*OFFICIAL* Alienware 18 Owner's Lounge Thread

If you order with w7 you get the disc, but if do with W8 you don't get it.


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My laptop was shipped today and ill be getting it on monday. Just arranged the day off work so I can wait in for it. Sooo excited now!!! I hope its as good as i imagine it is

 

Well I think this here has me covered either way, will just download the ISO from Microsquat and make a bootable USB drive out of it with their nifty little utility, who needs a DVD.

 

Mine also came with the wrong base plate, I got very worried when I opened the box, flipped over my new beast and it says 4800mq with sli 3gb 770's. I was afraid I was going to have to send it back, but it had the requested 4900 and sli 780's. You're getting a whole new system because your base plate is incorrect?

 

We are still missing information about the PLS screen used on the new Alienware 18.

Could anyone of the owners be so kind to run AIDA64 and find out exactly what manufacturer that made the screen and what the model name is called?

Thank you

 

contact dell and they will overnight a usb key with windows 8 on it...not sure if they are still sending windows 7 dvds

 

Hi, thank you very much for your input. Anyone else that can tell me whether they notice a non-uniform backlight in their screens or can comment on the screen quality?

I' ve also experienced some problems with the trackpad... Every time I use the keyboard the trackpad is locked, and I have to wait 1 or 2 sec until it responds again. I tried adjusting the sensitivity but nothing changed. Does anyone know about this?

 

Hi Sligh, Yes I am getting a whole new system which is very annoying as I just need a new base cover.

Apparently they cant just send me a new base cover so it will have to be a whole new system, I am not willing to accept a wrong base cover no matter how small a detail given the £3374 price tag I paid included the extras I added on. It should be perfect all round!

 

Hello guys,

It's my first entry here but I've watched this thread from its infancy.
I've been a gamer for... well... all my life and I always felt the only place to game is behind a powerful desktop. Console gaming is a child's play and laptops are just not meant for gaming. That was before I got this new job that makes me travel a lot. Now I still think the above but since obviously I can't carry around a desktop with me and because I need to keep up with the gamer in me, a desktop replacement was required. After a lot of research, including this thread, I decided to go for this configuration:

Processor Intel® Core™ i7-4930MX Processor (8MB Cache Overclocked up to 4.3GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
Memory 16GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
Video Card Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5 - NVIDIA SLI Enabled
Hard Drive 750G/7200 RPM + 64G caching mSATA CD ROM/DVD ROM Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BD-ROM, DVDRW, CD-RW)
Operating System English Windows® 7 Home Premium (64 BIT)
Accidental Damage Support 1 year Accidental Damage Protection
Extended Service 1 Year NBD with Premium Phone Support

The listing price on the UK site was £3759 but I phoned Dell UK and after some haggling I got it down to £3100. That's around 17% off.
And my EDD is 5th of August which is not that far away.

I think I got a pretty good deal.

What do you think?

 

I totally agree! I'm due to receive mine on Monday and I will be checking it thoroughly inside and out for any defects (especially after what I've read on these forums over the past few days) and if there are any I will be asking for it to be corrected. Especially given the money we are paying for these systems.

 

Well, I figure that as long as I got what I paid for, a little piece of plastic on the bottom of my machine that I will never look at is hardly worth the hassle of having to send it back, wait longer, and possibly have something arrive that is defective or have it damaged in shipping...but to each their own.

 

Don't know if this makes it any clearer.

 

View attachment 99402

Some were saying that the screws for 2nd HDD are not provided. They are there, 4 of them at the front of the HDD tray.

By the way, the latest beta driver from Nvidia 326.19 works with 780M SLI without any inf modification. It just works.

Also it was rather painful installing Windows 8 fresh and all the drivers. But regardless I don't know what hokey pokey it's, the speakers sounds better (less worse to be precise) after reinstalling Windows 8. Presumably the different drivers could be the reason. For what's worth, it could even be the addition of the second hard drive which changes the dampening of the speakers...

I have been staying up whole night now so my hearing aren't at its best, but I can say conclusively the resonance at 2kHz has moved a bit closer to 4kHz.

 

Ordered my M18 through AAFES on July 7 and received it on July 18. Had to order it with windows 7 as I kept getting an compatability error when I selected windows 8. Anyway it came with a windows 7 DVD and drivers DVD.

Anyone who can order through AAFES should consider it, saved over $800 with the same configuration on Dell webpage (with tax).

The olny minor problem I have had as it defaulted to disable SLI. When I tried to enable the 780 SLI said the following program, toaster had to be closed. Don't know why Dell is sending these with SLI disabled and figued they would have fixed this toaster issue by now.

 

Mine didn't ship with the spare HDD screws when I contacted Alienware I was told they are not ship as default with the system. I guess you were lucky. I just bought my own 30 for £1.99 job done.

 

Maybe it's due to the locale?

 

Does anyone have a different icc color profile for the monitor? One thing I notice with IPS panel is that sometimes they are a bit more yellowish at lower brightness than I'd like. Crank up the brightness and it's fine again.

