M18xR2 Pre-Order Configuration Questions... Ask HERE

The 7970m's are roughly twice as powerful versus the 675m's. There will be a 680m released sometime within the next few months hopefully, but initial reports are showing that it is not a door buster. I, myself, will still wait for it as NVidia normally has better driver support than AMD from my experience.

The m18x has the ability to use more than a single hard drive, so you can get yourself a nice SSD for usage as your boot disk, and quick data storage needs whilst also getting yourself a HDD for your archival/slower data storage needs.

As with the unit's RAM, it is recommended that you purchase the default storage option and obtain them on your own, as the savings are substantial.

The benchmark performance difference between the 3820QM and 3920XM is roughly 5%. The real world performance difference is unnoticeable to anyone that is not compiling code, doing heavy image/video editing, or the like. In fact, I would suggest you save 200$, and go with the 3720QM, as between it and the 3820QM, the performance delta is roughly 3%-4%, and that's entirely unnoticeable to the vast majority of users.

At a later date, you may be able to obtain the 3920XM (or perhaps even a more powerful CPU if they release another Ivy Bridge mobile extreme processor worth it, or if the Haswell mobile CPUs are compatible [highly unlikely]) for a discounted price.

The two other keys is to make sure you get a good warranty, as the Dell warranty is worth its weight in platinum when your system ends up down for the count. If they are unable to properly repair it, they'll send you another model of equal or greater value (especially if you squeaky wheel them as they'll sometimes be a bit slow about such things).

The second key is to haggle with Dell reps. to get the best possible price that you can. There are a few threads on the main Alienware forum page that detail this.

Good luck!

 

can someone please tell me what exactly i would be buying going from 3920xm to 3920xm overclocked? there's price difference of $250 and i'm not sure if the extra $250 buys me a beefed up cooling system or whatnots.

or am i just paying for someone to tweak some bios settings in the overclock menu?

 

Just settings in the BIOS which you can do manually.

 

The bios for the 3920xm is pretty locked down but there are a couple programs out there to tweak it a little. I have not put in a lot of time but I've bumped mine up to 4.1 with no issues, just have yet to mess with it a lot. So, you can do for free what it will cost you 250 for dell to do....

 

Ok I ordered my M18x. Specs are below and total costs with tax is $2833.09.
Is this a good deal? Can this play future games like crysis 3 on max with good fpsfps?

 

so do i get more menu options in the bios if i go with "3920xm overclocked" whereas i would have to use third party software to overclock if i go with "3920xm"?

i was under the impression that 3920xm gets me fully unlocked bios but i guess that's only for those factory overclocked machines?

 

Fox might be able to shed some more light on this one but I think if they overclock, it will still be locked down and eventually as they did with the 2920xm and 2960xm, someone will unlock the bios, providing for general public to use at own risk and then flash it yourself. As you will see in the performance thread.

 

No - you will have a Dell "locked" bios until some of the guys that mod bios' find out how to unlock it - like they did with the R1 bios'.

Yep. You wont get an unlocked bios from Dell, just the standard bios. Basically, if you have an extreme cpu, when you have the overclocking options turned off in bios your cpu will run stock speeds. You can enable overclockin extremely easily yourself and that will give you a few levels of OC available to choose from. You can still up the BCLK and adjust the multipliers but its not fully unlocked like the bios is for the R1 (R1 bios' have been unlocked by users and not by Dell).

So, in a nutshell, the more expensive cpu is basically Dell changing a couple of settings in bios (eg. enabling OC and then setting OC level to level 3) for you and charging you a huge amount for the priveledge - absurd when you can do it yourself in a heartbeat.

 

Those overclock levels 1, 2 and 3 as per the previous bios, I did not see them in this new version. I will check again but I thought I looked everywhere for them. I'm wondering if dell was trying to make it a little more difficult to just "do it yourself" for the basic overclock, trying to get people to pay more....

 

Hmmmm....I would hope that isnt the case. Do you have an option to "enable overclocking" in the bios?

 

If I remember, it was enabled. At work, I'll go through it again this evening and let you know.

 

Nice one. I really cant imagine that Dell would have released a bios that restricted user overclocking. If they had done, it would mean that the "other" cheaper XM would not be overclockable, right?

 

It's a guess right now for what they're doing for the people who pay the extra 250 bucks but the cpu is the same, xm cpu's are unlocked, it's the bios were dealing with.

 

Thing is, on the UK website both options are the same cost......

