Alienware 17 R4 GTX1080 in game random Stutter & Freeze

thanks, is it worth it to buy a 2080 and install it on the Alienware? loses performance by being a laptop vs. a desktop PC?


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Short answer, totally worth it IF you're the type of person that wants to run games with all graphics options cranked to 11. Longer answer, my laptop has great specs that will remain relatively high end for years but the one component that's already outdated only a year after I bought it? The mobile 1080. So instead of having to contemplate spending another 3 grand on a new laptop only a couple years into this current one, I spent a third of that on a 2080 Ti and an AGA and am now set for any game that comes out in the next 5 years.

 

perfect, thank you very much, but does not produce a bottleneck by having a seventh generation processor?


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No question you lose anywhere from 5 to 10% off the top just in general over a desktop setup but that's just baked in regardless with graphics amps. As far as bottlenecks with my particular CPU on TOP of that, no not that I've seen. I can play Battlefield V with everything at Ultra including ray tracing at 60+ fps (with the latest patches & drivers).

 

great, and you have the link where to buy the aga and gtx2080


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You have to shop around and be patient, I used a sale on Dell's website and points from buying the laptop to get the AGA for about 30 dollars about a year ago then a promotion (which expired almost instantly so I got lucky) on Newegg to get the Ti card for just under 1k a month ago.

 

thank you, but the water they sell is compatible with. the 2080? because I was reading and apparently it is bigger and it would not be well placed


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Chiming in to tell my short saga of stuttering.

Purchased a 17 r5 with a 1080 and 7th gen cpu from someone on reddit, it was in great quality, I was happy. At some point a day or two after buying it I updated everything, including the bios. It seems that this update started causing stuttering (I'll be honest, it may be that it was happening before the update as well, but I didn't notice as I only had it a couple days). At the time, I didn't know that there was a bios update that exacerbated this issue, so I assumed it was a thermal problem. I followed iunlock's guide to repaste (except I used non conductive TIM cuz I'm a wuss) and temps got a couple degrees better, but the issue persisted.

This is the point that I googled my actual stuttering issue and found this thread. Swallowing the news that I would have to go through this again was rough, I'm not experienced in taking apart laptops, but I decided to give it a go. This is basically what I did:

In iunlock's guide for my model, he recommends a specific set of pad sizes. I followed this example, but with these changes:

• For all of the "choke" points shown in this thread (basically the components that are much taller than the others) I used k5 pro. I have never used this before, but it seems to be working great, and was really easy to apply.
• For the thermal pad that overlaps the copper heat tubes (not sure what they're called), I found that I needed to break this up into multiple pads to fit properly. I put a 1mm pad on the heat tubes, cut to fit the contour so that it lines up with more elevated section of this thermal pad position. This made it line up better with the flat portion. At this point, I put another 1mm pad in the exact same way the guide shows, except I have that extra 1mm under the heat tube portion to get better contact. I'd advise experimenting with this one though as it is tricky, but the gist is that you need to add more pads on those heat tubes or you will not get good contact.
• I believe all other pads were identical to the guide.

I came to this conclusion after assembling and disassembling the heatsink 6 or 7 times. I started with 0.5mm thick pads everywhere (except for the choke points, I always intended on using k5 as ). I put on some dots of thermal paste on the gpu and cpu and tightened it all down. Took it apart and checked for indents in the thermal pads, and proper spread of the thermal paste. If there were no indents, I upped the size, if there was worse TIM spread, I decreased the size. Through this trial and error, I ended up with exactly what the guide said, minus the above points. As OP in this thread says, this is not going to be the case for everyone.

So the results, the stutter is finally gone! This was the first time I've dug into a laptop like this before, and it is almost surreal that this worked. To think the meticulous cutting of pads and spreading of paste actually paid off! I'm sure its not a surprise to most of you here, but it feels good to have it finally fixed!

Thanks to everyone in this thread for helping out us internet strangers!

 

Glad it worked out for you Sounds like you have become an expert yourself , good job !

 

Those who buy AW for the first time becomes an expert in fixing Dell PCs and probably will be the last AW or dell PCs they buy after facing too many issues that goes unfixed be it firmware or hardware.
Any plans for grading best laptops(BGA Jokebooks) with RTX this year? BIOS, CPU/GPU throttling, Best QA, best user experience out of the box, TB3 eGPU compatibility and performance (drop AGA since its present on AWs only) etc... It'd certainly help prospective gaming laptop buyers.