*OFFICIAL* Alienware 18 Owner's Lounge Thread

Well, I can't stand anything above 150. Most servers I play, for example in BF3, are always about 30.

 

For those who want higher res than 1080P with Alienware 18:

How many notebooks do you know that have this display size? Dont you think those who make the displays follow demand?

What would the majority want in a screen? Greater colours and viewing angles, or slightly higher resolution? What would be the easiest to offer without sacrificing hardware to run those screens?

Those who buy Alienware 18, how long do they in average keep their notebooks? If 3 years, how many of the newest games in year 2 or 3 do you think the Alienware 18 could run maxxed out in 1080P?

 

Yes, demand, the perpetual constraint. 1080p is not a deal-breaker--I'm more interested in screen quality than in higher resolutions. I only hope that Dell will be prepared if they become lucrative.

 

!!! Now I'm really worried... did you find out why it got cancelled twice?? I'm gonna have to contact dell immediately....

 

Still looking for an AW 18 Bios dump.

Also, is there anyone with 765m or 770m cards?

 

Yeah, mine was in pre-prod for about 14 days then dell cancelled it. They tried to give some reasoning but didint make sense at all to be honest. All u can do is see it ur one of the lucky no cancelled one, or one of the unlucky cancelled order once . Good Luck Dude !!!!! hahahaah

 

Well, love the unit be feel horrible not getting the extreme processor. Called Dell to return it and they asked if I'd keep it if they refunded me $200, then raised it to $400 when I said no. Still decided to send it back and reorder a new one with the extreme processor. So the waiting starts all over again.

 

Not being funny, but it's stuff like this that drives up the price for everyone else..... You should have just made your mind up to start with, YOU ordered in full knowledge of what you were getting. If that sounds harsh, I'm sorry, but that's just how I feel about this kind of thing.I know you have a return period, but still..... Dell now have a used 'new' machine that they will want to recover the money on, and how do you think they will do that, because they can't sell it for full price now........nice move...personally, I don't think it's anything to be proud of posting.

And people complain when Dell cut corners to keep costs down....it's down to stuff like this that puts their costs up, and we end up with cut corners....just simple logic.

 

don't order with windows 8, if you don't want to be sorry!

 

So I got it today...its been tough I must say. I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with UEFI but replacing the HDD with a SSD was a chore for me. I had to switch things to Legacy boot in the bios, mess with a bunch of stuff... If anyone is having issues let me know, I now have Win 8 running on my 840 Pro but it wasn't plug and play. I'm speending the rest of the night downloading drivers.

That being said... Pictures do not do this beast justice! Its huge, much better looking in person and very quiet so far!!! My only gripe would be the sharp edges on the front. Not sure how that will feel on the wrists after 4 or 5 hours. My wife looked at me and was like "really? That's the largest laptop I've ever seen!" lol Anyways here's some pics for you folks...

 

BTW...Keep the cushion from the box cover! Its great for when you have to roll this beast over to work on her inside...

 

Congrats on your new amazing beast. It does look gorgeous, and I'm pleased to discover that someone in your household uses Mac, too :thumbsup:

 

Companies have contingencies in place for stuff like this. It's very unlikely anyone is going to get screwed over as the result of my order being sent back; if anything they will gut the parts and use them in new machines. When you're paying these type of prices, you should get what you want and not settle for anything less. Dell offers a return window for a reason, and I gladly took them up on the offer to return it and order a top tier model instead.

Wonder if windows 8 had something to do with it? I ordered windows 7 and it was virtually nothing more than a drag and drop with my Samsung 840 pro - absolutely no bios changes required.

 

I have 18 with 765 card. How can i take bios dump i will be more then happy to provide it to you.

 

I literally just took out the HDD and then inserted my SSD. I figured it would be smooth but no way. I boot in legacy mode now (bios change from UEFI) and I'm not sure if that affects performance or not. The whole thing fires up in 10 seconds with the 840 so I'm thinking no...lol. Maybe the Win 7's don't have UEFI boot? I'm not sure.

 

I don't recall but, yes, it was damn fast. In fact, it was so fast you barely had time to hit F2 to enter the bios! I doubt it will hold back your performance. Maybe you had a different configuration? I ordered the 750GB HDD with 64GB mSATA cache drive.

