Aurora R12, Unacceptable BIOS/Z490 configuration, 11th Gen Intel CPU's (RocketLake)

"I just checked on mine which is the latest R10 and actually HwInfo says I have a X570 chipset. Are you sure about what you said? Is there any chance HwInfo gives me wrong info?" 

Both R10 units (Ryzen 3000 and the Ryzen 5000 revision) use B550A.  B550A is based off B450, but with AGESA-enabled pcie 4.0 lanes from the top GPU slot direct to the CPU, all other slots including the M2 are 3.0.  

Hwinfo and CPUz are third party programs, it's just a recognition issue incorrectly picking it up as x570. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/n4rqgl/warning_to_those_who_want_to_buy_aurora_r12_major/

this seems to be a widespread issue for R12 configurations. Dell must fix this in a BIOS update because this is simply unacceptable. some of my games are stuttering and showing high cpu usage where it shouldnt have on my 11th gen i9 and i finally found out the reason why.

Thanks for getting this back up.

Ye obviously this will have a performance impact for games. You'd be better off right now to disable XMP.

But especially  for lower resolutions the performance impact will be apparent.

Their technical support said that the system is running as per design by the way as it is not crashing or having instabilities. Pretty low bar right there.

All the best.

Thank you for your data! Yes I don't think the other member has an idea of what you are talking about. 

This is going to become a widespread issue if Dell does not perform the due dilligence to fix this issue with a BIOS update; imagine an R10 having 1/3 faster RAM speeds than an R12 with the SAME RAM stick(s)!! Ridiculous...

The R12's are pretty popular as the price tags are somewhat reasonable (with the GPU prices elsewhere). So this will help as every single one of them with the same board/bios will have the same issue.

Good news is that this is fully down to the BIOS. They just gotta communicate this with the ODM who can then make adjustments.

Anyways, hopefully this will be done together with the changes necessary to allow resizableBAR on the board.

I for myself have just taken the components, put them on another cheap motherboard in another case and will just be switching back once I see a few BIOS updates. But this obviously is not what most folks buying a prebuild PC would do, I'm aware of that.

Absolutely unacceptable.  I’ve spent 2 weeks trying to diagnose the low frames on my brand new R12.  This explains everything.  Why buy a prebuilt when it isn’t tested to work as advertised?  Unreal

i have an aurora r12 with the same problem

this is a serious problem bottlenecking high end cpu and gpu in aurora r12. FPS in games is low with stuttering.

games show low cpu AND low gpu usage, with subpar fps

the two sticks of 3400 mhz DDR4 ram runs at speed of two sticks of 1866 DDR3 mhz ram

see this post below:

(1) WARNING to those who want to buy aurora r12... MAJOR RAM ISSUE BOTTLENECKING SYSTEM : Alienware ...

@Dell-BradL @DELL-Chris M please report this issue to see how it can be fixed, there are already many users who want to return their aurora r12 because of this

There are several issues that need to be addressed. Nothing you do would really fix anything.

1) The fact that Dell (or their ODM (Pegatron)) is defaulting gear 2 regardless of the RAM speed has to be addressed by them. This is mostly just adding latency.

2) So it the issue of bandwidths taking a hit once XMP gets enabled. This is mostly effecting memory read performance.

3) So are the issues of latency (bandwidth) and even cache performance fluctuations. This is probably the worst thing and will be the main culprit.

Luckily all of these are connected.

In short: their old board is just lacking a lot of required adjustments to be able to run smooth with 11th gen Intel CPU's.

The higher the monitor resolution you're gaming in, the lesser the performance impact but the issue itself is there for each and everyone buying an R12 as long as they use this motherboard with the un-optimized BIOS.

I saw the reddit thread myself and I think it's super helpful someone there is willing to help and forward this matter to someone who might care. Thanks very much to the one opening this.

I suggest to keep the discussion on reddit as well (despite not being active there myself) as neither the Dell staff nor some 'special' member seem to care about it.

Thanks for your reply. I know you dumbed it down for me, but I still don't understand most of what you said. I think the general idea remains the same, though (not getting the performance we are paying for in RAM speeds).

I took several actions:

1. I emailed customer support and directed them to this thread, requesting them to look into it, or else I will just cancel the order.

2. Linked this + reddit discussion to new R12 owners to raise awareness.

This is my first purchase with Dell and I'm not sure whether (1) will gain any traction. To have these issues are unacceptable. I know the situation with the PC market now, but Dell Alienware isn't exactly cheap.

I will be following this & the reddit thread. I hope Dell acknowledges and fixes this. I feel so down now lol. It was a big present to myself.

Main issue is DELL "recycling" older chipsets, giving them a new bios and calling it a next generation R-line machine..

Board is using a chipset that is the same as on the previous generation of the Intel R-line, and updated the bios to support the latest generation processors.

What they should have done is use a new board with the latest generation chipset on it. Now R12 owners are stuck with a chipset solution that is obviously having issues.

Chris and I have requested that this get looked into. We don't have any updates yet.

Yeah, thanks for coming to that conclusion after three weeks time. Care to elaborate what changed your mind? 

While you're at it. There's a bunch of WHEA errors every few seconds from the 3080 running on PCIE4.0.

They'd be disappearing if you had an option to switch down to PCIE3.0. But you can't. And you shouldn't have to do that anyways.

No clue if everyone is effected by that... but if that's so... that's another thing I can't wrap my mind around how this can possibly be missed before release.

Just wanted to respond with a me too. Have a brand new pristine R12 and am experiencing hitching in games and occasional watchdog BSODs. Checked my config in the mentioned tools and it looks the same as OPs. The machine is near-unusable in its current state. Not sure what to do. If I contact support I'm just going to get a weeks-long run-around and eventual replacement of my machine when they decide they can't figure out what it is, and if it's this problem then replacing won't resolve it. Might just wait and see if there's any update.

If there is no update would we just have to get a new motherboard to fix this issue?