M17x DPC Latency

[wolverine9314]

Clipper,

I found that reverting back to the factory installed NVidia storage controller fixed this issue. It went against the advice of Dell, but worked for me.

Hi, I have been reading this thread and wish to say a big thank you to everyone who has been working on this.

I was wondering if anyone has had the same experience as me. I have applied the fixes listed in this thread (BIOS, nVidia Storage Driver, WLAN driver) and DPC's on my machine are now really good. I was experiencing hangs for anything upto 5 mins during which time the machine was unresponsive (I think others have mentioned this), but then fires back into life (note that i never saw this happen in a game just when using the desktop). The good news is that i haven't seen this since updating. The bad news is that my Optiarc BR drive is now completely non functional.

Basically now when I insert a disk (these are all manufactured and include the Alienware resource disk) the laptop initially looks like it is reading the disk and the cursor show the CD icon, if I then go into explorer the drive object doesn;t show the inserted disk and if you tryu doing anything (opening, right clicking etc) then the machine does a very similar hang to the one i described earlier. The hard disk light comes on solidly and nothing responds for a period of time. After this the machine comes back to life but the DVD is still inaccessible and if you try opening again the machine locks up - repeat cycle. Try ejecting it and the machine locks up (software or through the command strip). I have tried unistaling the DVD driver and the ATA drivers through device manager and rebooting and whilst it reinstalls these fine the problem remains. Before I ring Dell has anyone got any suggestions? Is the possible new storage driver a good candidate?

Sorry for the long post

[Aikimox]

@Aristo
Oh man, you're still fighting the windmills.
This thread is no place to get the R1->R2 replacement.
If you want to do it - call Dell and fight them till the end.
As far as the latency is concerned this thread can be closed as the issue (AFAIS) is resolved. I said before that there were no spikes on my R2 - forget it, I can reproduce them up to 50K high. But there's no audio/video stuttering, so screw the DPC Checker.
I'm ok with the replacement. R1=R2 on average all in all. Looking back at those hours of phone calls and letters to Dellienware - > was a waste of time. I even wanted to ship the R2 back to them and keep the R1 when the R2 arrived.


@BatBoy,
Do you think it's time to summarize and finalize this thread? It was a great job done by you, Stamatix and others, but it's time to rise a mug 'o ale and sing "We did it!"

[stamatisx]

Aikimox about the R2, how can you reproduce 50K spikes? Just curious. I know the eject button can cause a few but not that high...

[Aikimox]

I might give your test another shot later on, but so far when installing software from DVD-ROM and inserting or transferring data from a USB - one of these or maybe a combination of them triggers those spikes.
But again, I don't care, since I don't hear/see any stuttering, so I'm not worried. Though you know, I didn't have such spikes with R1+ATIs. Plus the temps were better. Makes you think...

[BatBoy]

@BatBoy,
Do you think it's time to summarize and finalize this thread? It was a great job done by you, Stamatix and others, but it's time to rise a mug 'o ale and sing "We did it!"

We certainly are getting there. Since this issue was originally reported for the M17xR1 w/NV GPUs and we now have a fix, it is time to re-examine this. According to ManuelG over @ NV, the driver issue will be resolved with all future releases of the driver. Thanks to Bill-B and Dell, we have a beta driver which confirms this.

At this time I am removing the thread from sticky status. The thread shall remain open of course. Post#1 was updated with links to BIOS A03, the BIOS A03 discussion thread and also a link to the beta NV display driver.

Concerning the latency being reported on ATI based R1's, Bill-B has posted it is being looked at.

For those of you who are still having issues, I encourage you to continue to post. If you are having a problem, and are ATI based, start a thread with specifics and we'll take it from there. Keep in mind that from member reports, several performance related issues appear to be driver related. We have a thread in place for owners who have moved over to the ATI GPUs on the R1. That thread can be found here:

Problems and Questions when moving from NVIDIA to ATI GPUs - M17x R1

Thanks again to Bill-B, John-B and all of the folks over @ Dell!

[Aristotelhs2060]

The only time i seen this happen was on my first system when overclocking.. DO you have anything overclocked??

my cpu is only overclocked but not to the limits. i think i saw this even on stock speeds though.

@Aristo
Oh man, you're still fighting the windmills.
This thread is no place to get the R1->R2 replacement.
If you want to do it - call Dell and fight them till the end.
As far as the latency is concerned this thread can be closed as the issue (AFAIS) is resolved. I said before that there were no spikes on my R2 - forget it, I can reproduce them up to 50K high. But there's no audio/video stuttering, so screw the DPC Checker.
I'm ok with the replacement. R1=R2 on average all in all. Looking back at those hours of phone calls and letters to Dellienware - > was a waste of time. I even wanted to ship the R2 back to them and keep the R1 when the R2 arrived.

getting an R2 for me and this country would be more difficult than you think. the alienware machines are not shipped in Greece from Dell, only the Dells ones. thus as i changed country since i bought it i dont have sales representative now only techniqal support. i never said i have audio/video stuttering with the ATIs despite the 4-5K red spikes that i can reproduce under certain occasions. only if i hear mp3s and press eject button which is for one sec-> OSD thing which Bill-Dell said that it will be fixed. still no news though.

my question was about the specific issue though. it has nothing to do with latency. its a root issue because the machine stucks even before the bios loads.

[Aikimox]

my cpu is only overclocked but not to the limits. i think i saw this even on stoc speeds though.



getting an R2 for me and this country would be more difficult than you think. the alienware machines are not shipped in Greece from Dell, only the Dells ones. thus as i changed country since i bought it i dont have sales representative now only techniqal support. i never said i have audio/video stuttering with the ATIs despite the 4-5K red spikes that i can reproduce under certain occasions. only if i hear mp3s and press eject button which is for one sec-> OSD thing which Bill-Dell said that it will be fixed. still no news though.

my question was about the specific issue though. it has nothing to do with latency. its a root issue because the machine stucks even before the bios loads.

If I could retrace my steps, would keep the R1 and enjoy it.

[Aristotelhs2060]

you know what. after i saw the i7 core scores i enjoy my R1 more. to the least there is no difference between them as for performance.

[trikster]

I'm using my R1 to edit and maintain a show that uses 14 channels of audio (1 track is for the 4 interior surround sound channels, 1 track for 4 sub-woofer/bass channels, and then two separate tracks for the 6 background channels). In addition to encoding the audio on the fly, I'm also compiling command data for 32 relays and 512 channels of DMX (I think I might be actually using 450, but all 512 are compiled). Oh, and it's not just one show I'm recording (5 minutes in length), also doing an intermission loop as well as various pre- and post- show routines. The entire thing comes in as 5 192kbit MP3 files (each weighs in at about 6mb) and another 100mb in various compiled files for the show controller.

Prior to the beta drivers from nVidia/Dell, I had to turn off PowerMiser and the integrate GPU in order to compile without any hiccups or audible distortion. With the new drivers (and Synaptics off as well as latest WiFi drivers) I am able to use the laptop normally for work and gaming, no need to disable PowerMiser or the intergrated GPU.

How about any video editing? I get a two second delay for every 5~6 minutes of video rendering. Also, are you on Vista or W7? If you are on W7, I might have to give it a try as I have a copy of W7 now.

If I could retrace my steps, would keep the R1 and enjoy it.

Why? Did I miss something?

[Aristotelhs2060]

If I could retrace my steps, would keep the R1 and enjoy it.

one question. did you try metro 2033 on the R2. do you see fps drops? i checked today and there was no red spikes during gameplay despite the fps drops. so i want to see if there are fps drops on R2 on this game and highest settings (dx10 very high) if the i7 makes any difference.