Guess who's back in the 'big boys' league!

Well, some of you will know a bit of my past with Dell and Alienware - a bit rocky over the last few years after having some issues with the M18x R1 in my signature. Prior to that I had the M17x R2 also in my signature. Dell and I had a 'disagreement' over what was deemed to be a suitable replacement for my R1 and after a lot of hassle, I ended up with a full refund. That was a few years back now.

Since then, I was dubious about returning to that kind of level of performance and cost outlay so I ended up making do with a little Alienware 14, which I upgraded myself by swapping out the mobo for one with a BGA 765m instead of the 750m that I bought it with. I was kinda happy with it and was making do - up until our house was broken into a few days into the 2015 new year and my 14 (along with my U3011 30" IPS monitor) were taken from me by scum bags.

After several weeks, the insurance came through and fortunately, the policy was new for old and I was offered a cash alternative over one of the new BGA models - proposed was a 15 with a 970m. Obviously I took the money instead with a view to biding my time for something better - maybe not even Alienware.

A few weeks back, I saw a 17 with a 4900mq and 780m and 3D screen with a 256gb SSD and Blu Ray for the bargain price of £740gbp, so I pounced on it. Unfortunately again for me (much like the burglary) I was scammed by the Ebay seller who took my money, failed to send any goods and did not reply to any messages. Fortunately, I was covered by Ebay's money back guarantee and I got my full amount back the other day.

Not one to be put off by a bad experience, I got back on the Ebay 'horse' and started looking again. I found a few that took my fancy, some I was beaten to, others my offers were declined. Persistence was the key.

Only the other day I managed to secure what I felt was a good deal on a 18 (Viking) that had the following spec:

4930mx
780m SLI
16gb
Blu Ray
Win 7 Pro
512gb mSata & 750gb HDD


The added bonus was that it also came with 3 years full warranty. I had to have a go at buying this thing! - fortunately, the seller accepted my offer and I feel I got a great price - given I am in the UK - of £1,800 shipped. I've specifically avoided 880m machines (after all the bad press about them) but as an example, they've been selling for £2,700 on Ebay UK with 4940mx and 880m SLI with only 1 year warranty......that's why I felt it was a good deal as 780m SLI is a much better proposition and far less of a lottery.

Just gotta wait for its arrival early next week - the seller has good rep and is VAT registered so I am hoping that I won't be bitten twice in quick succession on Ebay. The unit is described as brand new with no marks at all.

Must say, I am kinda excited to be back in the high performance league - I guess you could say that every cloud has a silver lining - going from problems with my M18x R1 to an Alienware 14 which was stolen from me has ended up (hopefully) with me getting a machine which is truly powerful once more.

Can't wait and couldn't contain my excitement! - just had to spill!!

Regards to you all
Steve.

 

Good for you, Stevie! Welcome back to "the game"!

 

Congrats Stevie,

Good to hear you found a nice system, with a warranty, for a good price. I do hate to read that you were violated. However, I find great satisfaction in helping the families, victims, by arresting said scoundrels. Let us know when you receive it. I will hopefully be upgrading to dual GTX 780m's in SLI here soon.

 

Awesome matey!! great decision on the 780!! Now you can sup up this beast later with a tri combo SSD in RAID 0 like I did

 

Thanks fellas - I'm sure I'll get the 'itch' to do some upgrades on it in the near future, raided SSD's would be nice to have again - especially as they have come down so much in price/capacity ratio (I recall a Dell quote some years back for a 512gb PM830 which was over £800gbp !!). Other things to consider are memory and wireless card, but apart from those things, it's pretty maxed out already.

I did briefly consider a 980m SLI'd Eurocom X8 or Panther 5 but the price quickly brought me back down to earth. Still, the inbound machine will blow my old machines out of the water - especially the last 14 I owned! hahaha.

 

^^^ Looks at Ebay for Alienware 18 models: See's prices and cries

Then thinks: I'll wait till October till I have some more money and get a maxed out Clevo with dual GPUs + new Skylake Desktop prcoessor

 

I'd have probably bided my time, too - but being stuck with a '"loaner" laptop which is completely pathetic at best (HP Beats Audio piece of s**te) I had to jump on something. Ebay prices can be scandalous, but £1800 for the spec I got with full 3yr warranty will do nicely for me. The way I look at it is that it will hold value over the current Alienware crap for some time - and perform better than all of them - so when the time comes, I may cash in and trade up. Either way, it was win/win for me after paying £600 for a 14 a year or so back and then getting an insurance payout that more or less covered the 18 in my signature. Of course, I would have preferred not to have been burgled, but them's the breaks, as they say.

You could say that the machine that is inbound has only cost me £600 and a little bit on top. Looking at it like that, I'd take that kinda deal every day of the week 24/7 !

 

Congrats bro.. You just a ant go wrong with a 18" AW... They are all works or art..

 

Thanks Bro, so true regarding the 18's - ain't that the truth!. Gimme any 18 and it would be better than any of the 2015 line up...

 

Good to see you back! My GF just bought an Aw 18 too, and I really have to say that its a really nice machine.

 

Y'know, I was dubious about going from my old M18x R1 to the AW 14 Mariner - mainly because of build quality concerns. When my used (Ebay) 14 arrived, I was very pleasantly surprised, so if the build quality is the same on the 18 Viking, I'll be happy. The performance increase in components vs. my 14 speaks for itself, so I imagine I'm going to be very happy on that score - assuming it all works as it should. My main concern - if you can call it that - is how glossy the panel is....I was used to my 14 being matte IPS, and whilst the 18x E2E glossy was good, I'm more of a matte guy so I'm hoping it will not be too reflective.

 

Knew you'd be back brother! Congrats on the new monster!

 

Thanks Bro - feels good to be back. Well, it will do when she lands!

 

If your AW18 ships with Windows 8, please, for the love of the heavens, don't upgrade to 8.1. Do a clean install, the amount of crap the 8 to 8.1 upgrade leaves behind is a joke, it's a whole new OS as you will see the old Windows in a folder called Windows.old but with the ancient drivers that are NOT compatible with Windows 8.1 completely

PS: you cannot use Windows 7 with the Alienware 18 unless you want to live with the Event ID 18 error upon each reboot (CPU Cache Hierarchy error), I tried everything under the sun, no fix. the OS doesn't play well with MQ or MX CPUs

 

It's shipping with Win 7 Pro. I have a Win 8.1 .iso USB that I created when the 7>8 upgrade offer was on for £15 and grabbed the Media Centre for free, too. I did that when I had my R1 so I am assuming it should be okay 'if' I wanted to go Win 8. I still prefer 7 over 8, mind you.

Yeah, I was aware of the WHEA event - something I tried to eradicate when on Win 7 but couldn't - it wasn't doing any harm, just one of those 'non-events' in my book.

 

ah then no problem. I prefer 7 too to be honest.

 

You've got too much OCD about this stuff.. If it does nothing, why be so worried about this stupid event?

 

You're right I guess. I'm not gonna worry about it anymore. Formatting my laptop now. bye bye

 

Oh man you just got burned by the Matrix

 

Yeah thanks to Tom now I'm spending g a full 24 hours formatting because I have a lot of data to restore from the external usb, u see I do a complete format of everything g when I switch OS because on win8 the disks are initiated as gpt for faster boot but on win 7 I have to set them as mbr as that's much more stable for win 7

 

Dude my point was not to format your computer and live with Windows 8.1 which is the superior OS...

 

Well 10 is out soon so I would have just moved to that. Gamers are going to want to that's for sure.