M17x R2: mini review (after 5 months)

M17x R2: mini review (after 5 months)



Specs:
Lunar Silver
Intel i7 620m Dual Core 2.67 GHz, with 3.03 GHz max Turboboost on dual core and 3.33 GHz single core
4GB RAM 1066 MHz
250GB HDD Seagate 7200rpm
ATI Radeon Mobility 5870 crossfire
RGB LED screen
4 USBs, VGA, HDMI, DisplayPort, ExpressCard, SD card, DVD, E-sata, Firewire, 2 sound outputs, 1 mic in.
Cost: $2300 total

I decided to write down a short review of my m17x-r2, that I had used now for couple of months, especially in the light of the terrible Tom's Hardware review and some other reviews I just read. Also, I'm not sure how many people actually get to see this computer in real life before they buy it. I got impression people buy MSI, Clevo, Asus or something third, because "Alienwares are $4k machines that just look shiny". My opinion is exactly the opposite - it's the other brands that sell overpriced gaming laptops with subpar quality compared to high-end Alienwares. And why would one spend few % of the price less for something so far behind in quality is beyond me. Or beyond any system of logic or common sense.

I also attach few pics so you can see how it actually looks in its natural habitat.

Build quality: 10/10


- The best built laptop I have ever seen. Outside is full metal alumin(i)um), on the inside there's black rough plastic. I thought m11x was good, but build on m17x is another giant step above that. The only small minus is that there's a small keyboard flex, mostly pronounced on "\" key. It feels literally like a tank otherwise. If you're not careful its easy to snap your fingers with a screen. Lights can be customized quite a bit, in ~20 different colors. The edges of the laptop are also tilted a little bit, presumably to enhance the air flow. The thing I hear complaining here is that it doesn't look professional. Maybe, true. Tho, you can turn the lights off and I guess put a sticker over Alien head on the lid... But again this is not a business laptop - if you need really something for business there are plenty of other business class machines (Lenovo Thinkpad, HP elitebook, Dell latitude, ...)

Keyboard and touchpad: 8/10




- Nothing special here. Touchpad finally works with the latest BIOS revision but the touchpad keys are kind of "deep". The keyboard looks Alienish , good size, but honestly, a step below the one on ThinkPad. And a step above many many others. Touchpad is okay, nothing special.

Screen: 11/10


- The best looking screen ever. There's a small bleed on red colors, that I was unable to fix with color management, but despite it looks absolutely amazing and its my favorite part of the laptop - BY FAR. Unparalleled with anything else I used. Screen is glossy but not as bad-glossy as m11x. I was unable to use it as a shaving mirror.

Performance: 10/10


All stock settings:
- 3DMark Vantage: 14200 GPU score
- 3DMark 06: 16k
You can find plenty of benchmarks around here so I won't say anything else here.
I played WoW, WoW Cata, BC2, Fallout New Vegas and Assasin's Creed 2. Even a single 5870 (I ran on single when there was lots of flickering in crossfire) eats all these games on max settings for breakfast, except the crap engine of WoW Cata.

Heat and noise: 9/10


- When benchmarking or running demanding games, the fans do get somewhat loud. It doesn't bother me though, since in those cases my speakers get loud too. Max temps I ever had (after an hour or so of benchmarking) were around 80 C for the CPU and about 85 C for GPUs. The laptop itself doesn't get even warm at all though.
- I didn't give 10/10, but according to my knowledge the laptop that works very quiet and keeps the internal temps low when under heavy load doesn't exist. Think of this score in an absolute way: m17x gets 9/10, everything else gets, at most, 7/10. On Dell XPS m1330, for comparison, WiFi was right beneath the touchpad which would become really hot to touch. You will also be happy to know that outter metal shell doesn't actually serve as a heat sink (yes, I am thinking about you here, Macbook Pro!).

