Some Alienware m15R5 laptop buyers report RTX 3070 with reduced core count - Dell claims vbios issue

[s3riouscat]

Summary

 

Allegedly multiple users received Alienware m15r5 laptops with reduced core counts (4608 vs 5120.) Dell responded some configurations contains a vbios error. They expect to have a fix as early as mid June. 

 

Quotes

Quote

Is this a case of a mistaken vBIOS or is something else afoot? Some Alienware m15 R5 gaming laptop owners are trying to answer that very question after finding fewer CUDA Cores within GPU-Z for the RTX 3070 laptop chip than there should be—512 cores less, in fact.

 

My thoughts

 

I'm watching this closely as it is a model I'm considering to replace my 4 year old Aero. I normally travel for 3 months of the year for work before the pandemic hit. 

 

Sources

PC Gamer Post

[Bombastinator]

Just ran into a claim on another Alienware laptop in another article.  Not a great time to be Dell I suspect.

[Athan Immortal]

Surely benchmarking could sort this out? If they benchmark and it's within expected ranges then it is just a vbios issue. Not like Dell can just shave some cores off, and I'm sure Nvidia wouldn't be shipping another variant without public knowledge or press release etc.

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, s3riouscat said:

I'm watching this closely as it is a model I'm considering to replace my 4 year old Aero. I normally travel for 3 months of the year for work before the pandemic hit. 

 

 

It's a dell, given LTT@s secret shopper and GN's recent experiance i wouldn't touch it with a 50 foot barge pole regardless.

[Bombastinator]

3 hours ago, CarlBar said:

 

It's a dell, given LTT@s secret shopper and GN's recent experiance i wouldn't touch it with a 50 foot barge pole regardless.

Not i.  GN’s thing was one specific machine though with one specific video card.  I don’t know if that applies to the entire brand.  I’m also not sure that the machine completely deserved his complaints about it.  I’m not saying he was wrong.  It is a machine a person who wants to customize their computer flat out should not buy.  It’s effectively unupgradable. As what it is though I suspect it will work fine.  It just can’t be made to do anything else. Complaints about the card were also accurate.  Leave it in that particular machine though and use it as delivered without any changes and it should work fine. His statement about the thing being ewaste waiting to happen I think is valid.  The thing basically can’t be effectively upgraded and will be literally junk when it is no longer fast enough to do things.  

Edited June 5, 2021 by Bombastinator

[AMD A10-9600P]

4 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Not a great time to be Dell I suspect.

Is it ever?

[Bombastinator]

10 minutes ago, AMD A10-9600P said:

Is it ever?

There was a time when it was. 

[Brooksie359]

11 hours ago, Athan Immortal said:

Surely benchmarking could sort this out? If they benchmark and it's within expected ranges then it is just a vbios issue. Not like Dell can just shave some cores off, and I'm sure Nvidia wouldn't be shipping another variant without public knowledge or press release etc.

Yeah its not like nvidia has done exactly that in the past. I mean who would suspect them of selling two different gpus under the same name without telling anyone. 

[WolframaticAlpha]

12 hours ago, s3riouscat said:

Summary

 

Allegedly multiple users received Alienware m15r5 laptops with reduced core counts (4608 vs 5120.) Dell responded some configurations contains a vbios error. They expect to have a fix as early as mid June. 

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

 

I'm watching this closely as it is a model I'm considering to replace my 4 year old Aero. I normally travel for 3 months of the year for work before the pandemic hit. 

 

Sources

PC Gamer Post

I actually used to love dell. They had great hardware. But this news makes me think that dell is becoming another HP. But you can't really blame the dell engineers. They are being forced to sell stuff at a lower price. If you don't become cheap and feature packed, and instead focus on being reliable, stable and good, you will die. You can see this with Sennheiser's sell-off of their consumer unit. 

 

Paraphrasing Luke Lafraniere(Sorry for me butchering the name):

Quote

Planned obsolescence and abject consumerism is real, and Sennheiser didn't do it... and they are gone. 

 

[Moonzy]

18 hours ago, Athan Immortal said:

Surely benchmarking could sort this out?

