*OFFICIAL* Alienware 18 Owner's Lounge Thread

Yeah I know, I'm waiting to see if he OC's them and see the score then.

 

Pretty good effort for a rush job anyway :thumbsup:. You can get the HGST Travelstar 5k1500 at the moment from Amazon Japan here which is about US$140 at current exchange rates.
A couple in raid would be nice.

 

3DMark score = P12136 with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M(2x) and Intel Core i7-4930MX

 

temps under load =

 

Hey Crabeye.. Can you Overclock the CPU to 4.2Ghz + on all 4 cores in the bios and let us know the temps ?

 

with a little help I can. If I post a picture of the bios can anyone help with the settings?

 

Carlsberg. Probably, The best set up.......in the world.

 

Some people complained that they don't have screws. So after my meeting I went to scavenge a bit at the pile of electronic waste outside of the MRI scanning room in the school. Look what I found.

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Alternatively, you can go to this famous auction website and buy a HDD caddy, and ask the seller to give you some screws, and he will ask you to pay him $3 more. I see that $3 is not worth it for some screws, better spend it on tacos.

$7.10 for the 12.7mm HDD caddy is the cheapest you can get, cheaper than Amazon. On Amazon, since people have Prime membership they charge more for the same thing.

2nd HDD Hard Drive 12 7mm SATA to SATA Caddy for HP Dell Acer BenQ Asus Lenovo | eBay

 

mine finally shipped today 7 days in production. hopefully should be here saturday maybe, still cant track it on the ups homepage yet.

 

Well I used to be a photog for the yearbook in school, so I learnt a lil bit. Thanks for the link, I knew Japan would have it first, Hitachi being a Japanese company would most likely sell it in Japan first. I could then use courier service like Tenso to ship it over. But Samsung has the 840 EVO 1TB SSD which will come out later this year so I might leave the 750GB in there for now.

As a side note, if I ever visit Japan maybe I will go visit you. My Japanese getting rather rusty as there isn't much chance to practice it.

Now I have to start working on the AW 18 but it's rather tedious. I will have to replace the CPU, swap the RAM position and add my own RAM, clone a few HDD and SSD here and there, then put them in and install a fresh Win 8 Pro. I deleted 3DMark11 sometime ago so I will have to re-download it.

I will run it once with stock components, and again with the 4800MQ with flashed vBIOS.

 

Did some benchmark. The msata caching is not bad at all.

I also did a 3DMark 11 performance run with the stock 311.48 driver. Nothing much run of the mill score. After all the CPU and RAM changing I shall bench it again. So far I actually prefer Win 8 than Win 7. Use Start8 for Start menu. Other than that every other aspects of Win 8 is better than Win 7, for me at least. Maybe I am just used to it.


NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-4700MQ,Alienware Alienware 18

My only defect is a few slightly dented heat fins at the back for one of the GPU. That gaping large hole is a problem. Good for cooling but dust can go in there, and anything solid that goes in there will bend the heat fins.

Some more shots of the internals. My HDD is a Western D Black, not Seagate. The battery pack is 86Wh, but it's absolutely tiny for some reasons. Apparently the OEM that makes the chassis is Foxconn. And apparently if you get only 8GB of RAM, they put the 2 sticks inside, and left the 2 slots outside empty. Now that's some consideration for the users. Kudos to Dell, or kudos to whoever who decided to put my RAM under the keyboard.

View attachment 99313 View attachment 99314 View attachment 99315

EDIT: By the way I think I raised the 4700MQ's 4-core load multiplier to 36, ie, running it at 3.6GHz before I ran the 3DMark11. Seems like the CPU can run fine with a few MHz of overclock.

 

Hi, I'm new to the Alienware world. I finally received my Alienware 18 yesterday but, to be honest, the experience so far is being quite disappointing. It is not only about the extremely cheap packaging (it does not include even a screen protector), but also the system came with some minor cosmetic damages (there are a lot of tiny scratches in the AW face, for instance) and a lot of prints all over the screen. It does not look like you are getting a new system, and it is extremely disappointing for a "premium" laptop of almost $5000.

