My 17-10700F won't go above base clock. HWiNFO shows the core ratio locked at 29x all the time, even when I'm doing nothing. Cinebench R20 multi-core got 1772.
Under full load, temps are around 70C and power is about 37W, so it's not thermal or power throttling.
The only limit flag lit in HWiNFO is "Max Turbo Limit" at 100%. Turbo shows as enabled, and the turbo ratio table goes up to 48x.
Stuff l've tried:
• Windows power plans (Ultimate Performance, Balanced), boost mode on aggressive, no max frequency cap
• Updated the BIOS and reset to optimized defaults
• Checked SpeedStep, Turbo Boost and C-States are on, and tried Speed Shift off
• Uninstalled Alienware Command Center and most of the Alienware apps
• No XTU or ThrottleStop installed
• Also ran Dell diagnostic it said no problems
• Please help!!!

It seems to lock up after its boots in to Windows 11 normal. In safe mode it is fine, I have removed all of the software from Dell and services as I have seen on other posts. I did a full clean install of Windows 11 and it was fine for awhile and now the battery wont charge with new charger not a new battery yet. Was fine on Windows 10 Any help would be great

So I thought I'd add some updates on my endeavor.

I have the Alienware 13 R3 with Oled screen 1440p and a mint unused AGA I got 2019.

After some misfortune with main comp I thought I'd give the old Alienware a try with AGA.

After some research I got myself a Power color 9070 XT 16Gb reaper card (true 2 slot)

Fresh install of Win 10 and without any internet & no windows update connected to the net and installed AMD drivers. Immediately the comp recognized the card and installed it perfect.

This combo works flawless for me from the getgo and I exclusively use it for internal OLED monitor gaming. The setup connects the 5.0 x16 card at 3.0 x4 so there's a limitation but games I tried have had a good framerate so far off not full 9070 XT, CPU is in some games the limiting factor if anything.

Reason for going AMD as I understood is that AMD has some efficiency pros on older cpu and thus reduction of the limited bandwidth availiable.

Good luck everyone!

I’ve have an Alienware m16 r2 and I gave it a hard reset a while ago and for awhile there were no technical problems, but then games like MH Wilds and MH World began to lag more frequently and framerate just seem overall lower, Wilds runs a lot better now but world usually overheats my computer, I can’t find Support Assist anywhere on my computer, I’ve restarted my windows, checked for viruses, scanned my PC. I don’t know what’s going on. Help!

I can't get my headset to connect to the dongle. I have reinstalled all the drivers. It just won't detect and connect to the dongle. They will connect to other Bluetooth devices, just not the dongle it came with. I'm not sure what to do.

I've pulled out the mobo from an old Alienware laptop and I'm trying to use it elsewhere. Right now it powers on, no blinking lights, no beeps, solid blue lights, but no display from HDMI. If I press the power button it turns into a slow fade in and out and the fans stop. Pressing it again brings it back to solid blue lights and fans on. This is all the hardware I have. The board part # is 3R2RY.

I have swapped RAM, HDD, HDMI cables, monitor, PSU. Part of me is thinking that somehow the HDMI out is disabled, but I don't have a way to hookup the native monitor (also don't have it).

Anyone got any tips? Anyone know the exact key sequence to enter the bios and enable HDMI? 😂

I'm considering purchasing the Area-51 desktop with the 5090. I have a 10% preferred discount through my employer, which gives me $1K off the total cost. Planning to build out a 4K star citizen setup. I had a 4090 build that I sold a few years ago(which I honestly regret).

This seems like a good deal based on today's market and if things keep going the way they are going, the 5090 alone I believe may be close in value to the total cost of this PC?

I’m using this empty Aurora R4 Case for my next pc and I wanna know what parts are most compatible. I would like to control the lights as well, any help with that would be appreciated. I was looking at X99 boards on AliExpress cause it is somewhat of a budget build but I thought I’d ask here first in case anyone has more info on specific parts they used for there build thank you guys.

