You might not get what you’re paying for if you were to buy Alienware’s new Ryzen
based m15 R5 gaming laptop today.
I’ve got this laptop here to review and while testing games I noticed that the performance
wasn’t quite where it should be for an RTX 3070 laptop, in fact it looks like 10% of
the 3070’s CUDA cores are missing.
Just check out some of these benchmarks comparing it against other laptops that I’ve tested
that also have RTX 3070 graphics.
In three different games it’s scoring the lowest out of the 7 3070 systems I’ve currently
got data for.
It’s not too far behind, but this shouldn’t be happening.
The cheaper HP Omen 15 is beating it and that has a lower tier CPU and a lower power limit
on the GPU.
Not long after noticing this strange behavior, I was told by a few people about this Reddit
thread where a number of m15 R5 customers were reporting that their new RTX 3070 models
were reporting the wrong number of CUDA cores.
According to the Nvidia spec, RTX 3070 laptop GPUs should have 5,120 CUDA cores, and this
is 10% more than what the m15 R5 is reporting through Nvidia’s own control panel, so what’s
going on here?
I reached out to my Alienware contact on the third of June to try and find out but unfortunately
I haven’t yet had a response.
I also mentioned the issue on Twitter and had an automated reply from Dell Support.
After providing them with some basic details on my system they replied with the following
message on June 5th.
Well it was at like 4am for me, so I guess June 4th in the US.
Anyway the response starts with the usual make sure you’re using the latest BIOS and
Nvidia drivers, which I was.
Then they go on to say, which I’ll directly quote here “CUDA core counts per the Nvidia
baseline may change for individual OEM, such as ourselves to allow to provide a more specific
design and performance tuning.
Be assured the changes made by our engineering team for this computer model was done after
careful testing and design choices to bring the most stable and best performance possible
for our customers, if at a later date more CUDA cores can be unlocked via a future update
we will be swift to make it available on our support website”
So based on this message it sounds like it was intentionally done to tune the system.
I thought this was quite interesting, because out of 100+ laptop reviews I don’t think
I’ve ever noticed a gaming laptop that had CUDA cores disabled like this.
At the very least I don’t think it’s common practice to tune the system.
Most of the time the OEM will instead lower the power limits to keep thermals in check.
If a higher end GPU with more CUDA cores can’t run in a particular chassis normally they
just don’t offer it, so if that’s the case here they probably shouldn’t be offering
it with the 3070.
If the m15 R5 is selling with 10% of its CUDA cores disabled then you’re not getting RTX
3070 performance.
It might not be too far off when compared to many other laptops with 3070 graphics,
but in my personal opinion I think it’s a bit misleading when the benchmarks show
us the R5 is the weakest 3070 option so far in terms of FPS in games.
Some m15 R5 customers have been flashing the VBIOS from Alienware’s r4 models to the
R5 which apparently unlocked the remaining CUDA cores and improved performance, though
this has caused instability issues too and is not recommended, but this information helps
confirm that it appears to be a VBIOS issue.
It’s probably not just some random custom made GPU for Alienware.
At first I thought maybe it might just be that the software was incorrectly reporting
the CUDA core count, and that could be the case, but at the same time it’s probably
pretty unlikely given the gaming performance that we’ve seen from this laptop.
Based on the actual performance that we did see from this laptop, it would make sense
if 10% of the CUDA cores are just missing.
Yesterday some sites like Tom’s Hardware reported on this issue, and they got a different
response from Dell/Alienware than I did.
This is what Tom’s hardware said that Dell told them”
“We have been made aware that an incorrect setting in Alienware’s vBIOS is limiting
CUDA Cores on RTX 3070 configurations.
This is an error that we are working diligently to correct as soon as possible.
We’re expediting a resolution through validation and expect to have this resolved as early
as mid-June.
In the interim, we do not recommend using a vBIOS from another Alienware platform to
correct this issue.
We apologize for any frustration this has caused.”
So it’s kind of hard to know which reply is correct.
In the message to Tom’s hardware they’ve clearly said it’s a mistake and they’re
going to fix it, but in the reply I had from Dell support they made it sound like they’re
more than happy to disable CUDA cores to tune the system.
How you accidentally mess up and disable 10% of the CUDA cores I can’t say.
So did Alienware get caught in the act and now they’re going to fix it, or was it a
genuine mistake and the support staff I was dealing with were simply misinformed.
We might never know, but at least a fix is on the way.
It’s also not yet clear if this issue is also present in the m15 R6, which I believe
is basically the exact same model as this except it uses an Intel processor rather than
Ryzen.
I’m also very interested to retest this laptop once the update comes out.
If they did have to lower the CUDA core count for thermals or something then presumably
with more CUDA cores they might need lower power limit than what it currently has.
Given I’ve already tested this laptop in 13 different games for my usual game benchmark
video before knowing about this issue, I’m in a good position to compare before and after.
It sucks that we’re going to have to spend another couple of days retesting the laptop
but that’s just the way it is, so if you’re new to the channel then get subscribed for
the upcoming video where I’ll compare the Alienware m15 R5 both before and after the
vBIOS update, and of course for the upcoming full review video which will be out some time
after that vBIOS update becomes available.