 

You can try this ICC profile that was created using a professional calibration tool. Uploaded to my Google Drive here: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6_y0H4_DNV-d0JoNko3MWxkbEE&usp=sharing

 

Thanks, I tried it, it's too yellowish/greenish. The monitor is quite different I guess.

 

Yeah - I imagine someone will come up with a calibrated profile for the new screen using a Spyder or Lacie soon enough....

 

What's your config? I just checked both the Alienware site and AAFES and the difference is only $150. The cheapest is going through Dell epp and choosing military. It'll take you to the same AAFES offers, but this method allows you to have it shipped to an overseas location. For some reason, going through the AAFES site doesn't give laptops an option for OCONUS. You can also get a 10% discount code through Dell epp that's good until August 9th. Which gives a savings of $300+ depending on your config.

 

Comments : 2
edit
Alienware 18 Alienware 18 edit
Operating System Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit, English edit
Memory 16GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz edit
Keyboard English Keyboard edit
Video Card Dual NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5 - NVIDIA SLI® Enabled edit
Hard Drive 512GB mSATA Boot + 750GB SATA 3Gb/s (7,200 RPM) edit
CD ROM/DVD ROM Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BD-ROM, DVDRW, CD-RW) edit
Wireless Broadcom 4352 802.11 ac 2x2 and Bluetooth 4.0 edit
McAfee Live Safe No Anti-virus Requested edit
Cable US 125V Power Cord edit
Service 4 Year Alienware Enhanced Support edit
Placemat Setup Instructions English edit
Office Productivity Software (Pre-Installed) Microsoft® Office Trial edit
Documentation/Disks Documentation, English edit
Support None edit
Systems Management Alienware Command Center 3.0 edit
Retail Software Dell.com Order edit
Packing Label Dell.com Order edit
Processor Overclocked Intel® Core™ i7-4930MX processor (8MB Cache, up to 4.3GHz w/ Intel® Turbo Boost) edit
Primary Battery 8-cell Lithium Ion (86 wHr) edit
Color Choice Silver-Anodized Aluminum edit
Shipping Material Shipping Material edit
Resource DVD Resource DVD edit
LCD 18.4" WLED FHD (1920 X 1080) TrueLife Display edit
Labels Windows 7 OS Label edit
Power Supply 330W A/C Adapter edit
Additional Software Additional Software edit
Optical Software No Optical Software required edit


This is what I ordered. I did not try EPP with 10% off. Also note when I ordered through AAFES I did not get an option about shipping, It was shipped UPS ground which took 3 days. But still pretty good for Dell for ordering on the 7th and receiving it on the 19th. I waited over 45 days on a M18X before I have up and just cancelled the order after delay after delay. I think I am much happier now,

 

I have the Alienware head as my wallpaper. After leaving it for a while, I notice the screen has image burn in/ image persistence. Googling says that it's more common on IPS panel. It's no big deal but you will notice it from the side when the screen is off.

Also I believe there's two versions of the Command Center, the one before patch and the on after patch One that turns off all light when you go dark, and one that leaves the touchpad light on when you go dark. The touchpad light will go off only if you leave it inactive for some time, or, if you turn off the touchpad.

 

Couldn't find the 328.19 drivers but I could find 326.19 beta....which worked and upped my 3Dmark Score

 

Nice.

Could you please disable SLI and test again to see what score one 780m reaches in your system?

 

Hey Crabeye, you need to start OCing that 4930mx in your machine. An xm cpu is too good to waste.

 

7780............................

 

7780............................

 

OK, I changed the OC to level 3 in the bios.

 

Now we're Rockin':thumbsup:

 

Thank you. I have hunted down information about the screen used on the Alienware 18.

It is the exact same screen used on the new Dell XPS 18.
XJY7J - LCD PANEL, OnLineSell.ro - Dell systems, spare parts and accessories online ordering & info site
Here is a review of the same screen. Notice the reviewer talks about minor light bleed on black picture that some owners here have talked about. And it features "True Life" , same as the Alienware IPS screen features.
Review Dell XPS 18 AIO Tablet - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

 

The majority of IPS panels will always suffer from some element of backlight bleed or IPS glow. Even high grade external monitors can suffer from it. My U3011 has a very minor glow, only really noticeable in a pitch black room, with a very dark image being displayed. You will only ever really eliminate it by buying a very expensive true professional grade external monitor, such as something from the likes of Eizo (CG275) or NEC (PA301). Granted, for such pleasure, you will have to part with close to £2k.

Unfortunately, it will be the truth that offering a superb IPS panel on a notebook with a base price of £1999 is not gonna happen. Sure, it will be good - possible bleeding, but you will NEVER get a professional grade panel of Eizo quality in a £2k notebook. Period.

 

Hello ppl,
Alienware has released its new line of laptops but unfortunately they aren't available and haven't been launched yet in India.
Alienware used to offer the BEST high-end laptops in india but unfortunately it seems that they have discontinued their laptop series.
I request all of you to pls sign this petition for the sake of my health and happiness. thank you.

http://goo.gl/5DWUR

MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU. SPREAD THE WORD.