 

Get someone from the UK to grab that option and see what the difference is. I would image there is no difference between the U.S. and UK.

 

I imagine exactly the same as you! - just seems that Dell US want to charge for the fun of it....

 

Alright just ordered R2.. well well just a quick question, as its possible to use 3 SSD with it, but do it possible to use 2x HDD and 1 SSD ?:S

 

The key is the middle slot is suppose to be 7mm. I've read where people are putting 9mm and large in all three slots. Suppose to be two 9.5 and one 7mm. You could do two hard drives in raid 0 with msata as the boot. Or just go ssd with normal hard drive, lots of options, adding the third in the cage gets tight with large drives.

 

Well ive just check R2 manual but there is nothin such information given. altho if look at on socket there are two very near mountin point given at bottom so i think it can adjust for ssd or hdd. Msata i think its just 64gb so its point less to throw in it, as cant load games in it. Another option Raid 0.. i can only say tht i will throw ma system into bin but NEVER ever use Raid 0, cosz with my first system aka m17x ive did lost whole my data which ive almost carried from last 7 years. Right now im lookin forward to buy momentus xt 750GB.

 

There's no limit i've seen with the msata yet, dell sells greater than 64GB and you can buy on the street greater than 64GB but they're more expensive. The labeling on the drives are on the connector, not on the cage and your right, you can adjust one of the drives. I'll have two 9.3mm ssd's and the 750 this weekend, I'll know for sure how tight it really is.

 

yeahh as ive know one can get 7mm ssd isnt it? so one 7mm ssd at bottom (port0) and additional two HDD at above slot. ive agree with you it will be so close to each other, when two hot things get so close to eachother then they will get sweat which creates extreme temp. or malfunctions XDDD

 

please post what you find. i'm about to order and can't decide whether to go with 3920xm or 3920xm overclocked.

also, someone posted that 3920xm gets beefed up cooling system while the rest non-xms gets standard cooling system (i.e. smaller heat pipe, etc)

is that true?

i'm thinking i might have to go with the xm because of this...

 

I just ordered a system from HIDevolution.com - Specializing in customized computers, electronics, and mobile devices for gamers and professionals... and now they won't answer on my emails didn't i just throw away my money?

 

sallyjefferson, I was messing with the bios and you can do it your self. Someone posted the bios settings, so no need to go overclocked unless it's free.

 

If you look at electrosoft's post on the latter pages of the M18x benchmark thread, you will see the bios options - you can see that you can apply the overclock yourself. He's also been gracious enough to post up pics which indeed show a triple piped heat sink for the Extreme CPU - they can be viewed in the latter pages of the owners lounge.....someone posted other info that suggests people who order with a non-extreme chip still benefit from now getting a dual piped heatsink over the single pipe that was given to non-extreme R1's.

 

Alienware is shipping out the units really fast I ordered on May 17 it shipped today.

Alienware M18X R2 - Direct
8GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1600MHz
3rd Gen Intel Core i7 3920XM 2.9GHz
DL BD Read (BR-R,DVD/RW,CD-RW)
CrossfireX 2GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon HD 7970
64G mSATA + 500G 7200RPM
Killer Wireless-N 1103 MIMO, ANW M18X
4 year ACC DAM SVC,ANW NB,4YR,DHS,BAND 3

 

Eahhh ive love your system Core i7 3920XM, great configuration tho

 

Thanks I got it for a good price 3872.00

 

Is this config for £2,051.11 ($3210.6) decent or pretty standard ?
Just copied and pasted so sorry for messy layout

Base Alienware M18x Base
Operating System English Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium (64 BIT)
Memory 8192MB (2x4GB) 1600MHz DDR3 Dual Channel
Keyboard Internal UK/Irish Qwerty Keyboard
Video Card Dual 2GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 675M SLI™
Hard Drive 64GB mSATA Boot Drive + 500GB SATA (7,200rpm)
Optical Devices BluRay Combo (Blu-ray read only, DVD, CD read & write)
Sound Creative Sound Blaster Recon3Di with THX TruStudio Pro Software
Wireless Networking Killer Wireless-N 1103 a/g/n 3x3 MIMO with Bluetooth 4.0
Cables UK 2M 250V Power Cord
Documentation/Disks Western Europe Documentation (EN, FR, IT, GER, DUT)
Bundle N05W8M04
Extended Service 1 yr Next Day In-Home Hardware Support
Placemat Placemats (Eng, Fre, Ger, Swe)
Processor Intel® Core™ i7-3720QM (6MB Cache, up to 3.6GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0)
Camera Integrated Skype HD Certified FullHD Camera with dual digital microphones

 

sounds good, except for the vid cards. the 675's are just re branded 580's, which are last Generation's High end Nvidia cards. The dual amd 7970's in crossfire are a current generation card and are TWICE as powerful as the 675's and are cheaper.

