planning to 'songlap' R4 once the price drops to 3k-4k

A lowered spec R4 is around that much rightnow I guess... I think can find with 3610QM+ 660M, will be challenging with 7970M and almost impossible with 680M. Good thing about alienware in general is that price does drop but not dramatically unless someone wanna let go of it urgently or clear stocks. That one is more like need to find the right deal at the right time.

well, best that if i can find one with 3630QM or 3740QM with GTX660M, then i will buy a GTX880M (or maybe GTX980M) and fit it into the beast.
last time i heard of someone mentioning direct factory units but not sure is it possible to get any of it.

I am still quite happy with my 3840QM and 680M it's freaking fast. But yeah I do feel the stress on GPU when I try Ultra. But high and very high works good for me. I might switch my GPU next year yeah to 880M or 980M

yeah that's the result of a few generations' improvements

i believe the cycle will repeat for the new 17.

a base model will work for you. i have one, but it's a beast now (after my cpu/ssd/ram/wifi upgrades)

will give it a new brain later (3940xm )

How to know the specs! you never update your signature!

hehe .. for now it's 3820qm, gtx 680m, 32gb ram (corsair vengeance 1600mhz cl10 from refnulf), 2x 256gb 840 pro, 1x 256gb samsung 830, 1x 256gb plextor m5m, intel 7260 .ac. this 3820qm is better for oc than 3840qm. (my other r4 is similar to yours except for amount of ram and ssd's)

my aw17 is a 4900mq, gtx 780m, 32gb ram (crucial ballistix sport 1600mhz cl9), 1x 512gb samsung sm841, 2x 960gb crucial m500, intel 7260 .ac.

however, trust me, don't go for 4900mq. the cpu is damn hot! (best served in air-conditioned rooms only) at room temperatures, be prepared to get shut down if you intend to play games for long hours, because of cpu overheating.

this 3820qm is better for oc than 3840qm

hmm why so?

maybe because my 3840qm is not a good candidate for oc compared to 3820qm haha

you can try to oc it then play heavy games for 2 or more hours. see if the cpu can get overheated fast (turn hwinfo64's sensor page on while you do that)

edit: my current cpu oc is level 3 for 3840qm (4.3ghz). max temperature is 93c at room temperatures (this one is using linx 0.65) guess what? cpu throttled at 2.89ghz

This post has been edited by horns: Apr 16 2014, 11:32 PM

But does OC really helps in gaming? I mean CPU OC. GPU i understand. Until now I don't have the balls to OC as no more warranty for my R4 so I use it carefully and i've maintained it very well!

I cleaned and repasted thermal on my Asus zenbook today

honestly, not really significant for gaming i guess (oc'ing gpu is better in this case) however for my work purposes it helps. (for common usage, it's not really that hot).

yeah don't do that haha! i just did a routine check on mine last weekend, nothing needs to clean up yet.

OCing both CPU and GPU does help in gaming. Gaming is not about how many cores u have. Most games are not optimized for multi core CPU anyways. It's about the speed. The higher the speed, the better it is. That's why many ppl invest in cooling for desktops for this purpose. Both CPU and GPU must be able to keep up with each other. If not, u'll get stuttering. Most ppl don't know that this is another determining factor for stuttering. Most of the time is the multi GPU setup but sometimes if the processor is too slow, this will happen also.

Nowadays we are more focused on OCing the CPU more rather than the GPU cos no point in OCing the GPU a lot cos GPU nowadays have overtaken the CPU. So, the CPU is the only one which needs to play catchup.

i knew you will give a clearer picture about this lol!

yeah deep down i believe it helps. however if you do it with laptops, there are side effects like cpu speed throttling, which is counter productive.

HAHAHAHA!!! Just reminding u only.

I know u also know one. Actually OCing on a laptop is fine cos it's also a PC mah.

But then, side effects as u mentioned also will happen on desktop. But normally, I don't OC on a laptop due to the insufficient cooling but as long as u OC within ur laptop's limit, it is still fine.

This post has been edited by Aura: Apr 17 2014, 01:00 PM

Seriously I am not good at putting them into words like you did

Yeah desktops are the same but they have advantages in space so we can have additional cooling

Hey bro, it seems like I'm experiencing the same problem as your client but worse, my aw is m17x-r2 but with single 4870. It seems to keep crashing ever since I tried buffering 4K video from YouTube and now I can't even operate windows for more than 10 minutes and it will show bluescreen and crash. I'll attach some pictures here. Hope you guys can shed some light.

easy to say, either your graphics card is overheating or it is damaged. you can try repaste the thermal paste, clean the fans and heatsink, see how it goes.

my client's case is different from yours. your case is excessive artifacts on screen while my client's case is black colour showed up as thin blue vertical lines.

wow that looked bad. perhaps it's just gpu got overheated. right try to do a thorough cleanup of fans and heatsinks with replacement of thermal paste first.

thank you for the swift reply guys. I've disassembled it and taken out and cleaned the graphic card and hopefully i can paste the thermal paste by tmrw. if it doesn't work, does it help by just changing the graphic card itself? cz I'm thinking of upgrading the 4870 to something else.

yeah, you can upgrade. just a problem that the cards arent available locally.
you can eventually upgrade to dual HD7970M.