, though. Seems I am up for my third repair in just a couple of months.

 

Man that sucks. Sorry couldn't get it to work bro.

 

Yeah, me too, bro. I'll call Dell tomorrow and tell them I want another system. I'll probably go for the Precision M6500 Workstation.

I hate to see this baby go but three repairs is my max for any system.

 

Yes, I have noticed this as well. My GPU stays between 48-53c as does my CPU.

 

If you're often being in bad luck about the systems breaking down repeatedly, then you should maybe get your environment checked out.

I'm not saying it's faulty, but a friend of mine had computer after computer break down on him, until he discovered, during some unrelated electrical work, that there was some issue with over-voltage or something (I don't know the correct English term for it).

He still has the computer he got after that till this day.

Sorry for derailing, just taught it might be relevant.

 

I am actually quite lucky to be honest.

The first repair was a faulty DVD drive, so no one's fault, the second time my video card fried due to a power surge, again nobody's fault, and now it seems my computer cannot boot up from any medium other than the hard drive. This has probably always been the case. The problem is that I work with my machine and I am not willing to risk losing my work or customers. If at some point I will need to boot up from the recovery disk to get to my work and I can't, I won't be able to make my deadline which would most likely cost me my customer as well.

I still think this is by far the best machine ever and I am convinced of its extreme good built quality, but as a personal rule I do not perform more than 3 repairs to a machine before I get rid of it. I simply don't want to lose work or customers.

 

Yea, I can relate to that issue. Thats why I've a computer strictly for work (Lenovo w500), and one strictly for gaming (Alienware m15x).

I've also got my old Dell XPS m1530 which is located beneath my sofa table which I use for ad-hoc surfing. That one is probably that one that sees the most use. It's smaller and more casual to use than whipping out a 5kg Alienware to check the recipe for meatloaf.

 

Guys could you please clarrify, in the M15x with previous bios (AO6 and AO7 etc) are only the i7 920/940 CPUs able to turbo boost each of the four cores or in the M15x or were the i7 720/740, 820/840 CPUs also able to have all four cores turbo boosted?

I haven't updated from factory A05 bios, as everything is running fine in my M15x using Dell graphics drivers, so if the AO8 bios isn't going to affect my (i7 820) CPU processing speed (I crunch big datasets) then I'll update to A08 simply to fix the trackpad issues.

 

Bios A08 only changes the turbo multipliers on the Extreme CPUs. On the Core i7 720QM/740QM/820QM/840QM, the maximum turbo multipliers are locked and can not be changed so it is impossible for Dell to write a bios that will change the turbo multis of those CPUs. You are safe to upgrade to A08 and there will be no loss in performance.

 

thanks for clearing this up... +1

 

Just got off the phone with Alienware referance CPU and GPU getting to hot since A08, they are coming to replace the heatsink and fan.... The ran a stress test and the min temp was 50C and max was 86C for the CPU. Just out curiousity I asked about changing out to the 5850 due to throttling and they put me on hold for more than 10 min came back and said the Eng. had never heard of such thing.

 

oooo crapp i reached 95c when playing bff for 15mins ran at 800/1100 clock speed =/

 

is that your gpu core temp or gpu ram temp

 

How can you tell?

 

with amd clock tools, tss2 is the core and tss1 is the ram. and with gpu-z temp #3 is core and temp#2 is ram. please correct me if i'm wrong, hehhehehe

 

What about HWinfo32? There thermal diode, gpu TSO(DisPIO), gpu TS1(MemIO), gpu TS2(Shader). Which one is the ram and core?

 

i don't have the hw32 installed right now but open it up, then open gpu-z and match up the temps, then you will know which is which.

 

What your max temp while gaming right now inap? Mine is around 78C if I play SC2 and CSS. When I play game like metro 2033, Batman, and Dirt 2 it go up to 82C. BTW Metro 2033 is so demanding. That the only game that I'm actually struggle to play. I get around 37-56 inside the tunnel but when I go outside it dip down to 20-30. Setting are 1080p, high, DX9. You try that game yet inap? Download the demo if you have a chance. GPU flash to 750/1050.