The machine itself is really cool and seems to be well built, but I am having some problems that I would need help with before doing anything.

What I am worried the most is about the screen. After reading so many good things I had some expectations and, the truth is the screen is not very impressive. It looks worse for instance than the one from my 5 year old Macbook pro. The real problem is that I have noticed that the backlight is not uniform at all. There are some regions, mostly in the top, where the screen seems slightly brighter. Especially in one of the upper corners. This can only be noticed over dark backgrounds (e.g. a black desktop background) and it is much more obvious in low light enviroments (using the laptop in a dark room). Is this something normal? I would take a picture but it is not something easy to capture... I would appreciate if some other users of the Alienware 18 could post their impressions about the screen and about the issue I am talking about.

Thank you all for your help

 

Be careful,
You might fancy the one on the left after too many of those Carlsberg's

:confused2:


@kh90... Keep us update on the notebook. Your posts is very interesting
Would love to have some mini review about the unit when you have the time

 

Ok after all the small talk and small play, it's now time for the serious stuff. Backing up this Samsung 840 will take a while so it won't be late midnight before I could start installing OS onto the SSD in the AW.

View attachment 99316

I shall have the A Team theme in endless loop till I am done with the autopsy.



Then I shall have this music playing when I am benching it.

 

Hi,
I just want to say hello in this Thread ... after some trouble with my M18 R2 I got a very good offer from Dell to switch to the Alienware 18 ... I got it yesterday!

My Specs:
Intel 4930 CPU
32 GB RAM
780 SLI
3 x 512 GB SSD
Win 7 Ultimate

So far, after the first tests I am very happy with this machine and I can only thank Dell for the great service to swap my old machine to this new one!

 

Yikes, please dont let stevie see this

 

All heatpipes are triple heatpipes. Even with 4700MQ CPU. The palmrest is rather tough nut to crack. Very tight.

View attachment 99317

View attachment 99318

 

Hi
Can't say I have any cosmetic problems, prints on the screen, and the screen quality is fine - no backlight patches whatsoever (or if there is I cannot notice it, and I have just had a look at the screen on a pitch black background in a dark room). Sorry to hear your machine is not quite up to standards we expect.

 

Thats a lot of copper. No wonder Alienware 18 doesnt run hot

 

There are people complaining about sound of loose screws inside their AW 18. It might be due to the ODD, or some other reasons. Either way, it seems that they use a thin metal plate as the heatsink for what seems to be the chipset. Problem is, the thermal pad they use is some cheapo green thin thermal pad. Like I said before, no company does design as well as Apple, it's because Apple is so stringent towards their suppliers and manufacturers. What's with thermal pad that doesn't even touch the die? No wonder there was slight jangling sound in there.

Luckily I have some proper 1mm thick Koolance thermal pad lying around.

View attachment 99319

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The subwoofer is huge. It's probably all empty air inside to create the acoustic resonance. I said before, you need excursion to create good sound, and without space you won't have the air to push.
View attachment 99321

I had to detach the screen and the SLI cable to get to the CPU. Doesn't seem to be too hard, but the whole opening up isn't the easiest either, due to how rigid the whole chassis is.
View attachment 99322

View attachment 99323

I will continue later tonight after dinner. Too hungry.

 

disable secure boot in bios
enable legacy option rom
ctrl+I
BAM! into raid utility
back into bios and enable secure boot
installing windows now.....

 

I'm impressed. All triple pipes. I'm sure I saw a pic of a dual pipe on one of the CPU's somewhere on the AW18...
Or maybe I'm making it up.

 

I saw that the subwoofer uses 5W and has impedance of 4ohm. That would require some amplification. I didn't really see any op amp in there (presumably it's all non discrete IC now), but I saw this ALC 3661 IC. Quick Googling doesn't show anything, but I found out that it's a Realtek chip. Therefore the sound should be about average, well, I won't expect them to put serious audiophile quality DAC in a laptop, although coming from an Alienware, I'd expect slightly more.

Although it's the downstream circuits that makes the most difference in audio, there are good DACs and they make a difference, some good brands are AKM, Burr Brown, Wolfson, Sabre etc.

