New Alienware options

Have I been sleeping or am I the first one to notice that Dell has just updated their gpu options to include the R9 m290x (AMD Radeon™ R9 M290X with 4GB GDDR5) and sibeam (Sibeam Gen 3 60GHz WiHD)?

Link

 

Wow man, you're right! +Rep

I didn't think dell was going to add them. Now to hear how they perform

 

About the same as a 7970m overclocked by another 100 MHz. That extra 2 GB of VRAM on a 256 bit bus won't really do much.

 

That is true. But the most important is that Alienware now officially supports Amd/Ati card with bios, drivers, ect... . What makes me happy is that Sibeam is also back. Not because I use it but because I saw on Ideastorm and on here that some people where asking for it. Shows Alienware/Dell still care. Hope this keeps on and we get higher res. screens.

 

I agree. I was getting worried that with dell going for restrictive builds something was lost but this is a good sign of commitment to the brand

 

:edit: Looks like the following applies to Canada only, not the US. Alienware.com still has the 770M, 4800MQ, and 7200's. Well, no surprise there that we get screwed for online shopping. Should have expected that.

Seems like fewer options to me... You can get 3D and 780 on the base model now, but a lot of options are also gone.

770M is gone
4800MQ is gone
7200RPM drives are gone, replaced by 5400RPM (ouch)

My build in November was:

i7 4800MQ
16GB
80GB mSATA + 750GB 7200 RPM
GTX 780M
Blu-Ray
3D 120Hz
3 Year Damage
3 Year Support
$2949.49 pre tax

Since you can't get the 4800MQ anymore, the 2 closest builds to it are:
Config 1:
4700MQ (down from 4800MQ)
1TB 5400RPM SATA 6Gb/s + 80GB mSATA SSD Caching (down from 750GB 7200RPM + 80GB mSATA)
DVD (down from Blu-Ray)
$3,347.99 (+$400)

Config 2:
4900MQ (up from 4800MQ)
1TB 5400RPM SATA 6Gb/s + 80GB mSATA SSD Caching (down from 750GB 7200RPM + 80GB mSATA)
$3,847.99 (+$900)

Yeah, my price was a bit down from the website price after negotiating with a sales agent (maybe $400 off?) but still, at best it would be the same price now with a handful of downgrades.

I was annoyed with the options when I built mine a few months ago, I think with the current choices I may have altogether skipped it and got one of the Clevos that I was looking at which would have been too bad.

 

You could try to contact sales via phone to try to get to a better result. Something closer to what you had last November.