$200 P31E 17 R5 refurbished with PTM 7950 on both the CPU/GPU dies, great results in Furmark and Fire Strike Extreme!
Been fixing up for parts laptops from eBay and picked this one up for cheap. To my surprise it is not in fact an R4 as listed, but an R5 once I got it into an OS, so huge win since it has 2 extra cores to play with over the R4. Wanted to push it further, so I put some new pads on the vrms and other bits covered by the heat sink, also some PTM 7950 instead of regular paste. Gotta say, hype is real if you have the spare money. Stable 59 package load and 70 hot spots once settled in Furmark over a 30 minute period, and not a bad score in Fire Strike Extreme. I highly recommend PTM if you have an Alienware from this generation and above. I got mine from LTT, but I'm sure you can get it cheaper elsewhere. Heck, maybe even from Honeywell themselves nowadays with how widespread it is.
Another thing, what are some good alternatives to AWCC for lighting and fan control? Cant even install a legacy version on this since its running Windows 11 and not 10. Though honestly, that may be a good thing from what I've heard about that software... If anyone does have a way to put the original AWCC on here let me know since Id like to mess around with it anyways. Thanks in advance!