Upgrades: 10/10


- The computer can be upgraded relatively painless. I think many people don't know that you can actually take out both graphic cards as well as the CPU. It comes with 2 hard drive bays + DVD, so you can easily buy a small SSD as a boot drive, and have another regular HD for storage. I think that's a very useful option - the big SSDs are still pretty expensive and if most of your storage is spent on movies, music and such - you won't profit that much by having those on an SSD - at least I don't see any difference watching a movie on SSD or HD. Otherwise, this is good as upgrades through Dell cost at least twice as much you can get otherwise (e.g. quad core extreme cpu).

Warranty: 7/10, Customer Service: 0/10

- You get next business day on-site service. On-site techs are really bad, most of them never even seen an Alienware before. However, if something breaks, you get the new part delivered to your home NEXT DAY. That's pretty good, so even if (or rather, when) Dell tech breaks something, new parts can just be coming in.
- Customer service on the phone is often terrible, especially if they connect you to one of their outsourced centers in India. Get ready for a giant waste of your time.

Other things:
- Despite the weight of "only" 10 lbs (~4.5kg) keep in mind the laptop comes with a pretty heavy 240W AC adapter too (in case you chose 5870 crossfire configuration) that you actually need as well.
- It has this super-annoying feature called Stealth mode. Just never use it and you'll be fine.
- comes with an AW hat and actually pretty decent AW mousepad, which I use to hold my Thinkpad when I'm on the couch.
- I never reinstalled Windows, just removed McAfee and there was no other bloatware installed so just left it at that. There's still Dell datasafe backup running - and I left it because its not annoying.

After 5 months doesn't show any visible sign of wear (it wasn't moved that much tho). Also, it actually works much better now, as new drivers are much better, and new BIOS fixed the touchpad polling rate problem. I have also learned not to touch Stealth mode button. There's barely any crap stuck in the keyboard, the screen still looks as new and it doesn't suffer from the annoying "finger grease" problem that m11x has. The only maintenance I did was to clean up the dust from underneath that gathered at vents. I didn't open anything just cleaned up what gathered on the outside. Not because temps when up (they didn't) but because it just bothered me knowing it was there.

Summary:

I think that overall, this laptop is an excellent choice. Looking at it's price, it costs few hundred dollars more than it's competition. The screen itself contributes around $200 right there, and there's the crossfire setup that you don't find that often on other laptops. So if you leave out those two things (at least RGB LED you shouldn't), the price becomes in-line with other similar laptops, that are technologically far behind. On EPP website, the base m17x-r2 price is $1.6k before tax, with i5 520M cpu which will probably be just fine for pretty much anything. In that respect, it's much more worth bang for the buck than anything else thats 17-18" and is a gaming laptop. I will even go as far to say you'd have to be completely clueless or uninformed to buy anything else. And that's coming from someone who whole-heartly hates Dell. Any upgrade along the road you want to put in, you can easily, without voiding your warranty, as long as you keep original parts (at least that's my understanding). On eBay you can even buy quad core extreme CPU for ~$560 if you really want it or, as a future upgrade (i7 940xm is quite a bit speed boost compared to i5/i7 620m range CPUs), and Newegg sells 60GB SSDs in $100 range. The way people get silly $4k numbers is if they get all the upgrades from Dell, which is imo, really bad idea because it costs so much more. Also, Dell Outlet can have good deals too.

 

I must say silver is pretty nice. I'm getting bored of my black. It is so.. plain..

 

Nice review chiefs oless! High 5!

I like it when theres nice pics to look at!

Cheers.

 

I owned all three and I must say my rank is Silver - Red - Black.

It sad that I ended up with a Black as my latest purchase

 

nice review. pretty much agree with the comments you make, especially on the tech support outsourcing part.

 

Agreed. Now I wish I'd seen some shots of silver before I bought mine.