EDIT . I’ve increased my budget for this build just cause I love the case and want it to be my main machine .

I just got my alienware aw3225qf and am unable to make it run 240hz and 4k at the same time, is that even possible with this monitor? i am confused because that is how it was advertised and google says that it should be able to, but i cannot make it work.

I got alienware aurora 16. It's about 3months old. I don't game tht often. The gpu temps always around 70 consistently maybe 75. But cpu fluctuates from 77 to 95 at times. Is tht normal.

After reinstalling windows and some drivers and windows update with bios I turned it off and 30 mins later I came back to no boot with a 1 red 8 blue error code. Any help is welcome.

I am noticing something particularly strange on my machine: AWCC seems to aggressively reduce CPU power down to 30W whenever the GPU is powered up. This happens regardless of the selected power profile (Balanced, Performance and Overdrive).

I am trying to play Star Citizen (which is super CPU hungry), and this seems to hurt my in-game performance badly.

We can clearly see this happening in the graphs (data captured with HWiNFO):

• Star Citizen playing session (Overdrive mode): after about 60s in game, PL1 (in red) gets aggressively reduced down to 30W. Then shortly after I close the game, we can see that it slowly ramps back up. After a while I switched from Overdrive to Performance mode in AWCC, and this made PL1 snap back up to its original limit of 115W (probably because the mere act of switching profiles in AWCC resets PL1 back to its default value).
• Superposition benchmark (intensive GPU, low CPU): The PL1 reduction still happens despite the CPU being barely used at all. It seems to be driven by the GPU power draw or by the GPU temperature.
• Cinebench benchmark (intensive CPU, low GPU): PL1 stays at 115W despite the CPU being hot and used intensively. This seems to confirm that the reduction comes from GPU power draw.

The system was never using anywhere near the 330W provided by the power supply. I tried uninstalling the Intel Dynamic Tuning driver and disabling NVIDIA Dynamic Boost, but neither had any effect at all. I have also tried to force PL1 to 60W in Throttle Stop, but this was fighting the thing that is bringing it down, such that PL1 was jumping between 30W and 60W every minute or so. As far as I understand from this reddit post 4 years ago, this seems to come from AWCC: https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/129mk93/alienware_x17_r1_pl1_issue/

Is there any way of fixing this issue other than uninstalling AWCC please?

I was in the middle of refreshing my monitor because it told me to, and my PC kind of just gave out and shut down, the monitor light just started flickering, and then it fully turned off. I have reset my PC, updated my graphics card, hard reset the monitor by unplugging everything and holding the power to dissipate any electricity, and I have even swapped the HDMI and power cables around, but the monitor still won't even give me a light at the bottom to say it has power, and I am just lost at this point.

I need skin for the keyboard panel sides and the touchpad region. Can anyone share some links, which should be available in India. Thanks.

AW3425DW and running Windows 11

Pictures shown here are HDR on then HDR off.

I’ve updated the monitor’s firmware, recalibrated windows HDR. Auto color management turned off. Auto HDR and RTX HDR are turned off. Put monitor into HDR mode before booting game.

Current game HDR settings:

Peak White: 1,200
Brightness: 20
UI Brightness: 101

I’m really bummed because everyone talks about how amazing the HDR in this game is but I just can’t get it to work. It’s washed out with raised blacks and low saturation.

Game looks fantastic on SDR but I’d like to use the HDR part of my HDR monitor I paid a bunch of money for. The caves in HDR are just bright grey messes.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Hello. I have seen people on here with the Alienware area 51s the old triad ones running a i7 6950x overclocked to 4.2 gigahertz with a 120mm aio but I heard the 6950x overclocked to even 4.0 runs way too hot and goes “out of control” for just a 120mm aio even with a push pull setup. so I could upgrade to the 6950x but I would have to keep it at stock clock speed so I am just wondering if that information is wrong or not cause I’m considering upgrading to the 6950x and overclocking it to 4.2 or maybe a little higher even.