I read the Reddit post that brought this up, and OP posted it on LTT

There's a ~10% difference in performance, so it's reflective of what the core count suggests

Though I'm not sure how well the test is performed and how the variables are controlled

[GoodBytes]

Maaan Dell is going down the drain at such rapid rate, it's just sad.

• Cut down after sale service, even for business class systems/customers.
• Aggressive sales tactics, pushing crap on people.
• Hidden subscription fees for warranty, despite already priced in.
• Poorly built systems (inadequate coolers, single channel memory, weak PSU to block upgrades)
• Proprietary parts including motherboard, case and power supply
• Cheap build quality
• Poor air cooling computers (probably to push paid service or people upgrade their PC sooner due to dist buildups)
• Making GPU with no cooling on its vRAM, let alone having a decent cooler on the GPU itself.
• Pre installed bloat that actually seriously affect system performance.

Why would anyone consider Dell's / Alienware systems these days, I just don't know.

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Maaan Dell is going down the drain at such rapid rate, it's just sad.

• Cut down after sale service, even for business class systems/customers.
• Aggressive sales tactics, pushing crap on people.
• Hidden subscription fees for warranty, despite already priced in.
• Poorly built systems (inadequate coolers, single channel memory, weak PSU to block upgrades)
• Proprietary parts including motherboard, case and power supply
• Cheap build quality
• Poor air cooling computers (probably to push paid service or people upgrade their PC sooner due to dist buildups)
• Making GPU with no cooling on its vRAM, let alone having a decent cooler on the GPU itself.
• Pre installed bloat that actually seriously affect system performance.

Why would anyone consider Dell's / Alienware systems these days, I just don't know.

They do all bespeak a fireball show mentality. I wonder if there was a change in leadership?

[lboolaka_33]

7 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Maaan Dell is going down the drain at such rapid rate, it's just sad.

• Cut down after sale service, even for business class systems/customers.
• Aggressive sales tactics, pushing crap on people.
• Hidden subscription fees for warranty, despite already priced in.
• Poorly built systems (inadequate coolers, single channel memory, weak PSU to block upgrades)
• Proprietary parts including motherboard, case and power supply
• Cheap build quality
• Poor air cooling computers (probably to push paid service or people upgrade their PC sooner due to dist buildups)
• Making GPU with no cooling on its vRAM, let alone having a decent cooler on the GPU itself.
• Pre installed bloat that actually seriously affect system performance.

Why would anyone consider Dell's / Alienware systems these days, I just don't know.

 

18 hours ago, CarlBar said:

 

It's a dell, given LTT@s secret shopper and GN's recent experiance i wouldn't touch it with a 50 foot barge pole regardless.

I like their Latitude and Precision lines (when paired with ProSupport, which gets you a US-based rep), pretty solid if not overpriced. I'm sad that they abandoned the trackpoint on both lines, especially when they use crap touchpads.

I do agree that their consumer-line stuff isn't great. It's a shame, because my XPS 420s are still going strong, and I have some ~15 year old Vostros (AKA Inspirons) that have held up much better than a modern Inspirion ever would.

[CarlBar]

14 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Not i.  GN’s thing was one specific machine though with one specific video card.  I don’t know if that applies to the entire brand.  I’m also not sure that the machine completely deserved his complaints about it.  I’m not saying he was wrong.  It is a machine a person who wants to customize their computer flat out should not buy.  It’s effectively unupgradable. As what it is though I suspect it will work fine.  It just can’t be made to do anything else. Complaints about the card were also accurate.  Leave it in that particular machine though and use it as delivered without any changes and it should work fine. His statement about the thing being ewaste waiting to happen I think is valid.  The thing basically can’t be effectively upgraded and will be literally junk when it is no longer fast enough to do things.  

 

The sales experiance and hidden charges where common to both, so was the less than stellar build quality. And thats ignoring the simple fact that some of the things they got wrong are going to seriously degrade the lifespan. it's not just going to be e waste eventually, it's going to be e waste sooner than it should.

