New 17 R4 arrived today - Spoiler alert (I love it)

I received my 17 R4 today. After a lot of tinkering and playing around, I found the following:

• The QHD panel is amazing, and I absolutely love it. It's bright as hell, and smooth as butter with racing and FPS games. Could not ask for more.
• The Killer N1435 card took some tweaking (and removal of the management software), but it works great now.
• Nice speakers, they put out plenty more sound than my old Asus.
• The temps are reasonable. Hammering the system with Project Cars maxed out on every single setting, I couldn't beat 82C with the GPU being slammed at 100%. The CPU cores maxed out between 71C and 77C. I may re-paste some day if I feel the need, but right now I don't mind at all. The fans are also reasonable at these temps.
• The keyboard is nice to type on. It's very similar to my work laptop (Precision M6800)
• My daughters are obsessed with AlienFX lol

Build:
17.3" QHD/1440p panel
i7-7700HQ
GTX1070 8GB
16GB RAM
256GB PCIe SSD (OS)
500GB 960 Evo (Apps and Games, added myself)
1TB 7200RPM HDD (Data)
N1435 Wifi

 

Glad to hear a happy camper is around and sharing good news.

 

I'm jealous of that beast you got there, nice buy. Did you buy it str8 from Dell or from a retailer? I myself have been considering buying an alienware but instead of going through Dell I was thinking of ordering through HIDevoultion and having them do their repaste and repad services just for some added piece of mind.

 

Thanks! I hope it stays that way. I'll be keeping an eye open for any issues, particularly in this first 30 days.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

I looked at HID as well, but bought straight from dell because of the sale that was going on. The sale, the free SSD upgrade, and the 10% off code that stacked as well. The price went from $2,399 to $1,808 before taxes and expedited shipping. I have no problem re-pasting if need be, as I did it on my Asus.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

Sweet! Good to hear you're loving it. Game on!

 

Great, good to hear the stock thermals are acceptable too. Enjoy!

 

wow, very nice temps man! especially considering that's stock without HIDevolution's cooling mods! Spectacular!

 

That's encouraging to hear! I thought they were a little high at first (especially the GPU), because after re-pasting my Asus everything was in the 65C range haha. Keeping in mind that's much less powerful hardware than the AW, I'm happy overall. I got the 1070 up to 85 the other day, but that was after 2 solid hours of maxed out Forza Horizon 3 and is the highest I've seen. However, all CPU cores were within 2C of one another (75-77C) per Afterburner.

As an aside: When I ordered, the GPU was listed as being overclocked on the website (like the 1080). However, I'm not sure where to verify or change the degree of said overclocking. I haven't overclocked anything in many years, so I'm way out of the tweaking game. Can anyone clue me in?

 

You can OC a little more using MSI AB or nvidia inspector. I'd say OC will help in scorong more points in benchmarking and whilst gaming you'll notice little or no difference at all.

 

I cracked open the NIB aw17r4 I was selling. Stock out of the box BF1 running at 1440p ultra for about 6 hours cpu maxed at 81c, PCH 77c and gpu was 68c. Didn't notice any stuttering or hesitations. I will run more benchmarks and gaming test over the next few days and create new the or reply to the main thread. AW has done something it looks like. this one was built September and shipped sept 10th.

7820hk
1080

 

Yeah, I haven't had any issues with stuttering at all thus far, so hopefully it stays that way. I played FH3 and Overwatch for about 3.5 hours last night, and while the fans get a bit loud at times, temps thankfully stay under control.

 

Awesome man! So happy f0r j00!

 

Nice to see someone posting positive experiences in here for a change.

 

Yeah, I was really on the fence about purchasing after reading all the doom and gloom, but noticed that most of it was from 6+ months ago. I really liked the 17 after playing with one in a store, and the current ROGs weren't doing it for me (though my G74SX has been a fantastic machine). I was very close to a GT72VR, but the deal I got and the (fixed) QHD screen were too hard to resist. I figured I would roll the dice, since I'm not worried about getting my hands dirty if need be (and had also just re-pasted the G74). Thankfully my fears have been unfounded thus far, though I would like to see the temps a bit lower, if just to make the fans relax a bit.

 

R3sp3ct t0 th3 Qu4ke 3 l33t sp34k

 

How's the battery life under light use?

 

I don't really use it off the charger, so I don't have a solid answer. However, notebookcheck said this of a 1080 model:

Idle (without WLAN, min brightness): 4h 36min
WiFi Surfing v1.3: 3h 01min
Load (maximum brightness): 1h 9min

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Alien...op-Review.214918.0.html#toc-energy-management

 

Depends totally on current battery usage in Watts, you can check it in HWINFO or TS. If the usage is under 10W then the battery life will be around 9 hrs or 10 hrs.