Alienware M17 (NOT the x) R1 - Best settings on .29 BIOS

[LaKraven]

can I get a Crossfire pair of 4850's for it, though... and if I do, would they even perform as well as the 3870's (given the 4850 is a budget card by comparison)?

They had thermal pads where they needed thermal grease (CPU & GPUs)! There was basically no thermal grease used on the entire system... just pads! This of course also meant that the heatsyncs weren't sitting flush on the chips as well, causing greater overheat issues.

As per the Radeon drivers, they are literally the latest built as downloaded YESTERDAY from the AMD website.

[granyte]

hahahaha don't worrie about it 1 4850 depending on the luck can be betwen 80% to 100% the power of dual 3870 so 2x 4850 are in an other world

4850 is no a budget card it's the most powerfull mxm2.1 card eve made

[LaKraven]

Well, what I find disturbing is that Alienware (by that time absorbed into Dell) offered to sell me an upgrade to dual 4870's (when I complained that my GPUs were radically overheating, and having argued for WEEKS that it's a HARDWARE issue, not a software one). From what you're telling me, the M17R1 won't take dual 4870's at all?

[granyte]

there are no 4870 that are built on the right format for the m17-r1 the actual 4850 were originaly ment to be 4870 an old member got his hands on an es at the time but finaly alienware turned them in 4850 to prevent competing against thier own m17x

but if you realy wan 4870 you can get the 4850 and flash thier clock that's what i did

[kmeliv]

SDD: 1x 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 (obviously configured on AHCI) for Windows 7 x64 Ultimate & critical applications
?

I flashed the same bios but can't find AHCI mode anywhere - can you let me know how you managed to switch it on? I've tried a couple other bioses but nothing...

Thanks very much in advance.