 

8 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

They do all bespeak a fireball show mentality. I wonder if there was a change in leadership?

 

No. I once did a few months work experiance a couple of decades back in a secondhand shop stripping old PC's, (Mostly Pentium II and Pentium III), and we got a lot of Dells, (with lime green cooling ducts for those who remember those days). Everything hardware side is endemic of the super proprietary do it as cheaply as possible style they had even then. But it was a different era, cooling requirements where lower and mounting hardware was simpler. It was harder to screw up, not to mention the software side was simpler, nobody was doing much in the way of their own software.

 

We generally threw the cases and motherboards because they weren't usable outside the specific dell case. PSU's varied. RAM, HDD, and CPU where usually good. DGPU's weren't a thing in most PC's we stripped back then.

 

TLDR: It was harder to screw up and there wasn't anyone doing it better. it wasn't that Dell where good back then by modern standards, they where just better than everyone else.

[Jet_ski]

“Dell is being taken to court in California over the company’s claims that its Alienware Area 51m-R1 gaming laptops can be upgraded.

 

In his lawsuit, Robert Felter claimed Dell misled customers about the upgradability of its Area-51m gaming laptops after the company failed to provide replacement parts that would allow users to upgrade their CPUs and GPUs with next-gen components.”

https://gizmodo.com/dell-sued-for-promising-alienware-laptops-could-be-upgr-1847036825/

Just another Dell nugget of excellence.

[GoodBytes]

13 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

They do all bespeak a fireball show mentality. I wonder if there was a change in leadership?

So, the story goes that back in 2013 when Michael Dell turned the company into a private one, so that, in his mind, could save it, by no longer needing to answer to shareholders who were pushing the company to make cheaper and cheaper systems, at the cost of destroying the reputation and image of Dell. This problem is that back in those days, PCs where dying. People where buying iPads and smartphones and that was that... this was their PC. They didn't care of needing anything more. Hence why we had Windows 8, with its tablet focused experience. It didn't help that the hardware space for the last ~9 years was dead. Nothing has occurred that were significant. Sure, the usual bump of 10% improvement gen over gen.. yay?! But that was about pretty much it. Sure, we had the GeForce 900 series and 10 series, but gaming PC were not what it is today. And people were more focused on gaming on console.  Many PC games where Console ports. I recall playing some games where the menu was not even upgraded from 720p to 1080p. 

 

So, Dell bought Dell. But the problem is that he didn't have the money. So, he took a large loan... of course, those needs to be repaid... and I think that turned the copany to push crap on consumers, and cutting its service left and right... the large loan had to be repair. The company being private means we no longer have an idea of the company financials, but these actions, I don't think Michael Dell were proud off doing. probably he imagined that once the loan was paid, he could turn things around. I don't know. But that clearly didn't happen, as 5 years later, in 2018, Dell turn itself back into a public company.

 

Going public doesn't magically pays off debt.  The company total debt is around $53 billion US, where ~$43 billion is in long-term debt (has lot of time to pay it) and ~$10 billion in current debt to pay soon. So, despite the stock price skyrocketed recently like it never saw in a very long time... the company isn't in the green per se. 

 

Some good news is that Dell monitors are still pretty awesome. I mean you get what you pay for, for sure. But. their monitors are easy to find in stock, despite the current situation, and they are pretty good. I won't say, "the best of the best", but nothing to be disappointed of. They still are rock solid, they seem to still pick high quality panels for its UltraSharp series, you are not being screwed over, to my knowledge, and I believe the same for the Alienware gaming line monitors. at least the higher-end ones.

 

That said, I expected Dell to make a monitor like the famous LG 27GN950-B (4K 27inch 144Hz+ monitor, good responsiveness, and color accuracy). I mean, Dell has this excellent relationship with LG, I mean most of their monitors uses LG panels. But considering that LG made 2 of them worldwide and BitWit has 3 of them, I guess LG could not meet the demand that Dell is requiring. I would love to mix that panel with Dell knowhow for its controller and ease of use for its on screen menu and pushing panels to their limits. But, anyways.