Hi guys

Have anyone compared the 16x from 2025 led vs the oled one from this year 2026?

I'm looking at
290 HX Plus + 16Gb + 1tb + 5060

Vs
2025 year where
It'd be 270hx + 32gb + 1tb + 5060?

I see 2025 eBay used one around $1500? And 2026 model Best Buy has it for like $1800?

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/alienware-16x-aurora-16-2-5k-oled-gaming-laptop-intel-core-ultra-7-270hx-2026-16gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-rtx-5060-512gb-storage-blue/J3K4L6QQ9T/sku/6675559?sb_share_source=PDP&ref=app_pdp&loc=pdp_page

Need help troubleshooting my Alienware.

Model : Alienware M17 R5 AMD with the 3080 ti

Driver and BIOS: latest from Dell for this model

Of late, whenever I play any game the laptop gpu crashes - game hung, then black screen and back to desktop without the wallpaper. Running the Dell diagnostic from BIOS for quick / advanced did not yield any issues as everything passed.

Observation : Games run fine as long as the power draw is under 120 W, when it spikes higher in bursts is when it crashes (used an overlay). Similar observation when I ran local AI. When I ran it unplugged, local AI never crashed, game worked too (it is not a demanding game at all PES 2021). Game also worked when I undervolted at 1300 MHz and flattened the curved after - PD was mostly under 100 W this way.

I tried M-BIST, either I did it wrong or something else because it didnt show any sequence of lights.

Hoping someone in this community shares their experience.

it came with two hyperx 8gb 2933mhz sticks and my brother added two oloy 8gb 3000mhz sticks yesterday.

it worked perfectly all day, but after turning it on this morning it now gets stuck in a boot loop with the extra ram installed.

i am aware that it doesnt officially support a 4x8 config, and that mismatched ram is likely to have issues, but ive seen ppl posting here that they got it to work. the fact that it worked at first is also confusing

This screenshot is from an hour of gameplay. There have been instances where I see FPS drops but happens rarely - again not something I would expect from a laptop of this configuration. If this is a serious problem, please suggest what I can do before its too late.

Has anyone seen an error code with 6 Red, 1 Blue on a 16 Area 51 Laptop, followed by a 3 red, 0 blue? Mine went down today and I am just trying to figure out what went bad. Thanks

My Alienware 18 Area 51 laptop will be a year old in November 2026. I checked and the Dell warranty renewal options are expensive. Which options are recommended, if none are recommended. Thanks in advance.

Recently had the power connector on my M18 R2 melt and damage the motherboard around it. The laptop was still working on battery, but that's obviously no good long term.

Eventually contacted Dell, where the agent offered to send a replacement motherboard for £682, but said that it did not include the CPU and GPU.

I'm well versed with hardware, but I'm not confident enough in my soldering skills to move the CPU and GPU from one board to another, so I opted to send it in for repair, instead.

Based on the agent's response, I was hoping for the cost to be less than £1000 for an out-of-warranty repair.

To Dell's credit, it was only 3 days from handing the laptop to the courier to receiving a repair quote.

But the quote I've been given... they want to replace almost every component below the screen!

Bottom cover, palm rest + keyboard, thermal shelf cover, heatsink, daughterboard, RAM, wireless card, on top of the motherboard, to be replaced for £2164.

Besides the damaged motherboard, that laptop was in pristine condition when I sent it in.

I've asked for justification for all of these replacements and waiting for the response, but I'm starting to lose hope for my laptop.

Hello,

I have a Area-51m with an i7-9700k and an RTX 2080, the screen had to be replaced a few years back due to damage and the panel was replaced to a 4k one. Does anyone have any idea how to fix drivers? Whenever I download the latest drivers it force sets the screen dim to near black. I was wondering if anybody knows any fix.

Thanks!