View attachment 99324

Another thing, the DMC slot is empty, which means there's no WiHD (wireless HD).

View attachment 99325

 

View attachment 99326
Took off the heatsink to find that the finger prints of unknown young Chinese girl is forever stamped onto the heatsink.

View attachment 99327
And as usual, Dell or Alienware is no exception, stock thermal paste is caked up.

View attachment 99328
Ppl like Arctic Silver 5, I prefer alternatives.

View attachment 99329
Have to heat it up before applying. Hardest thermal paste I have ever used.

View attachment 99330
Most other sockets have flathead. This seems like a duck move on Dell's part, using torx screw.

View attachment 99331
No problem I have all the torx head.

 

View attachment 99332
Can't resist taking out the MXM GPU too. I am disappoint Dell, you didn't use the superior Samsung GDDR5 VRAM. Which means you can't do +500MHz overclock on the vRAM like what those people using MSI GT60/70 could. For some reasons the video heatsink cannot be taken off so I didn't bother.

View attachment 99333
My dented heatsink...Must be a Chinese guy rather than a girl that worked on the unit.

View attachment 99334
To all the people saying the sides are plastic, this is a proof that you're officially wrong. It doesn't feel cold to the touch because Dell has used some matte coating on it. There is no flex whatsoever around the rim, except near the ODD part where there're too many holes and too little metal.

View attachment 99335
The other GPU basking in its glory.

View attachment 99336
Under the MXM 2 GPU (the right GPU), there are 2 holes. No holes for MXM 1.

View attachment 99337
Basically the whole base plate is a magnesium alloy chassis. There might be silvery plastic below the lights at the side, but underneath the plastic it's metal. Metal all over. Fullmetal gear I'd call.

 

I always heard people saying about how good Alienware's cooling is. I found out how they keep the palmrest from getting scorching hot. All they use is air, which by itself itself is not a bad insulator of heat. When there's little air, convection is not as effective as molecular heat diffusion. Anyway notice the air gap on top of each heatsink. For the left heatsink there's a power board on the palmrest; for the CPU heatsink there's the big monitor hinge; for the right heatsink there's some plastic structure which is just a wire guide for the antenna.

View attachment 99338

The AW 18 is not without flaw. One of them is the inefficient use of space. There's so much space wasted around the ODD area that they could easily fit a 2 drive bay in there. But, in retrospect the space might be a design consideration. More people are right handed than left handed. Gamers rage. When gamers rage they punch their laptop, and right hander would punch the right side of the palmrest, and maybe that's why there's huge space there. And the drive bay is on the left side of the palmrest now, which is good.

On the old AW M14x R1 which my friend has, the HDD is directly below the right palmrest, and that's a flaw. He DC'ed in games and punched his laptop, and killed the HDD. I had to waste 1 day of my life trying to help him fix it. So...well, the space there is prob a brilliant design choice

 

All was good but my M key fell off. I scratched the keyboard slightly when I put the key back. I shall ask for a replacement keyboard. It's not even 24 hours in my hands yet...

View attachment 99311

 

One thing that scares me is the few cables that drape over the Heat Sinks. -1
But its good that all the CPU's appear to get Triple Pipes + 1

 

Returned my old unit and Dell placed my new order today for the 4930 model. I was pretty tempted to go with Windows 8, but stuck with Windows 7.

 

Someone mentioned being disappointed by the speakers. Now that I finally got the chance to AB some songs, I agree with his opinion that the speakers on the Alienware are underwhelming. The reviewer who said that the AW speakers are the best among all laptops must be smoking something.

Without thorough EQ, the Klipsch on the Alienware to me, is awful. Klipsch speakers like their earphones always have this high frequency resonance going on somewhere, always too sparkly always too tinny. The resonance at 4kHz is especially unbearable.

This is what I need to do to get the JBL to sound good on the Lenovo.
View attachment 99339

This is what I have on the AW's Klipsch right now. Still ongoing adjustment but there's no cure for distortion and resonance. You can change the response but resonance stays. Note the wide cut from 1kHz to 4kHz. Also I boost the mid bass at 125Hz heavily, because from that puny subwoofer you aren't gonna get much action for below 100Hz, all the bass you hear is mid bass.

