Alienware Area-51m Review by Ultra Male

Grab the generic Intel IRST UWD driver, it gave a sizeable boost in writes on HDD/SSD. Response time is great too!

 

CPU temps of 75-84 degrees Celsius with the i9 9900K during gaming seems reasonable. I was getting crazy hot temps of 100 C and over on the new Alienware Area-51M system I received on Friday. No idea why it was getting so hot during a 20 minute gameplay session of Battlefield V set to ultra settings, and with ray tracing features enabled. I had the fans on “performance’ mode too. Sent it back to my reseller just yesterday, and hoping to receive a replacement unit by next week sometime.

It could have been that mine hardly any thermal paste on the chip, or just received a bad thermal paste job from the factory. All sorts of possibilities. I actually tried to open the thing up, to reapply the thermal paste myself, but couldn’t manage to even get to the damn heatsink. Shortly after I had sent the laptop back, I realised I had missed two screws on the rear of the system that I hadn’t removed, which was why I was struggling to remove the rear exhaust cover of the chassis. It should simply slide off with a quick tug.

If I happen to experience any CPU temperature issues with the new unit I receive, I may just play around a bit with the voltages, or change the stock thermal paste to Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut.

 

That is it, really nice test! Contains everything what is important, I'm especially happy 3DMark11 score included too.

 

New record AS SSD Benchmark score with the new IRST v17.2.6.1027

No Caching involved even, just stock settings



@tilleroftheearth

 

Hmm, that RAID0 benchmark result looks low? This is what I get on a single 970 EVO Plus
in my m15, stock settings:

 

That is insane man! Compared to my previous results my above benchmark is a big improvement but that 970 EVO PLUS is killing it! superb 4K Read/Write speeds!

You aren't using any caching software like RAPID or whatnot right?

 

Like I said, standard settings. Now that you mentioned, I tried disabling write cache flushing - no difference to speak of.

My point is: are these RAID0 numbers what we would expect? Is the sequential single drive performance of the 960 Pro 2TB really just 1350 / 1200?

 

Yeah, so Samsung claims 3500 / 2100 for the 860 Pro, so unless there is a driver/hardware issue it would be safe to conclude that a single modern SSD maxes out the NVME interface and there is no point in putting 2 in RAID0 hoping to gain sequential performance.

 

Good score w/o any write cache involved.
What's the drive health considering that the drive has taken 80TB of writes in its lifetime!

 

the older one (almost 1.5 years old) is 99% and the 2nd 960 PRO which I bought 8 months later is @ 100%