Update: June 11, 2:25 p.m ET: Alienware has updated the vBIOS for the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, which should fix the CUDA core reporting issue.
"Last week, we discovered our new Alienware m15 gaming system was limiting CUDA Cores on 3070 configurations," A Dell spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "We have released a firmware update to help resolve the incorrect setting. Please check out the support page here for the updated vBios.”
The original story is below:
Alienware is addressing an error affecting the Alienware m15 Ryzen Edition R5 that limits CUDA cores on models with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card.
"We have been made aware that an incorrect setting in Alienware’s vBIOS is limiting CUDA Cores on RTX 3070 configurations," the company told Tom's Hardware. "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."
Forum threads on Reddit and Notebook Review showed people noticing that software like CPU-Z and HWInfo are reporting the wrong number of CUDA cores for an RTX 3070. Rather than 5,120 cores, it showed 4,608. HWInfo also reportedly showed fewer ray tracing and tensor cores. Some also had issues with the number of render output units (ROPs).
Some people in those threads reported that switching to the vBIOS for the Alienware m15 R4 with an RTX 3070 fixed these issues, but that could cause other problems.
If the cores were indeed being limited, not just misreported, it's possible that performance will be increased once the fix is released.
