Alienware's Fewer CUDA Core Controversy Explodes, Company Admits Error, Announces mid-June Fix | TechPowerUp
 
Last week, it surfaced that Alienware shipped certain m15 gaming laptops with GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPUs with fewer CUDA cores than what is standard—4,608 vs. 5,120, without properly advertising it in their marketing material. Over the weekend, the company's train-wreck of a response played out. First, from Alienware's parent company Dell; and later by Alienware itself.

Dell, in a statement to Jarrod's Tech, tried to normalize the practice. "CUDA core counts per NVIDIA baseline may change for individual OEM, such as ourselves [Dell], to allow to provide a more specific design and performance tuning. Be assured the changes made by our engineering team for this computer model was done after careful testing and design choices to bring the most stable and best performance possible for our customers, if at a later date more CUDA cores can be unlocked via a future update, we will be swift to make it available on our support website," the Dell statement read.
 
Here's the controversy: Alienware did not advertise the specific configuration of the RTX 3070 Laptop GPU in this notebook, only mentioned the GPU name. One is guided to believe they are buying a notebook with a GPU they've independently researched to be of a certain configuration. Clock-speed tuning by OEMs to a certain degree is acceptable, but certainly not 10 percent fewer CUDA cores. Also, CUDA cores aren't the only things that are fewer. Since Dell/Alienware reduces the number of streaming multiprocessors available to the GPU, there are proportionate reductions in even RT cores (raytracing cores), Tensor cores, and TMUs.

Meanwhile, Dell's misfired attempt at damage-control was quickly eclipsed by Alienware, which trashed the "optimization" excuse offered by its parent company, and termed this as a manufacturing defect. The company released a statement to Tom's Hardware: "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."
 
At least Alienware acknowledges the bug in my opinion and are working on a fix. 

It's Alienware, what do you expect? They were originally a decently cheap, quality place to pay someone to do a build for you, but they cratered like a meteor when bought by Dell.