You should change that.

 

I second this.

 

Ah right, its under fixed config so id have to just go through standard model to do that which would work out more.

 

So I've been researching this laptop like crazy because for something so expensive, I need to know what I'm getting into. I've never owned a serious gaming laptop before and once I saw the things you can do to the M18x I knew this is what I wanted! I love that you can upgrade most everything and there's so much documentation on exactly how to do it. But anyways, I have a question regarding this build. I have learned that it is pretty much cheaper to buy the laptop pretty close to stock and do the upgrades to RAM and HDD/SDD yourself in order to save some money. So would this build be pretty good for now and as I get more money I can upgrade to 16GB RAM and a 256GB Crucial SSD:

3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3610QM (6MB Cache, up to 3.3GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0) **I've read there's pretty much no difference between the 3610 and the 3720 besides base clock speeds right?**

Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit

6GB DDR3 at 1600MHz

500GB 7,200 RPM SATA 3Gb/s

Dual 2GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon™ HD 7970M - CrossFireX™ Enabled

Intel® Centrino® Wireless-N 2230 With Bluetooth 4.0

Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BR-ROM, DVD+-RW, CD-RW)

All of this for $2600 before I try to haggle with them
It pretty much has the necessities to run graphics at ultra for most games and has the raw power to do what I need out the gate right? Or is there something I'm missing?

Thanks for reading all of this!

 

I recently made a similar order but I went with the 3720QM because I tough it was an "ok" deal to get an extra 300mhz for 150$. While it might not be needed I like to think it will help in like 1.5-2 years and 150$ is not much on a ~2750 laptop.
However I dont think adding another 100 mhz and 2mg of cache is worth another $200 for the 3820QM.

While I may upgrade later on to the 3920XM for the unlocked multi, I just could not afford another $800 right now. But a 3920XM at ~4.4ghz would be really sweet and a lot a cpu power for the years to come!!

But yeah even with a 3610QM a m18x with 2 7970M in crossfire will be able to run most game at the highest setting for a while!

 

Looks good. The 3610QM is a great gaming processor. Keep in mind that only the 3920XM has the triple pipe cooling system (all others are single pipe, I believe) for the CPU. But yeah, $900 more.

Killer wi-fi is something to consider but at $80 for the upgrade I can see why you'd make your choice.

Your setup is pretty much like mine (I'm upgrading with my own drives/RAM, too) except I went 3720QM because I wanted VT-d for virtual machines. I'm also going to call on Monday to see if I can get the 3920XM...figure I may as well see if I can go all out even though the benefits aren't huge.

 

If you're tight on cash, then yeah that config is fine. If you play online through wireless though, you may want to reconsider the killer wireless.

Other than that, yeah you can just upgrade the ram and hdd easy once you got the money

 

Thanks for the replies guys! So the Killer is pretty good for wireless? I wasn't sure if it was actually worth it and reading up I couldn't find too much on it.

 

It's worth it because it's better but I'm not sure about the price of $80 to upgrade.

Killer Wireless-N 1103 Review: Can Qualcomm Take On Centrino? : Killer Wireless: Is It Able To Usurp Intel's Centrino?

You could probably buy the part and do it yourself for less than that. The only thing to really consider is the Intel option is not a 3x3 antenna so if you have a more advanced wi-fi router that supports MIMO then you will want to opt for that. If not, then don't waste the money. Killer may help gaming a tiny bit, but you really want to focus on what your current router can do (or the one you will purchase can do).

 

Hello, I've gona receive my new M18x R2 on comin Tuesday as schedule delivery, which will come with 6GB 1600Mhz ram. Actually i have 8GB corsair 1600Mhz ram which i was usin it with my previous revision of alienware. So its possible to put this two corsair module in 2 empty slots underneath of keyboard? like both ram are at 1600Mhz, but im not sure of alienware ram CL timing so will these corsair will work with alienware ram?

 

or go wired like I'll do 95% of the time when at home (kinda need the gigabit connection to my file server)
I really hate wireless for gaming, for anything else its fine though ...

 

Hello everyone!