 

mine landed!







how to verify gfx bios etc?
the battery looks ugly, and please let me know if u see anything that is not normal/old on the back panel picture. because there some greyish patch around the battery and cd drive located on the screw spot, im not sure if thats normal.

also update me whether the color looks darkish silver?

because all the promo pics looks pure silver.



My spec:
4900mq, 780m sli, 16gb ram. 960gb m500.

also let me know what benchmarks to try on it.

i can able to install dell stock drivers for dual 780m , but when tried to install latest driver from nvidia.com , it shows that it couldnt detect the card type and installation aborted. any help would be appreciated.

 

has anyone had chance to measure new screen against sRGB?

 

Make sure you are running the discrete graphics cards and not integrated - use FN+F5 to switch between integrated (Intel) and discrete (nVidia) graphics.
The latest graphics drivers 326.19 should install without the need for any modifications.

 

Just FYI...with new Nvidia drivers my score went down some... P8559...

After a week or so with this laptop I can really say I am impressed. Its super quiet and super powerful. I even love Windows 8.1 and it has given me no problems installing all my games, Office, SQL Server, Visual Studio, every other program I use, etc. My only knock is the front could have been less sharp with maybe a slight slope for comfort. But mainly the quietness of the machine is incredible, even with the SLI's on during regular workload. Maybe I haven't played Crysis 3 enough yet but its impressive to me. Looking forward to enjoying this puppy for many years. Now if only Google could make Chrome look good at 1080p...

 

It was mentioned that the screen is the same as the screen on the XPS 18 tablet/AIO computer. Review Dell XPS 18 AIO Tablet - NotebookCheck.net Reviews. Notebookcheck says it covers about 84% sRGB, which is fine by me. The viewing angle is so good that I almost take it for granted.

 

I posted this in another thread yesterday. Win 8 UEFI installation can be a pain.

"After two days I have finally managed to install Win 8 Pro on UEFI. Just a few things I learnt.

As compared to Win 7, in Win 8 the computer name can't be the same as the user name, if you screw it up there's no easy way to change it, esp the user name.

Second, when I was referring to the guide to setting up a UEFI USB boot drive here ( Windows 8 Forums), I found out that the Rufus works the best and it's the easiest. I am not 100% sure if the Win 7 USB DVD tool from Microsoft set it up that way.

Before installing the Win 8, it's advisable to format the drive using diskpart in CMD, then convert it to GPT. Basically just start CMD, type diskpart, list dist, select disk x (whichever the one you want to format), clean, then last step type "convert gpt". If you type list disk again you will see a star on the GPT drive."

Today I took out the fans to have a look. Seems like the vRAM without heatsink are exposed to the fans somewhat by the hole there.
View attachment 99463

The fans don't actually blow that much air, 5.5cfm as shown here. You could press F12 in UEFI boot to run the Dell checking utility. I ran it and it showed that the max RPM for the fans were 2200rpm. What I like about the fans is that they have a rather well configured curve for minimal noise. It ramps up in game but when you're out of it, the fan ramps down immediately.
View attachment 99464

I noticed that on the main GPU the gap between the heatsink and the fan is wider than on the secondary GPU and the CPU heatsink. So I put some foam there. The one of the left is what I put, the one on the right that's less dense is the stock foam.
View attachment 99465

 

Hello everyone. Can anybody tell me about the fan noise of Alienware 18. For example if I do video editing on it, it will be very loud or the fan will remain almost quiet?

Thank you all in advance.

 

Fans are extremely quiet, a lot quieter than my M18x.

 

Thank you, if the fans are really quiet I will go with Alienware too. It was hard to choose between Alienware and Precision m6700. I already had XPS One 27 and the fans were extremely loud running After Effects or Premiere Pro.

 

Hello

Alienware 18 BTX Send

 

My status also changed over the weekend to shipped!
Interestingly that both our orders were dated 12th July (albeit mine was the 3rd order - after the first 2 had been cancelled by Dell).

Let's hope everything is okay with the systems (It will be my first Alienware Laptop).
Happy days!

 

Just wanted to post this over here, too. Hoping that it does not get deleted, but nothing would surprise me right now.

Good luck to all of you with your new machines, I hope that you all are extremely happy with them and they are trouble free...

 

Stevie,
Please don't stop posting on here. I'm sure the majority of people welcome your input and also I for one would be very interested in the final resolution of your problem.

Keep the British Bulldog spirit!
And as one great man said. WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER!

:thumbsup:

 

Thanks Richard - somehow, I don't feel like I want to be a part of these forums any more. I'll leave it at that. I don't want to rain on this thread - you guys enjoy your machines. I'm out.....one final thing to do. Get a Mod. to also close my money saving thread over here, too: http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...-aw-system-accessories-please-contribute.html with immediate effect.

 

I just ran 3d Mark 11 to test the system (i7-4930MX, 2xGTX 780, 32GB RAM) as it comes from the factory. No new drivers, no OC, anything. The result is 11016... which, despite being good, seems a little bit low compared to what I've seen from other users with similar specs. Is this a normal score? Maybe the other results I've seen correspond to OC systems...

 

Good luck with finding a resolution.

 

Thank you, Prolixious.