New Alienware 17 (2015) - swapping the CPU

I will try to keep it as short as I can.

I am getting the new Alienware 17 with the i7 4710HQ; Is it possible to remove this CPU and put an alder version. I have a spare boxed i7 4900MQ which will probably increase performance in demanding CPU applications / games for about 5%.

Maybe only someone from the Alienware team will be able to give me a concrete answer.

Thank you in advance for your kind reply.

 

HQ means that it is soldered ... The new AW17 has both soldered GPU & CPU so unfortunately you can't upgrade/swap any

 

Whaaat?! So, if you have an 970m or 980m you cannot change them because the GPU is soldered on the motherboard?! That doesn't make any sense...

 

That's why you are much better off slapping a 980M in your current AW17 R1 than buying the questionable new AW17

 

I called them and spoke to the supervisor. After being on hold for near an hour I was told that both CPU and GPU are interchangeable. However it is more complicated compared to the 2013 version.

Regards.

 

Then they don't know what they're talking about. They can't be changed, at all. Both the CPU and GPU are soldered onto the motherboard.

 

Juliant...don't listen to what they are telling you , they are retarded to be quite honest if that is what they are telling you. Is it possible? Maybe if you have a butt load of professional soldering experience with stuff like this but for the average user these are NOT interchangeable. You will not be able to take your 4900 and slap it in this machine, I wouldn't even be surprised if it is a different socket all together. If you did try it and messed something up that would almost certainly void the warranty as breaking the solder and replacing the chip would require work not under the scope of a user approved upgrade.

Long story short if you have not done your homework on these new machines

• Non upgradable CPU/GPU ( Soldered to the board )
• No 3D option as of yet
• One HDD bay instead of two
• M.2 mSATA instead of the non useless one that was in the R1 which carried capacities up to 1tb instead of 512GB
• No optical drive option at all
• It does however have the nice Alienware head power light so thumbs up for that I guess.

Pretty much anyone you talk to is going to tell you that these are a massive step backwards compared to even the R1 which wasn't as widely adopted as the R4 due to it having the locked down Bios and crappy fan tables.

EDIT: Forgot to mention there is also a VERY real possibility that any new Nvidia card you buy from now going forward will have a locked vBios that will prevent overclocking....there is a whole whack of threads that can be found in the forums regarding this. Basically Nvidia disabled OCing on all 800/900m series cards via the drivers and when the internet created a PR nightmare they reintroduced it but they said that all NEW cards will be locked so only the people that already have the card will have the ability to OC going forward.

 

It makes sense, everything is soldered in the new Alienwares so you cannot put your MQ CPU, cannot upgrade the GPU, you have less max RAM capacity (16GB only vs 32GB), the new Alienwares are a big downgrade in every category.

PS: and please, you actually listen to anything that comes of the mouth of a Dell call center agent????????

 

What these fine gentlemen said. You should file an official complain because that sales rep was trying to scam you in an extremely unacceptable, dishonest & unprofessional way

 

Speaking of the poor R1 fan tables is there anyway to control the fans using HWinfo64 without the crazy latency spikes ?

 

I am honestly not sure, I don't OC and keep my paste nice and fresh so the temps have never really been an issue for me. Perhaps someone could better answer this question.

 

He's got stock paste so that a big problem itself... Also @MahmoudDewy, did you disable EC support in HWinfo settings to prevent these issues?

 

Yup ... Tried using both the COMPEL & DELL ECs & everything ... Get insane continuous DPC Latency spikes rendering the laptop useless

Is there any other way to control the fans ... Cuz when I use my own cooling scheme using HWinfo I get amazing cooling results on both idle & load temps and that without using full speed fans continuously but I can't keep it going because any sound or video is super choppy cuz of the latency

 

To answer your main question, basically no. It is not possible
As confirmed by all other comments before me, CPU and GPU are all soldered into the board.
I'd like to know who told you that those were interchangeable and hopefully send some feedback to them.
I apologize for that misinformation and any inconveniences this may have caused you.
And hopefully I can find out who's giving out wrong information and correct that. (If you have a Service Tag that you could send me via PM, I would appreciate it).

 

Technically it being soldered is not the end of the story, it just means that it would require taking it to a proper BGA shop and getting it removed and replaced with another chip.

This would of course kill any warranty and BGA chips are harder to get hold of but not impossible.

 

You can't swap the gpu, the routing is different from gpu to gpu, the 780m haven't got the same vram bus power supply pinout than the 980m etc ... You can see that like a different type of socket for cpu.

 

CPU bga chip replace should be doable. GPU not.