 

Does your bios show UEFI or legacy as the boot option?

I've installed Windows 7 a hundred times, bootcamped it on Mac's etc... I thought i could just swap but I guess not. Mine came with Windows 8 Pro which I have no reason why I bought since I have Win 8 Pro but I'm wondering if the Win 7 units came with a different bios setup?

 

After lurking in this forum for more than half a year, I have finally decided to order my own AW 18 yesterday (7/11). When I check the order status today it says it's already in production, and yet the EDD is 7/31...

Congrats on getting your beast! I am currently thinking of installing an SSD myself after I get my machine too, so there might be a few questions for you in a couple of weeks.

 

how did you install windows in your ssd? cos I can't.

 

can you tell me how to do it?

 

Another thumbs-up goes to Dell for fixing the sata cables! Maan, I really wish I could justify another 18" beast right now....

 

OK NICE PHOTOS! now we need some one willing to tear there system down and take pictures as they do..
then we can get down to the nitty gritty..

also can you take your keyboard off?/top bezel? or does it all lift away from the mother board..

im assuming that the keybaord comes off.. before every thing else does..

 

Don't forget that little 8 cell battery they pulled from the XPS 15. Or was that Inspiron?

 

I just bought the Intel 525 240GB msata as the SRT cache for the HDD that I will get (WD10JPVX). The Intel 525 is going for a rather good price on the auction website now, so anyone who's interested should go grab it. Considering the fact that Newegg has it at 289.99 ( Newegg.com - intel 525') and Amazon has it at 299.76 ( Amazon.com: Intel 525 Series 240GB SSD OEM: Electronics), the offer I gave which was 210 was a pretty good price.

Could anyone who's interested go click on the offer price and try a lower price? Just go to the famous auction website and search for Intel 525 240GB and it should show up as first result. I am interested to see how low the reserve price is.

Since I can't afford the $599.99 Crucial M500 960GB, this combination of Intel 525 + Western D WD10JPVX 1TB will give me very low power consumption with good speed.

To top it off I will get the Patriot Signature 8GB DDR3 1.35V SODIMM to add onto the 8GB that's on the AW 18. If nobody is popping the palmrest off before I get mine, I shall be the first to do it. I will also need to replace the stock 4700MQ with the 4800MQ which is coming. I got it for only 310, compared to 399 which is the normal MSRP.

Time to queue the music and crack on. Very soon.....

 

$120, $130, $135 were declined.

 

Considering the fact that M4 256GB and M5M 256GB are being sold for 199.99 on Amazon, I doubt the seller will accept anything much lower. Unless if...those Intel 525's are stolen goods...

But I didn't really expect the offer to be accepted, now it pisses me that I don't know what the reserve price is.

 

Hi guys, this is my first post and I have been lurking around keeping an eye on everyone's first impressions and unboxings. I was fortunate to have an exchange ordered for the 18 placed on 01July2013 and is sadly still in the pre-production phase. I spoke to Alienware tech support earlier today and the rep told me that there is a backorder on LCD's and that is why my order is still in the pre production phase. I don't know if that is true or not. I was instructed to call back later next week to find out if my status has changed. I know it's only been a couple of weeks for me but I thought I would at least be in production phase by now. I guess I just have to be a little more patient and hope my order doesn't get canceled. Btw my specs are 4930xm 32gb ram 780 sli 768GB RAID 0 + 256GB mSATA SSD Storage Drive.

 

All systems go...

Have Win 8.1 Beta running. Just as an FYI... they did not send the Cyberlink DVD software... check yours. Fired up a Bluray and it played great. Screen is fantastic. The sound is fantastic. The keyboard is fantastic. There is no fan noise whatsoever when you are doing regular stuff. Test some games tomorrow.

 

It got cancelled first time due to an internal (Dell) reference number change ?????

This time, I'm still waiting for Dell to let me know. I've had a call from the UK/Ireland Customer Care, who have said they are looking into it and will come back to me. From what they did say is that it's the production team that are cancelling the orders --- whether it's due to parts or not I don't know.

