Hardware Alienware M17x power glitch throttles CPU to 316MHz

my old alienware, P4 + Radeon 9700M, ran about 70 degrees.

 

The M17x isn't exactly the kind of unit that you use on your lap, so heat is actually pretty unimportant - that said, the cooling arrays are well designed - the processor has a fairly beefy one all to itself, and the graphics cards get their own as well.

That said, 240w for a laptop is pretty absurd, and they are about 15 pounds.

 

I am really in the market for a gaming laptop. I know they are not ideal, but here's the thing: I already have a good gaming rig that I won't need to upgrade for a few years (thanks to the console holding progression of games back) and I work nights... which gives me a lot of dead time that I would love to be gaming. I can take a laptop in with me and leave it there as long as I put it away each night. Also again due to the console / direct X 9 situation, the lappy would be able to play new releases long enough to be worth the purchase. I always assumed an M17 was a safe bet, but I'm gonna hold off now until this issue is addressed I guess.

 

Bugger, My M11x didn't get that message.....

Oh well I must tell it to stop playing ME2, L4D 1&2, JC2, Arcania, Fallout3 (New Vegas), Metro 2033, Crysis & BFBC2.

All the while it uses a massive 25-30w of power.... (65Whr battery lasts 2.5 hours whilst gaming).

 

...lol...expected from a trashy computer company, whatever Dell touches - it becomes pure rubbish after,
I was never intrested in their trashy specs... what with all that "AlienFX" LED lights...

 

I have an M17x with the Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9800 @ 2.93GHz and the 280 GTs in SLI.

The same issue appears in Dragon Age, etc. on my M17X.
What I found is that as long as have Taskmgr.exe open when I run the game, I then immediately select the process that appears for Dragon Age and limit it to only one CPU....all stuttering issues immediately disappear. It seems more likely to me that the code is not optimised for multi-core CPUS... either way, you can also do it after the game is open, but, I found that the intro movie also stuttered if I didn't get to it straight away... seems to work for other games as well. Not ideal, but, might help some other people out.