View attachment 99342

You can screw up a response, you have can flabby bass or piercing highs, but if you screw up the part near human vocal range, it's really screwed. In short, because of the bad resonance happening near human vocal range, cutting the response meaning the music will lack body.

The JBL on the Y500, without subwoofer, produce more bass and more bass impact than the Klipsch, has better clarity and has less vocal range distortion. The distortion apart, I suspect the lack of a proper amplification for the subwoofer in the AW is what makes the subwoofer weak sounding.

Disclaimer: I am a bit stringent on sound quality, having a musician as my father. Nonetheless the speakers are indeed underwhelming. My EQ curve might not fit everyone, some people are less sensitive to sibilance, some are more. I am very sensitive to it.

Ok, to fix the lack of body I moved the 1kHz back up. Most of the resonance is at 2kHz so it's fine. If it's still too boxy sounding lower 500Hz more. In fact IMO the key to EQing laptop speakers is to always try lowering 500Hz to see if it's less boxy sounding, works most of the time. Volume leveler seems to introduce some distortion too so I leave it off.

View attachment 99343

 

Thanks for the disassembly! Finally we can see the internals (that have not changed much I have to say), the heatsinks (exactly alike to M18xR2's) and the VRAMs! Those should be also overclock-able to 3000mhz (+500mhz) according to Hynix datasheet:
SK hynix
SK hynix

Yet we haven't seen any high overclocked benchmarks !

 

Finally someone who understood what i meant with the speaker on this. The problem is i dont knw much about EQ so i think ill just try out ur settings

I saw that ur cooling system has 3 copper pipeing each. Could you tell me which GPU and CPU you have in ur machine so taht i can understand the copper pipeing config in the AW systems. I have seen somehwere where the machine just had 2 copper pipeing in the CPU. So i reckon high performance CPU has 3 Heating Copper pipes. Just want to know my i7-4900qm is wth 3 or 2?

 

*posted in wrong m18x thread. mod can delete*

 

Hi DumbDumb,

Is this what you meant?


Shabby thermal pasting


And then there's this wire that wasn't attached(Nowhere to attach it to)??....GREY ONE

 

For anyone out there wanting to open this thing up...be carefull. Like kh90123 said, the keyboard is really tight fitting. I broke a couple of lugs off trying to get it off until I figured it's best to start in the middle at the back.


Oh, and don't forget to take out the SD card blank.....or you'll be there for a long time trying to get the board off.:thumbsup:



Foxconn..Yay


This thing pretty easy to strip, once that keyboard is off.

 

That is the third antenna used for 3x3 wifi cards, such as the Killer 1103 or the Intel 6300.

Thanks for all the pictures!

 

Hello noob question here. If I want to install my own ssd, does the laptop come with the DVD needed to do a complete clean install? I tried looking it up but I'm seeing that they don't and only provide a image in the existing drive (with bloat I'm guessing?) Is my only chance to buy my own copy?

 

still in production, after the order been modified 3 times by dell... 30 days after the original order... getting impatient. :/

I love seeing the post taking that beast apart. More used to build desktop machine, First time I'm actually going for a laptop to replace a desktop. My m15x was ok but didnt outperform my desktop back then, but now my desktop is getting old and the aw 18 is almost twice as powerful by number crunching. (desktop is an old oced q6600 to 3.3ghz with a 2go 5870, yeah that's pretty old but still ok gaming performance)

 

That's what I did with my first desktop replacement laptop, I needed the laptop to at least be eviqualent graphics wise or else I was going to be upset. My 3 year old sager had slightly more VRAM than my desktop, and a better processor and overall outperfomed it, so I was happy until recently when I started to have to play games at ridiculously low resolutions in order to have acceptable frame rates. With the 780M's, I can now play native at butter-smooth frame rates...according to notebookcheck, this solution is precisely 729% better than my previous card, and, man does it show.