As I said before it's strange how the web-site has no mention of any problems, or is it just a UK issue? As the States seem to be getting their systems ok.

Kind of a reference to problems seen by several members on this site.

Al-Nour - I hope you contacted Dell and got reassured that things are ok with your order. But as I said, the orders seem to be at the mercy of the production team as to whether they get cancelled and customer support are not told (IMHO), or am I being naive?

 

What 3dmark 11 score does a single 780m get in the AW 18?

 

Done setting it up! Took FOREVER to get it the way I wanted it but it was worth it.

Quick recap of my ordering process:

Ordered finally after several days of haggling over the phone on July 4th, and the package arrived Friday the 12th. That's speedy! The packaging (if you can call it that) was embarassing though. For something that costs several thousands of dollars to be wrapped in brown paper and nothing else is over the box is awful. The edges of my box were dented, but at the least the machine and components were safe inside. Still, Amazon can stick a 10$ purchase in a box with bubble wrap for me and Dell just wraps my laptop in brown wrapping paper cheap parcel style?

Specs are:
-4930mx
-Dual 780m
-4 + 4 Warranty
-Rest is stock at third Option

How I set mine up:

I removed the HDD completely and formatted the mSATA drive as a GPT. I created a UEFI compatible Windows 8 Pro installation USB from my other laptop's installation. Installed two 256 gb Samsung 840 Pro SSD's and put them in RAID 0 with a 64kb Stripe size. Installed Windows 8 professional on the mSATA and transferred my user folders to the Raid array. mSATA will stay as a boot drive (also has drivers and office installed on it) and the rest is installed in the RAID array.

Oh and I upgraded to Windows 8.1. Kinda meh.

First Impressions

Well it's big. Overwhelming at first but I've gotten used to it pretty quickly. Metal feel in the chassis is looooong overdue. Bezel is unnecessarily fat but the rest of the design is sleek like I prefer. I'm glad there are no media keys, they are outdated and tacky imo. I'm not fond of the keyboard... yet. For a machine so big the keys manage to feel cramped, a problem I never had on my much smaller m14x. NOT fond of the miniature f keys which I typically keybind. I would have traded the macro buttons on the left hand side for a more spacious keyboard, esp. since I game with a Naga. Steelseries has this keyboard beat pretty easily on competitor's models.

It's fast and runs very cool with basic tasks like videos and web-surfing etc. Have not actually gamed on it yet, trying to get used to the keyboard a little first and my setup took a while. EVGA Precision and NVIDIA System Tools don't recognize the clock speed on the 780m's yet but there's not exactly a need to overclock them for anything yet. The front of the machine does dig into your wrists depending on your typing posture / height of your chair relative to the laptop, nothing major though.

ANYWAY, I'm passing out at the keyboard so forgive the rambling. I'll post again tomorrow with some benchmarks if anybody's curious. Have a good weekend fellas.

EDIT: Here's my 3DMark Score (stock obviously): http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6859885

 

Yay, Just got a message saying my rig will be delivered on Monday.
Job 1 = Strip it down to see all the goey bits

 

I don't think it's a UK issue, cause I ordered mine off the US site... I'm guessing it's due to parts like you mentioned, thing is I got an email from their US Customer service saying that my order is fine and that because it's a new launch they're waiting on parts, but I got a lil worried yesterday so I had a chat with a rep online, and explained the whole thing again and he rechecked and said "ur order is stuck in production due to processing issues" ... he couldn't explain more and he sent an email to their "team" for more details and will get back to me, too bad it's the weekend so I wont get any solid info till monday... which I'm guessing is going to take me back to square one cause I'm sure he's just forwarding my query to the US customer service desk again ... nonetheless, I'm looking forward to their response and I hope they get this parts issue sorted quickly, if that's what it is... cause it being in pre-production from 24/06 till today 13/07 is a little too much...

