Popcan

Update: From day one I was getting random fan errors and malfunctions as well as random hardware tests that would always pass but still random an annoying. After a session talking with Dell tech support, they sent me out fan assembly, they sent me out another fan assembly. which turns out to me the entire heatsink and 3 fans. They also sent me in the ram fan (the little one). Fan issue is resolved so far. 3rd time cracking the machine open... barely had enough honeywell ptm7950 to do the job twice. Same scores on cinebench. little fan is different than the original.

I think I'm out of the loop on this one. Is the UV that you are adjusting different than the one in the bios?

Whats you cinebench score?

Update: on the repaste with Thermal Grizzly kryonaut. After several weeks my score on cinebench started creeping down from 31000ish down to low 25000.... I ordered some Honeywell ptm7950 and installed it. My scores Instantly shot back up to 31000 with max temp set to 85c Pretty Happy with that.

As far as I am aware, 1.7.0 is when they started to removed UV. It did for me as well. However, if I had a custom profile set with my UV setting. I could update the bios and then just load my custom profile. This would restore my overclocking/undervolting options. I have confirm that they still work this way. Just upgraded to 1.8.1 and tested this again. I can confirm is still works to enable the undervolt option.

Does anyone else get random “fan malfunction” errors in the bios log? Happens every now and then.

That is an awesome opportunity! Thank you for passing that along. I feel like we are a bunch of beats testers but what else is new lol.

I'm sure someone has at this point, but I haven't seen a post of it yet. It would be an interesting venture for someone to experiment with. Thermals hold these CPUs back so much. If I had the choice knowing then what I know now, and if it was available, I would get the AMD variant. However, I just play games on mine. Battery life is much better according to reports as well as the thermals are much better. Just my .02 🤷‍♂️ I don't think you will be disappointed, there is a lot to like about these m18s even if there are a few blemishes.

I will say this, the most stable my laptop has ever been is when I reinstalled windows. and got rid of all the dell stuff. my backlight has stayed how I set it.

I had my voltage set to 1100 with no offset and would get that occasionally. When I upgraded my ram to kingston fury 5600 ram my laptop would not boot at all. I had to reset the bios and then it was fine. So, from my experience these cpus seem to handle undervolting differently than traditional cpus. 🤷‍♂️ or its dells buggy bios or software...

From the limited tests I have seen so far of similar speced machines, the 7945HX get way better battery performance, better thermals and is neck and neck with the 13900HX in performance, if not a little better.. Depending on workload of course.

I can confirm 5600 works at rated speed. With 32gb anyway.

The issue I have ran into with removing awcc is that the reverts my keyboard lights to white. I really, really dislike awcc.

This is one of the issues I ran into with AWCC. It already uses its own version of XTU that causes conflict with the bios and XTU. At least in my short experience. Like I have mentioned before in other posts, I have had AWCC hang my computer at post after repeatedly getting messages about AWCC resetting my bios to default. From the research that's available and my own testing it seems that the bios locks undervolting in any setting but performance. This seems like a bug to me. There is a sorta work around out there but I don't know if it will allow you to use XTU since it requires you to disable the service and rename it in system32. You could probably get it to work if you uninstall AWCC and wipe xtu and then reinstall XTU. I have a -150mv that I set in the bios that shows in hwmonitor but I'm not sure that its actually sticking at all times. I have AWCC installed but all of dell's other bloatware removed and XTU service disabled. All in all, I think that the bios is a little buggy, there are even options available in the bios that say on them that the customer shouldn't see them lol. Even more than that I think that AWCC is a horrible buggy mess. Because of Dell's track record with AWCC I have no hope for it either but we will see. I do think that eventually they will fix the bios issue. Disabling windows from modifying the bios has seemed to help also. I remember a time when you bought a product it didn't feel like you were a beta tester. lol

Here is what a about an hour of halo infinite maxed settings, capped at 120fps, looks like on the cpu. undervolted 150 (im honestly not convinced that its actually doing undervolting) custom fan curve (pretty much just maxed fans.) edit: this is with 15 TCC 85c max

Hottest spot I have seen on the 4090 is the ram, i've seen mine hit 90c (I pretty much have HWinfo up at all times.) GPU die itself has only hit 72c on the hotspot. I have been stressing the heck out of my system. I'm not 100% happy with the way the cpu runs and the bios are hit or miss if they work at all for me. I'm looking forward to your add-a-sub post! Thats pretty cool/

Oof! I appear to be spreading false information 😬 my bad... I stand corrected. Wanted to prove myself correct but couldn't find what I thought I knew lol.... I must have read the double sided single rank and thought that was double... idk... Here is a video that puts it in terms people like myself can understand lol...