 

The customer service is definitely not a 0/10, that's way too exaggerated and ridiculous. I'd say it's no worse or better than the customer service found at other companies, at least a 6/10. The wait times are long and you can end up being transferred around a lot but that's not the outsourced employees fault, it's Dell's organization. When the proper person is contacted (outsourced or not), they do their best to resolve issues, at least that's been my experience with Dell over the last 15 years. Alienware tech support in Costa Rica is a 8/10, level 1 techs don't know anything but usually if they can't resolve a problem, they escalate it pretty fast and the level 2 and above techs take care of it. Results vary for each person but in the end, Dell takes care of it's customers far better than any other PC company out there.

I agree with the rest of the review though, especially about the costs of obtaining an Alienware at a reasonable price. There's not a single competing notebook out there, gaming or otherwise, that can deliver the build quality, support, flexibility and generous warranty support like Dell. People that try to compare junk low budget notebooks like the G73 to Alienware just show their ignorance. Even Clevo cannot keep pace with Alienware. Hate on Dell as much as you like but the Alienware of today is this good BECAUSE of Dell. Just remember that before hating on Dell.

P.S. The current All Powerful line was designed largely by the old Dell XPS team with some input from Alienware engineers. Before Dell, Alienware didn't really have a true design team, they relied on outsourced designs with minor modifications of their own.

 

I say customer service is like a 6.5-7.

 

Just curious, why uninstall McAfee? Does it kill in-game performance?

 

I ordered black, and I am really wondering if I should have gone for red. I need to use it for work, so I thought the black would be more profesional, but like everyone says, there is only so much black one can take

 

Gray is a beauty, I have a black one.

Now I'm jealous ! You killed my day !

 

Thanks!

Yeah I like the silver one. But I guess it's very subjective, all 3 colors look good. Interesting, I sort of wish that I maybe went with black or red. I think it's psychological.

Well, depends which one. Ever tried talking to Newegg support? It's light years away from Dell. Sadly, you are right here - customer service is similar to a lot of other companies. I have had similar experience with many other customer support reps - when I called Sears couple of times I had the impression I was talking to people with high mental retardation. Besides the fact that one person actually started talking to me in Spanish until I asked for English! I don't know whether the outsourcing is the only problem. But every single person I talked with at Dell was utterly clueless about anything regarding Alienware. Starting from sales rep, waiting for at least an hour on the phone for any simple thing, to on-site tech, it was one worst than the other. The 0/10 is based on my few years of experience with Dell, as I have bought now 4 computers from them.

If that's their "very best"... good lord... I can't even imagine what would it look like if they weren't trying.

Interesting point about the price tho - yeah, from what I remember when AW was a solo company, the prices were quite a bit higher. I guess that's one of the things the money is cut on to make the price affordable. If they give you the business class tech support, the price would be quite a bit higher. But I wouldn't mind paying for it.

Well I don't think so, but I just like to get rid of all the annoying programs and the ones that take a lot of resources. I am using NOD32 instead. Typically I disable all the updates too, then just run manually whenever I remember. I think that works fine if you're not surfing on "fishy" websites looking to download illegal stuff.

 

Yes customer support for most large companies is poor at best. They rely on a first layer of IVR, which takes about 5 minutes to navigate, then a second layer of low level trainee quality CSR's, then it goes on from there. Thankfully the hold times where all less than 3 minutes.

I ended up having to return my m17x because they sent me a config with a CCFL screen rather than the RGB. I think it was due to a listing error. Why they don't go ahead and use the same exact listing on the site and invoice I don't know but I digress.

To address this problem, it too 3 hours of my life away, on three separate calls with 10 different CSRs.

CSR ping pong is probably the worst of the problem, I felt like a wounded animal that was being worn down by a hungry pack of hienas. You have to spend at least 1 minute to get them to know who you are: Order number, name, address phone, ect... Then wait about 2 mins for them to read the notes. Then another 5 mins for you to explain to them what the notes mean.
They ask a series of questions then finally get to the real issue. At which point they either argue with you for no good reason or plain ignorance. Whey they've had enough they transfer you and you get to do it all again...