I decided to buy an alienware M18x laptop, and im now "building" the computer.
But i do not know what kind of processor or harddrive i should pick..maybe you guys can help me!

processor:

Intel® Core™ i7-3610QM (6MB Cache, up to 3.3GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0)

Intel® Core™ i7-3720QM (6MB Cache, up to 3.6GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0)

(the first one is cheaper, and i would like to know if its worth putting any extra money on the more expensive one, or if the first one will do just fine..)

Harddrive:

750 GB seriell ATA-harddrive (7 200 v/min)

1TB RAID 0 (2x500GB 7,200rpm)

(same thing here, first one cheaper, but is it worth to buy the more expensive one?)

Please please help!

 

Don't mix match memory....get all Corsair Memory and sell Dells

 

Congratulations on the decision to buy an M18x. Awesome machine... I love mine and trust you'll be very pleased with yours.

Also, welcome to NBR. We're glad you joined the Community. Questions like yours have been discussed in dozens of places in a variety of threads. You can use Google to search our forums and find things more effectively than trying to use the forum search function. (The forum search function works poorly.) Click the link in the left side of my signature for an index of useful threads. Scroll down to the very bottom and you will find a link to forum rules and a link explaining how to use Google to search the forums.

If you find another thread ( M18x Owner's Lounge and the M18x Pre-Order Configuration are the perfect threads for such questions) feel free to jump in and ask these and any other questions you may have.

If your budget is limited, focus on a 3 or 4 year advanced warranty instead. The differences between those two CPUs and the two HDD configurations you are trying to decide between are relatively small.

 

Hello everyone!

I decided to buy an alienware M18x laptop, and im now "building" the computer.
But i do not know what kind of processor or harddrive i should pick..maybe you guys can help me!

processor:

Intel® Core™ i7-3610QM (6MB Cache, up to 3.3GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0)

Intel® Core™ i7-3720QM (6MB Cache, up to 3.6GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0)

(the first one is cheaper, and i would like to know if its worth putting any extra money on the more expensive one, or if the first one will do just fine..)

Harddrive:

750 GB seriell ATA-harddrive (7 200 v/min)

1TB RAID 0 (2x500GB 7,200rpm)

(same thing here, first one cheaper, but is it worth to buy the more expensive one?)

Please please help!

 

The issue is likely going to be that, to get 6GB, they most likely used three 2GB sticks. It is possible that they used a 4GB stick and a 2GB stick, but I wouldn't think that'd be very likely at all. The memory should run at the highest CL timing value between all sticks.

 

It is a 4GB and a 2GB stick when you get the 6GB configuration.

 

They will both be perfectly acceptable. The major reason to upgrade between those models is for virtualization support, and the additional clock speed, which is only a major factor for people that truly need all of the performance that a system is able to give them. For gaming, they'll be almost identical. For everyday usage (browsing, document editing, etc), they'll be nearly identical as well. If you're going to be doing rendering, compiling, or anything of that ilk, you may want to step it up a few kicks in the CPU department.

For physical hard drives, RAID0 is a decent performance increase usually at a fairly moderate price. What you might actually want to think about doing would be going with the base 500GB drive, and then ordering your own 500GB drive to set up in RAID0, if you are comfortable with reloading your system.

Besides that, RAID0 also doubles the chance of drive failure (from the point of view that you have two direct points of failure for your array, versus a single point of failure) so that may factor in (but it's an extremely small factor normally).

And, as already mentioned, you should be making sure to get at LEAST a three year warranty. Dell warranties will often pay for themselves outright.

Good luck!

 

someria
for the cost/performance the i7-3720QM is worth the upgrade.
as for the HDD if you want speed/storage the raid0 is the better option.
if its just storage then the 7200rpm 750gb will suffice

both these option shouldnt cost you that much more however i can only go by the price listed on the australian website.

 

Hi jmorales2012, My name is Luis and I Work for Alienware, if you need any type of specifications or information about our systems you can let us know to [email protected] and we will get back to you as soon as possible. #IWork4AW

 

i have been reading some reviews..and i must say they are not very good..is m18x really that bad? will it crash the first day you get it?

I really heard some horror stories..and that support was horrible to the people who needed help, i just want an honest opinion, but everything seems to give me mixed signals, some people say is great, some say is the most horrible computer ever...which one should i listen to?

and what is really more "safe" when it comes to harddrives, i have never ever had a laptop gaming computer and i heard about overclocking, how does this work and how does it affect the computer?

Please help.