Haha my bad! It didn't cross my mind. I did take a picture of my board though lol... Its pretty straight forward. None of the fans had to come out but I did remove the screws on the big fans. The only issue I had was getting the heat sync(sink?) back on. One side of the screws look like they stick up more and I kept thinking they were cross threading. there are only 3 or 4 different types of screws. I personally take it a part in sections and just keep the screws isolated from section to section. I kind of don't mind how dell put this thing together. I do think they could have done a better job with how the bottom panel attaches. those 45 degree screws in the front corners never want to go in for me... For anyone attempting this remember what @MogRules noted about the first boot after reassembly. It takes a good while for it to turn back on. Just enough time for you to think you broke your laptop. lol If someone really wants it, I will tear it apart again and either take a video and/or take photos. Same here, If I don't have the TCC cranked it will shoot up to 100c immediately, for anything. I have been playing around with it a bunch and went back to 15 TCC it still will hit 90 regularly and even 100 once in a while. 13th gen just run hot from what I have seen and read. Jays 2 cents had a video up with a 17in msi (i think) with 13900hx and a 4090. instantly he was hitting 100c on that as well. At least it appeared that way on the video. I 100% agree 170w is too much. On a cool system I will jump up to 186w and sit there for no more than 5 seconds then jump down to 170ish and then before a single pass of r23 ill be held at 135w. I have actually tried setting 145w as short max and 130w long max in bios and it doesn't change anything for me. I wonder how the AMD chips will hold up. I have been doing a lot of stress testing to see what this machine can handle and it is VERY picky about how I adjust the bios. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong but I can change the same setting back and forth (ex: voltage, max turbo etc) in the bios and seeming randomly my laptop will get stuck at 798-2200mhz upon a reboot. I have started just saving my custom settings resetting the bios and then loading my custom settings again. That usually fixes it. Like I have said before with AWCC it has actually stopped my pc from booting multiple times and I have had to do the power button bios reset. After deleting AWCC I have since reinstalled (to get rgb and fan control back) but I have disabled AWCC XTU services and disabled windows from being able to edit the bios. This has fixed my crazy self adjusting bios issues. Waiting on my 5600mhz kit to show up still. hopefully Saturday.

That's a much better score! are you hitting 100c with that?

Still sounds like your bios is a little wacked out to me. I ended up repasting also last night. Used thermal grizzly kryonaut I had left over from another project. Not a fan of this element 31 stuff. They just took paste and mixed liquid metal in it. what a mess. I used 91% iso to clean up the residue. No issues, temps are the same. the biggest change is the gap between my hot cores and cool ones increased. hot cores are the same and cool cores are cooler... After reassembly the bios half reset itself, like it would when I had AWCC installed. My first test was 29000 and after that dropped to 2200ish mhz and I was still hitting 100c... getting 26000-28000 on r23. It defaulted my power setting to quite... Reset it back to ultra and loaded custom defaults. Hitting about 500 more points and r23 than before 30500ish at 15 tcc. played with undervolt some more and got it to settle at 31500. raised tcc to 12 because with 15 it was hitting 90c anyway. getting 31600 now. best score I managed was 33800 at 0tcc. 100c is still to hot for me.

I had this exact same issue. After undervolting, it would go crazy and everytime I would put an actual load on the cpu it would drop to 800mhz. No matter what I did it was stuck like that. Awcc wouldn’t actually change anything and just say my bios had been reset to default every time I opened awcc So, I reset awcc and set it to max or whatever it’s called now. Went into the bios and set it to ultra performance and then confirmed the that the settings took via cinabench. I have started to save my bios settings and then use Load default custom user setting in the bios because my settings don’t always stay when I had awcc installed. I swear it was overwriting my setting. as soon as that clears up I uninstalled every Alienware piece of software on my pc and I have had no issues since. Only down side is I can’t change my custom fan settings or my rgb. But I like the way the fan curve is on ultra in the bios anyway. From other posts I have read awcc is using a half baked version of xtu which really messed the bios up in my case. I have had to reset the bios via the cmos reset procedure 3 times because awcc would freeze or whatever it does and then my computer wouldn’t boot. There is also a setting in bios that allows windows to modify bios settings, as per another forum post it was recommended to be disabled. I did that as well. Right now I run at 15 tcc and ultra performance with 50 offset and get 30000ish on a 10min cinabench run. while gaming or benching cpu stays at 85c mostly but jumps around from time to time. I just can’t bake it at 100c like its an easy bake oven… if I turn the tcc back to stock I pretty much am pegged at 100-102c but go up to 32000ish Could also be a crap paste job… I would be interested in seeing what people get when they repaste. I am on 1.6.0 and was on the latest version of awcc.

Nice! What did you do to get those scores? I am only getting 30000 at 85c and 31500 at 100c 100 is too hot for me.

It’s been many years since I dabbled with mxm card swaps but if I remember correctly. The Alienware/dell stuff would sometimes throw fits over the wrong vbios. I remember something about there being an issue with the 60hz vs 120hz panel. I’m pretty sure the 120hz panel bypassed Optimus and the vbios would address that. on top of dell being picky about non dell vbioss. From my experience most mxm cards can swap vbios just fine. As long as the mxm card matches the vbios. Example a Clevo 970m 4gb vbios would work on a dell 970m 4gb but would not work correctly on a 970m 8gb. I know it’s a pain but looking in the notebookreview archive on here would help. I know it’s been talked about over there. unless the card is just dead, I think your issues is the vbios. Also try the normal thing, reset the cmos, clean the card connector and reset it into its slot. Hopefully someone with more knowledge will chime in.

Awesome sauce!

Some systems do not like xmp. Did you try removing battery and cmos bat? A bios reset should fix you.