I would've been happy if it was in-production by now at least... how can they not have enough parts? not what I expected from Dell.. starting to feel a little let down especially since other people have received theirs and are probably gonna have an awesome gaming weekend ... here's to those that got their beasts :hi2: Enjoy ur weekend

fyi- Specs ordered:

*Overclocked 4th Gen i7-4930MX Processor (8MB Cache, 4.3GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
*768GB RAID 0 (3x256GB SSD) + 256GB mSATA SSD Storage Drive
*32GB DDR3L/1600MHz
*Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M 4GB GDDR5

 

Your specs are like mine.... highly doubt our orders are stuck because of a back order on LCD's ... people who have order the 18" after my order date of 26/06 have received, I think even people who order after you received theirs ... must be something else.

 

Nice work. I took the easy route and switched back to legacy mode. Since I (or 95% of owners IMO) won't need to utilize the advanced partitioning options of GPT is just made sense and was easier than having to create the UEFI compliant boot media. This old timer is sticking to MBR. I have a NAS to store all my crap on. Performance isn't affected and either option works fine until you want to create 4 or more partitions. At first I was going down the route to create the UEFI boot usb but I already had the cd in my drive so I skipped. Here are the instructions I found if others want to use it. UEFI Bootable USB Flash Drive - Create in Windows

Also if anyone wants to know difference between GPT and MBR this is pretty good.
Windows and GPT FAQ

 

What 3dmark 11 score does a single 780m get in the AW 18?
Could somebody please find out? I want to know if the 18 is throtteling too.

 

Dual GTX 780M's should be between 11,000 and 12,000 out of the box, give or take a few hundred, depending on the CPU.

 

A single GTX 780M with a stock vBIOS typically scores P7500 to P8500 in 3DMark11 depending on clock speeds and CPU. And, J.Dre has correctly stated the 780M SLI performance.

You can find this information any time you want to by using the search feature at the Futuremark web site. You can see all of the submitted results that the users haven't chosen to hide. You can also specify the CPU/GPU combination and filter results based on the number of GPUs. You can also limit search results to "valid" scores, meaning no unapproved tweaks (PPU with NVIDIA and disabled tessellation with AMD, using Virtu, etc.) and Futuremark validated drivers are used. As you can see in the screen shot, there are two "valid" results, but if you unckeck the box there are a lot more that are "not valid" results. Those can still be useful for comparison as long as they are in the correct range and not exceptionally high or low.

Spoiler

 

11300 with the XM CPU out of the box. Now with nvidia driver will be higher. But the nvidia drivers don't recognize my 780M.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Can anyone who got their M18 confirm if it's a 400 nit display or 350 nit?

 

I remember reading it was tested at 361 nit. So, I suppose 350 is what it is claimed to be.

 

What's the difference between a clean installation using a Windows 8 ISO burned onto a DVD vs clean installation using the UEFI USB boot drive?

 

New Command Dell

 

Just did a 3DMark 11 on my config with dual 770's. I'm happy. Better than a single 780 which what I was hoping for.

Score
P8591 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770M(2x) and Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4800MQ

 

Thanks, those scores seem pretty good. I'm considering the 770m SLI.

Also, I'm new to these forums. I'm about to buy an Alienware 18, do you guys like them so far?

 

Its an amazing piece of hardware and extremely well built. The machine makes no noise at all with both cards in SLI doing regular workload stuff. The screen is fantastic. The speakers are out of this world and it really looks like nothing else out there. The machine is substantial though. Its massive and the height of the keyboard with the sharp front is not the most comfortable design. But based on the extreme silence of the machine Alienware really put their minds together on this rig. I still haven't played any high end games yet but I am in awe of how everything has been working so fluidly. The sleekness of the machine, especially at night when I'm mostly on it, is outrageous. Its really something to behold.

 

Those are good scores. I am also considering that config, but with 4700 probably. You should try OC them and see what you can get. Probably has more OCability than 780s if it runs cooler, idk.

 

Everyone with 780m SLI setups, what temps are you getting after running 3dmark 11 (or other games if you have already tested them)
My 3Dmark11 is around 74ish after a run.

 

I'm going to try and repaste this thing some time next week with some Arctic MX-4. I might buy a cooler pad U3 as well but the vents are on the back so I don't think airflow is a problem.

I'm getting consistent temps in the 80's when gaming. which I'm not sure is normal.

 

can you post some GPU-Z screenshots many thanks