And @spudinske, depending on which OS you ordered with your 18, you may get install media, you may not, Win7 is included, Win8 is not. You will need to contact customer service to get a copy of Win8 sent out to you from Dell (it comes on an 8gb thumb drive), and you can then install clean to your new SSD. That's how I went through it, anyway.

 

I received my Alienware 18 the other day and swiftly installed a new Samsung 840 SSD. I migrated over from the main (750GB and 64GB cache) fairly easily.

After cloning, I swapped the SSD and the HDD around so the SSD would boot first. I then went into bios and set it to ACHI (from RAID). Upon restarting, the second (750GB) SSD had vanished. I went back to bios and set it back to RAID and restarted. The second HDD then showed up.

Is there any reason why this would happen? According to Samsung Magician, it should be set to AHCI for best performance. I think on the new AW18 there are 3 HDD bays (4 if you take out the optical drive). Would moving the second HDD away to the 3rd bay help?

All I need to know really is what performance (or feature) loss would I get leaving it on RAID? Or, what can I do to enable AHCI without losing the second HDD?

Finally, is there a way to check that the 64gb cache is set up correctly on the second HDD?

 

I still think that Samsung RAM is better. On each card there are 4 RAM chips that have no heatsink on them, so I wouldn't expect fantastic overclock.

You could try lowering 500Hz a tad more and raise 1kHz slightly, but leave 2kHz way down. That's the culprit. Resonance due the way the speakers interact with the chassis and the air inside. Or maybe it's just the flaw in the design of the speakers.
I ordered the AW with 4700MQ and GTX 780M. I believe maybe the GTX 770M and GTX 765M GPUs have dual heatpipes instead of 3.

Did you try taking the GPU heatsink out from the card? The manual for AW 18 says it's possible to take it out.

ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-prod...laptops/alienware-18_Owner's Manual_en-us.pdf

Mr. Fox posted a manual sometime ago, but looking at this one it seems that Dell has updated their manual.

 

ICN matt did you use the samsung kit to transfer over? I am having an issues where I don;t have a USB to Sata cable so I cant use the migration software.

Alienware Respawn using Resinatll Flash Drive doesnt work as it wont load into a smaller drive.
Does anyone know if using premium features of Alienespawn like full system back up will work? its £33 and I don't want to waste my money

Dell doesnt supply the Windows Disc's anymore and when I asked how I create a back up they suggest dell date safe 2.0 but its not actually on my system and I cant get hold of it.

Anyone have any idea how you reinstall and alienware system on a new drive? when they dont supply a windows disc

 

kh90123, very nice pictures) could you also make a screenshot of Intel XTU utility under core settings. I wonder if it's possible to change TDP, not only multi's. Tnx)

 

Okay Alienware technical are sending me Windows 8 Thumb Drive, Does anyone know where my windows 8 Product key is? apprently should be on a sticker somewhere but its not in any of my documentation or on my laptop

 

What the...so you pay 4 grand for a new laptop and they don't even send you the install DVD? I just looked at my invoice for the AW18 I have on order and I see no mention of included DVD media, it just says 'Windows 7 label'. So I'm seriously gonna have to call Dell and ask them to send me install media for the OS?

 

I think there is a problem with alienrespawn. Because I have the same problem as you, and I have two ssd one 256GB and 240GB, so the alienrespawn don't install in any of my ssd. But I formatted the HD and alienrespawn install with out problem, it just don 't install on the ssd.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

I got this windows 8 thumb drive yesterday! You don need the key, it activate it self when you connect to the Internet. But you have to install all the drivers.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Well you could change the Long duration power and short duration power in the BIOS, then you can overclock it, presumably. I have not installed Windows 8 Pro yet, since I had been busy making backups and cloning disk left and right. I was also waiting for the last 8GB stick of RAM to come, which just came.

 

Thats handy to know as although they are sending me the windows 8 Thumb drive my entire system is being replaced by another brand new one. I only got it wednesday.

The spec listed on the base cover is wrong (says 770m not 780m) but they can just replaced the base cover it has to be a whole new system.

 

On the Alienware 14s, the Windows 7 units shipped with discs, but the Windows 8 units did not. I'd think the same would hold true for the 18s.