Alienware M14x Graphics Card issues.

Question

Hello, it's been a few months with the new 14x now, and overall im very happy with it. i haven't done a huge amount with it recently, mainly been sticking to relatively easy to handle games. recently however i tried  to run some more intense games, and i found my self running into very poor frame rates and overall sluggishness. after looking at so youtube videos of people with very similar alienwares (in terms of GPU,CPU and RAM) i became irritated that i was not able to run the same games at anywhere near the speed they were. initially i thought it had something to do with overclocking and after setting that up (mostly) i was still having issues even after raising the clock speed of my gpu and cpu by around 100 MHz realized something was wrong. when installed the heat monitoring programs people i should have if i were overclocking, they were telling me that my CPU was running fine, but my NVIDIA card was doing, well, nothing, just sitting at ~ 50 degrees C. it would warm up a bit when ran games, but the usage % wouldn't budge. currently, im just trying to fix it using what google bring up when i search my problems, and im certainly learning alot, but nothing seems to change the GPU Usage %.  The stress tester im using, FurMark, recognizes the card, and also says it's getting hotter, but also says that there is 0% GPU usage. Overall, im looking for a way to: set programs to use my NVIDIA card Find a better way to describe this issue possibly a better GPU monitor if people know that the ones i mentioned tend to lie about results. and lastly, if no one can provide those, just copy paste me a support telephone #. Thanks very much to all who read. P.S: first thing i ran into when looking up underpreformance in GPU's was to make sure the drivers were installed. i went to dell, put in the service tag in their website, went to the personalized driver section, and found an urgent NVIDIA driver. i've downloaded it now, but im not sure weather i've done it correctly, because it's still appearing in my personalized driver section under urgent video driver. if you know anything whether they normally disappear after they're downloaded, be awesome if you would tell me :)

DELL-Chris M · Answer

No, the files do not disappear from the list. The Nvidia processor is turned on only for preset applications and thus extends the battery life. To force it on all the time, do the following -

* Be sure the AC adapter is plugged in

* Open the Nvidia Control Panel

* Select Manage 3D Settings

* Under the Global Settings tab, select High Performance Nvidia processor

* Click Apply

* Close the Nvidia Control Panel

* Test some games

Remidev · Answer

Thanks for replying so quickly :), well, i went into the global settings and set it to allways use the NVIDIA card, and the GPU monitors im using still report 0% usage. im thinking now that it's this monitor is not reporting correctly, however there is still now real noticable change in any of the programs i tried.

Remidev · Answer

i just spoke to support about a separate issue, and at the end mentioned this problem, he said that i should use GPUZ and UGININE heaven as a monitor/benchmark. tried both of those, the GPUZ still say the Intel(r) card is at 97-100% load while the NVIDIA card is just getting warmed. im not sure what to do at this point, when the technician arrives to fix the other issue, ill ask him if he can take a look and maybe help me out, but in the mean time, it seems regardless of what i do, the computer refuses the use the NVIDIA  as anything but a heatsink.

Locked Topics – Alienware General

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