Contact Dell Support, here's what you get.

I had a simple question, and here's what the recommended chat link delivered. Beyond pathetic. I know some of you know the answer to my question in this attempt to gain some knowledge on the subject, and would appreciate your answers below. SHEESH! C'mon Dell!!

Note I was very polite with her. It's not her fault, but Dell's for not training their employee's!

MOD EDIT:
Do not post content from private correspondence, such as email or chat, within the forums. Posting any other persons private information such as email, phone number or address could result in banning.

Forum rules

 

Dell sales team know absolutely nothing about the Alienware line, If you want I can put you in touch with my sales rep who helped me purchase my M18X. He is very knowledgeable and was a great deal of help in answering pretty much every question I threw at him.

From what he had told me, the M18X can indeed support the Core i7 Extreme Edition. But he did tell me that it would indeed void my warranty if I did the installation myself. For self upgrades in terms of RAM and hard drive he told me that the only things that would be voided was the factory installed RAM and hard drive I would be removing.

When I get off of work in the morning I can PM you his number and extension if you wish.

So far the only upgrades I have done to my M18X was take out the 4GB factory installed RAM and install 32 GB (8x4) of GeiL DDR3-1333, replaced the Seagate 750GB to Kingston HyperX 240GB SATA-III SSD and installed a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB SSD hybrid as a secondary drive. I also swapped out the factory NIC for my Killer NIC 1102 and upgraded my Windows from Home Premium to Professional.

 

Their depot service is also really really good. I included a little handwritten note with some technical questions and they were nice enough to include responses in the box when it was returned to me. The sales team is just horrible though. I've been getting inconsistent and mixed answers from them for EVERY question I pose. It's almost as if Dell policy changes day to day.

 

Alienware Support is totally awesome, as long as you are dealing with US or Costa Rica (not India) support reps.

This is rubbish and it's not true. Owner-induced damage is not covered under warranty. If installing an XM CPU doesn't cause damage, there is no reason for concern. The warranty does not extend to aftermarket upgrades, but the original parts would continue to be covered by the warranty. This was confirmed in our last conference call with Dell/Alienware last week.

They actually sell the Extreme (XM) CPU as an option on a new system, so it would be ridiculous if someone told you that the XM proc is "supported" as if to insinuate it is only available as an aftermarket upgrade. It seems to be temporarily unavailable, probably due to high demand and lack of available parts. If you look on the Alienware M18x web page, it actually has a bullet-point that reads "Put the competition to shame with an optional factory-overclocked Intel® Core™ i7 Processor Extreme Edition."

 

Totally agree!

 

+1 on that.

One of the reasons I definitely purchased the North American Tech Support.

 

MOD EDIT:
Do not post content from private correspondence, such as email or chat, within the forums. Posting any other persons private information such as email, phone number or address could result in banning.

Forum rules

I figured since it was my own correspondence that I was posting, I was giving permission to post my personal experience with Dell's "customer service". Is it because the other party (Dell Rep) had not given permission to post? Anyhoo, sorry 'bout that. It didn't even cross my mind that that would be problem.