M17X R3 Upgraded to new Alienware 17 - Story + a few Qs

Whats up gang,

Over the last 4-5 months my R3 has been riddled with issues that has basically left me without a laptop for the duration. After many service calls and many hours spent troubleshooting Alienware has kindly offered a replacement to the new Alienware 17 with a 770m.

It started with issues where my laptop would not boot with the 6990m detected. 1/5 boots would load the 6990m, the rest of the time I would only get on with the Intel 3000. I called up Alienware once a week for about a month and their BIOS update, Chipset update and other minor updates seemed to do the trick for the following 2 days but then it would go back. Finally they sent a tech with a new MoBo and a replacement 6990m (apparently the last 6990m in stock). When the tech swapped it out i twas a disaster the laptop simply wouldn't boot with the card in (tried removing it and it worked) Scheduled another call which forced me to take another vacation day to meet the tech. Swapped the card to a 580m and it seemed that things were A-OK. Worked fantastically for 3 days and for the first time I started to like nVidia cards. On the 4th day the laptop would not boot or when it did and it resolved to using the 580 it would crash as soon as I launched a game. Later my power adapter stopped working and the problems grew from there.

Alienware offered to send me a new laptop Base 17, 8 gb of RAM and initialyl a 765m. They could not match my old HDD specs so I told them not to ship any HDDs and I would use my old ones they were willing to bump me up to the 770m.

The few questions I have are:

• Will the 770m perform as well or better than my 6990m? (I loved the 6990m it would run anything you threw at it. Benchmarks say 770m is a lot better but I swear the 6990m had some wizardry behind it because it ran any game on the highest settings)
• I noticed on the Alienware site that there are 2 power adapter options. I imagine the higher wattage is strictly for the 780m should I order this separately? Would there be a benefit with the 770m?
• Finally, is it worth upgrading to the 780 now or should I wait for the 800 series or the next AMD card?

Thanks guys, hope to hear from you soon.

 

Sorry to hear about your troubles, but I'm glad to see that Alienware is still taking care of their customers, especially years down the road. How awesome is that?

1. Yes, the 770M will perform much better than both the 6990M and the 765M -- that's a nice offer from Alienware.
2. No, there won't be any direct benefit of having the larger PSU. Your setup will do just fine with the 180W PSU. The 770M draws less power than the 780M does, which is why they offer the 240W PSU for the 780M. However, if you plan to upgrade down the road, you will need a larger PSU.
3. Definitely wait until the 800 series NVIDIA GPU's come out. There's no point in upgrading at this point. They will be released between April and June of 2014, so, why spend $700~ on a 780M now, when in about eight months you can spend that much on an 880M with an entirely new architecture that should perform at least 30% better than the 780M (rumors estimate 50% - 70%, which is like having a GTX 780 desktop card in your laptop.)

Hope that helps. Enjoy the new system! They're awesome... Keep in mind that replacements usually take longer to arrive as opposed to new orders, as they are not top priority.

 

Thanks for the reply J.Dre.

I agree it turned out really well and it was very good of AW to do this. I should mention their support was top notch I would attribute my issues more to the defective refurb parts. I had to put together a quick desktop to get me through not having my laptop for games but in the end this saved me from having to buy a new laptop.

 

Wow, that's awesome. A free upgrade is always great!

As J.Dre already mentioned, the 6990 which is about to be 2 generations behind, will not hold its ground against the 770.

 

I am curious to know what warranty you had ? thanks ^^

 

Same as J.Dre, wait for the new series before performing any upgrades.
I'm glad you are on the right track now

 

As far as I understand there is just one warranty level with Alienware. I had paid fro extended warranty to cover 3 years of the laptop's life.

As cool as it is getting a brand new laptop I would have preferred to have a working system instead of having to put together a desktop.

Will post update when the laptop arrives. I got my order number yesterday and the return shipment setup. Hopefully within 2 weeks.

 

Thanks L. I'm looking forward to it. I'm a bit worried about how the 770m will hold up but it should be OK. I tried talking the replacement folks into paying for an upgrade to the 780 but I think that might just delay the shipment.

Out of curiosity does over-clocking the video card void warranty? I haven't tried it yet. I guess since AW does not have their own OC tool it might. The warranty has been good to me so I want to make sure that stays intact.

Thanks!

 

The 770m will be faster than the 6990m, not by a huge amount but it will run MUCH cooler. You can oc it to have a big lead.

 

I got my replacement Alienware 17 yesterday. I honestly am not a big fan of this design and during the process of packing up my defective M17x R3 I felt sad to see it go.

I was sure that I was going to be struck with some bad luck and the replacement laptop wasn't going to work right.
So I checked:

• the hinge height
• made sure everything was flush
• tested all the keyboard buttons
• tested the lights
• ran Alien Autopsy and tested the innards
• made sure all the specs were correct

It was a pleasant surprise that everything was perfect. Not bad. I took some shots of the 2 models side by side.



I like the new top cover, but I still think the R3 had the rest right. While the keyboard on the new A17 is much more sturdy I still liked the larger glow on the R3's buttons. The speakers on the R3 looked a lot nicer too. The one piece glass on the R3's screen was a fantastic idea and I'm sad that they removed that. But I can live with the aesthetics, the only real disappointment are the speakers. I don't know what Klipsch but the new laptop's speakers are a disaster compared to the R3's.

None the less, this one works and the old one doesn't. I slapped in a new SSD and re-installed everything.

My only problem now is that I did a clean Windows 8 install and I only have an upgrade key. I don't want to format and do it all from scratch .

EDIT: Found a solution to my Windows 8 issue here http://www.guidingtech.com/16405/probable-fix-activating-windows-8-clean-install/. Will test after work.

 

I don't have a chance to call Dell today. Does anyone know how the warranty on replacement systems works? Do you just port over your remaining days with your old system or does the new system come with the 1 year? Thank you.

EDIT: It transfers your remaining warranty, no bonus 1 year.