They should call that part of it CSR roulette, because you sometimes get a decent person, but they transfer you because they realize xyz errors where made, and have to be addressed by department abc, but then you never know who's going to replace them.

During my ordeal I'd say I had 1 good CSR and 1 competent one, the rest sounded like they where in training.

Makes it hard to navigate the system.

Mike

 

I think Dell CS is great. After purchasing the Silver one I had someone called me just talking and asking for my opinion on Alienware. Make me feel my premium money on Alienware is worthwhile.

When I was waiting for my current Black one I saw a great deal on Dell site which makes a same config is $100 cheaper than what I paid. I called them up and those guys who talked to me were extremely helpful. They asked few questions, send me an email regarding some related stuff and waiting on the line to make sure I receive the email before ending the call. The next day they called me up said that I have a option: Make another purchase for the new price, wait until it's delivered and ship back the current one, no fee at all on my side. I told 'em that even tho I have no negative impact with that option and I much appreciate the way they were willing to suffer loss to maintain customer satisfaction, I don't really mind the $100 and I will keep my system to keep things simple. The guy was surprised. He told me to hang on and came back in 3 minutes saying that there is 2nd option: An email with $100 coupon code. I said that's great. About 3 days later I received the email, in that 3 days they called me about 5-6 times just to make sure if I received the email or not and promised me that they will push things up for me.

Well for a single customer, that's a lot of careness. And I think that's great. Not as great as small companies (just face it, that's a fact. Just like I face it as if it's Origin PC they could have simply refunded $100 back to my bank account but this is Dell and their departments are half around of the world away from each other) but it's really great for a huge corporation like Dell.

Ever try to call Apple? You can take a bath then enjoy your breakfast with hot coffee while waiting for someone actually answer the phone. And when I say you can take a bath and enjoy your breakfast with hot coffee while waiting on the line with Apple, I really mean it.

 

I think your particular experience is a little different since Alienware customer service sat. folks gave you a call. They will go above and beyond due to the nature of their work. To check on and improve customer sat. They operate under a different set of parameters than the regular customer service folks.

Mike

 

I Love my Red one

 

I'd have to say the Dell customer service itself is good, but the on site techs are pretty bad. When I had my first service call I felt really important because I got a call from alienware to check if everything went down alright. Now they won't call me anymore because I hold like the world record for dell replacement PCs. haha. Nice review though, makes me wish I got silver, but my alienware was free, I can't complain.

 

Build quality is great but the design is poor. If it needs to be taken apart there's a good chance there will some marks as the anodised finish, especially the red, marks. Whoever decided to mount a slot loading optical drive under half of all the components needs to be fired. It's at least an hour job to take apart the system. It took 30 seconds on my old M1730!

 

Wow those are pretty sweet specs for a free laptop. I never got any phone call, and I'd have plenty to say at that time. Disfunctional touchpad, crossfire flickering, computer stuck in Stealth mode..... luckily with help of NBR it all worked out. Maybe I should add:

NBR AW forum members: 100/10 That's probably the most useful thing about owning this computer, quite a fair amount of knowledgeable people on this subforum that have owned or own multiple Alienwares that know these machines inside out, publishing guides, workarounds, fixes, benches, etc.

 

@Unreal25

If some of the dell techs and on site techs were as knowledgeable as some of the people I've gotten help from on this website Dell would be by far the best computer company on earth. NBR should just start making computers.

 

very nice review, full of information on key points that could sway viewers into making their purchase towards alienware, nice photos, i myself did not like the silver from the photos viewed online but now that i have actually seen user photos i have changed my mind and think it looks really nice in silver and i believe my next aw purchase will be in silver. Thank you for the nice review +1 rep to you.

 

"My Precious, me's cannot be without our precious."

 

I second that.