*OFFICIAL* Alienware Area-51M R1 Owner's Lounge

Agreed this is highly suggested. I went for Pro Support. ;p

 

I can call their sales and upgrade the warranty. I added two years to my wife's 17R4 for $225 this way.

 

3 years of everything for warranty tho I only plan to keep it if it has some semblance of upgradability

 

and this is what I worry about, future gpu upgrades, I think dell tried to cover their tracks a bit by including the amplifier port even though this is really unnecessary it shows that even they are not sure about the future of the dgff design.

The best cpu for this laptop will be the 9900ks when that comes out where every core turbos at 5ghz

 

To answer publically as well, no I never repeated it opened this new one up at all. Didnt drop it or allow any screen damage.. just a code 43 in device manager and green weird moving lines.

 

https://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/20052800/fs/19316750

Well this is weird. Radeon VII AND RTX 2080 are both running at the same time. On my AW 13 R3, it normally disabled the internal card. Will try later with AW 13 R3.

I had to disable the RTX 2080 in device manager in order for the Radeon VII to be utilized. Performance is similar to RTX 2080. This is a stock vs stock (GPU) run.

I am also back on 1.5.0 since it has a changelog for the AW amplifier.

My set-up LOL

AMP > Area-51m
AMP (HDMI) > M18x as display

Those are not "MXM 3.0b" they are custom non reference boards. Original mxm 3.0b boards were all interchangable and were made by the nVidia reference design.

The last real mxm 3.0b card, the quado p5000m:

Spoiler

980M (last consumer mxm 3.0b card before nVidia stopped making reference design cards):

Spoiler

780M previous generation:

Spoiler

I can post a lot more but the point is, these are "standard" designs, meaning if I had a Clevo, AW, MSI, etc. I can transfer between laptops and it should work fine.

All the newer Clevo & MSI "MXM" boards are non standard designs, so it's almost no different from Dell's DGFF since to make them work requires lots of work (I never even seen a Clevo 10/20 series working in an MSI).

That's a CPU-Z validation. It can hold 5.3Ghz on a small load like that but for benches and overall stability purposes, 5.1Ghz is the highest I can do. I can easily do 5Ghz but not with an undervolt. I can do 4.7Ghz with a -100mV undervolt.

 

Nvidia never manufactured mxm cards, they only designed the Standard in MXM-SIG which they are part of.

The rtx 2080 altough it's clevo made, it's the same size as the msi counterpart (same dimensions). The only problem would be cooling and bios compatibility.

There was some guy that got the msi gtx 1060 mxm working on a msi gt60/70 ivy bridge model. Which is a 5 year old machine. Same would go for the alienware 17 (R1) which someone made working with a msi based gtx 1070. Even the mx17 r4 is seen working with a zotac gtx 1070 mxm.

Those are two different systems with two different mxm manufacturers running quite good for legacy systems.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/alienware-m17x-r4-gtx1070-mxm-successful-upgrade.825475/

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/msi-1070-in-alienware-17-r1-ranger-success.797893/

I think you're right about the cards not being made according to the Nvidia mxm standard, but in reality it's quite possible to retrofit mxm cards to other laptop manufacturers. It only needs to be recognized in the bios for it to work. With custom drivers and bios you can come a long way.

I thought that that was being an enthusiast. Modding your laptop beyond the manufacturer's spec, not just abide by them. I'm pretty sure the laptops that can run a gtx 1080mxm msi can also run a rtx 2080 msi based.

I think that if you want to run clevo based cards you need to make chassis modifications due to the extra powerports clevo uses. But as shown, nothing is impossible. Even cross fitting mxm cards in different manufacturer laptop chassis ( because AW was clevo based, and it's now shown it can run MSI and Zotac MXM cards)

 

If you live outside US, buy directly from Dell. Even if you buy from HID, based on my own experience as well as experiences shared by several others in this thread already, opt out of their thermal upgrades because they have not been doing them properly for a while. Plus, liquid metal only matters in this laptop between the IHS and the CPU dye. Other than that one place, it doesn't matter what you put between the IHS and the heat sink and on the GPU (as long as it is a high end thermal paste) because the heat dissipation is bottle-necked by the heat sink and the 2 fan cooling system. You will NOT get beyond 1-1.5 degrees celcius better temps with liquid metal as compared to high end thermal pastes unless you replace the heat sink with a liquid nitrogen cooler and use the laptop while fixed inside a desktop tower casing with no back panel on due to custom cooler. If you want to achieve 5.1 GHz stable and beyond, get a desktop.

 

You know you won’t get good results with Liquid metal and liquid nitrogen? Stop spread wrong info (this was second or third time). The higher heat the better will Liquid metal works. From 8C and below you will get destroyed (LM will start to solidify) and on top heatsink will slowly raise of from the die/IHS.

 

The connectors themselves are just fine. What's weak on those are the contact pins and a little mishandling during installation can ruin them to an extent that some pins make contact while others don't anymore. This results in unexpected behavior that could eventually lead to a lot of unwanted issues. But if one is installing the connector properly then it is totally safe. In my case, the connected came damaged from HIDevolution with 2 pins bent inside.