The first week with my M17x I was experiencing crashes in games just moments after starting them. I could reproduce the problem every time I ran a game, but benchmarks would run fine. This was driving me nuts. I petitioned the experts at NBR (who beat any tech support department I have ever dealt with) and tried everything they suggested. No luck.
Just as I was getting ready to flame Dell about my crashing computer I found the solution:
Disable Active State Power Management in the BIOS (found in the Graphics menu – same place as Hybrid graphics).
Whereas before I could only run games for a few minutes at a time, now my M17x runs games until I close them (including all-night stability tests).
How did I discover this? Pure chance! The manual makes no mention of this BIOS setting. Few people know what it does. My guess is that I have a software problem related to ACPI and ASPM. Turning the feature off fixed my stability issue immediately.
Temperatures of the GPUs are no higher than before and the clock speeds step-down nicely after I finish gaming (just like they are supposed to).
There are other issues with the M17x, but this was the most annoying and now it is solved.
[...] Review: Alienware M17x All Powerful 16 12 2009 Reviewing this notebook was tough. Initially I could not get it to run games without crashing – often blue screening. I stumbled on the solution by way of a BIOS setting that I must have changed while tinkering. [...]