Dell promises to fix crippled performance of Alienware m15 R5

A couple of days ago, news hit the wire about Dell shipping Alienware m15 R5 gaming laptops with a GeForce RTX 3070 video card with just 4608 CUDA cores, 512 less than the official specifications from NVIDIA. This results in a performance drop of about 10 percent.

Now some extra information plus a statement from Dell has hit the web. First up, Jarrod's Tech received a statement from Dell claiming this adjustment was made by the engineering team after ‘careful testing and design choices’.

Dell has confirmed to Jarrod’s Tech, who is currently testing the exact same laptop, that the decision to disable the cores on RTX 3070 GPU was intentional by their engineering team after ‘careful testing and design choices’. The laptop maker has also confirmed it may enable more cores in the future, which just shows that the decision to limit CUDA core count made completely no sense in the first place.

Interestingly, Tom's Hardware received a different statement. The tech site heard from Dell that the CUDA cores were disabled "by mistake" and that a fix will be rolled out by mid-June:

“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.” -- Dell spokesperson to Tom’s Hardware

The incident sparks new conspiracies as the CUDA core count drop is only found on the AMD-based m15 R5, and not on the Intel-based R4 nor the upcoming Intel-based R6.



Via: VideoCardz