Owners of Alienware’s new m15 Ryzen Edition R5 laptops with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 GPUs have been shocked to discover that they only feature 4,608 CUDA Cores based on information relayed by popular system monitoring tools (e.g., GPU-Z and HWiNFO)—a significant decrease from their official specification of 5,120 CUDA Cores. Amid wild accusations of their graphics performance being crippled on purpose, Alienware has clarified that this inconsistency actually stems from a vBIOS issue that will be corrected “ASAP.” Alienware has warned impatient owners not to switch to the m15 R4 vBIOS, which reportedly fixes the problem but introduces other issues.
“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.”
Sources: r/Alienware, Tom’s Hardware