*OFFICIAL* Alienware 18 Owner's Lounge Thread

That video has been floating around, but I'm sure most haven't seen it. Probably for the better; not for the faint of heart, lol.

To think that could be your machine..

Sent from my Galaxy Note II

 

Probably like at every company, there are jerk workers everywhere. The guy next to him didn't seem particularly rough (and actually wore his gloves) so this is probably more like the few bad workers just being a jerk. Hope he got canned already. Sad thing is this is an assembly line so EVERY MACHINE got treated like this...The guy in front of him is the bag guy who puts the laptop in that Alienware bag.

Can anyone translate the Chinese?

Similar to folks who spit in people's burger at fast food places, the FedEx delivery guy who tosses a plasma tv over a fence, the ups guy who stole the ipod he just delivered...these folks are everywhere, eventually, they end up on the streets or at mom and dad's house.

 

"Yes, but Johnny is such a good boy."

 

That might be from excessive pressure on the screen at that spot. Try loosening a screw near that area and see if it helps. If not, rma it.

Sent from my GT-I9100

 

I hope to order my 18 this week. HOPEFULLY I can get someone to configure me a system with 780's for 3100 like they had when they came out.

 

Please remove post!

 

Great thanks a lot. works!!

 

Thanks for the pics! How hard is / was it to get to the ram dimms under the keyboard?

 

So they won't throw in 780's into any configuration. You have to pay upwards of 5000$ for it. Not doing that. Looks like in buying 770's :/

 

Very strange - here in New Zealand they have made the 780m a 'free upgrade' on the three lower end models, removed it as an option on the highest-end model, and slapped on a big orange 'There may be a long delay' warning.

This leaves me somewhat cheesed off because I ordered by m18 on August 4th, and paid an exorbitant amount to upgrade to SLI 780m's from the 770's. It also leaves me worried about my delivery time ...

 

Lucky. They wouldn't even think about it here in the US. I'll call one more time and see if someone can.

 

Honestly it's very unusual. Given they are now all assembled in the same place, I would have thought ordering and pricing would become more global.

Does every country have their own allotment of stock? Or does Alienware in NZ just feel they can get away with enormous delays after they have your money?

 

Finnaly I got my new Alienware
Right from the box on stock: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M video card benchmark result - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4900MQ CPU @ 2.80GHz,Alienware Alienware 18

 

Could be quite hard if you're opening it for the first time. Try to pry with your finger nails from the back, with the screen fully opened. Remember to remove the SD slot dummy before opening the palmrest. Not much could be said, except be bold but cautious.

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

 

It's a cinch to remove the palm rest. Don't forget to pop out the SD card dummy as kh90123 mentioned or you'll not get it off. The new Alienware 18 has to be the easiest laptop I have ever worked on. I absolutely LOVE how it is made. Super easy to take apart.

 

That M18 looks pretty sweet at night w/those lid lights..kinda like a rice rocket Then you turn the lights on and wish it had those exotic grills + edge 2 edge display.

 

Are the palm rest and bottom cover made of magnesium or plastic with magnesium inlays? And do you notice much flex on the lid? Jw.

 

Sweet photos. I believe someone mentioned a while back in this thread a Torx screwdriver was needed to take a part certain area's of the laptop.. Do you know what number of Torx screwdriver? The reason I ask is I stripped some screws before taking apart an EVGA 690 video card. It didn't take much to strip them. Thanks

 

Good question. It really baffles me why they can't just slap them in there, rather than making me pay 5000$ for them.

 

Because then Dell wouldn't make as much money on the other components that are automatically included in the various new tiered configurations. If you want top end, it's now unfortunate that you have to have Dell throw in some of the stuff that they normally would not sell (or people would choose to upgrade themselves - more cheaply than Dell prices - at a later date) such as memory upgrades, HDD upgrades etc....even cpu upgrades if you want top end gpu's.

Dell must have caught on to the fact that with the old system, you COULD buy the best gpu's without having to upgrade the cpu or ram at the same time. Bottom line is more money, more sales of stuff that they make larger profit margins on. Smart business move, not so smart if you plan on annoying your client base who know what they want, how much they want to spend only to find that they are severely limited by the various lack of options to configure a CUSTOM (said with my tongue in my cheek) gaming laptop.

What's so custom about it if you cannot customize it the way you want?? - Dell should have stuck with the old system where you could pick and choose everything and truly build a custom machine. Now you just get to choose from various pre-built bundled deals, which is great for Dell but really blows for someone wanting to truly customise an Alienware machine right now.

 

Nice, is the palm rested screwed down from the bottom panel side or is it just held in with tabs?

EDIT: Yikes. Looked into the procedure in the owner's manual and that does not look like fun. I have no problem building custom LC loops or ripping heatsinks off of expensive GPUs to install water blocks, but I'm pretty sure I will let Dell do this.

Is there any way to get the same RAM Dell uses so I can just use the bottom 2 dimms? Not sure if they sell the RAM for the upgrade...

 

Yeah, probably. I'm not going to complain though. 770 SLI is a massive upgrade to what I own now which is a single 555m. I don't think I'll be complaining much when I order it

 

The someone was me. You need torx screw driver to remove the CPU. I don't know what size it's, I think it's T8.

 

Just man up and open the palm rest. It's plastic. The tabs holding it on the chassis is metal. The keyboard has a layer of thin aluminum behind it, but there's still some flex to it. The palmrest is held by both screws and tabs at the side.

To take out the palmrest, you will need to take out only 12 screws. 3 screws for the back cover, and 9 internal screws, 4 on the left 5 on the right. 3 of them longer than the other 5. Removing the palmrest is easy, only 12 big screws, but removing the keyboard is annoying. You have 14 tiny screws to remove to get the keyboard out.

You don't need to buy Dell RAM, just get some 1.35V DDR3L RAM with 11-11-11-28 timings. Faster does no good as the stock RAM runs at that speed. Plenty of options here: Amazon.com: 1.35v ddr3 sodimm 1600

 

I sorta think that when the supply of 780m becomes more available, they will make them available in the old configs again. Even if you buy a fully loaded one now, the delivery date is still pushing into October. I think their thought is that if someone wants to pay us 5-6k for a fully decked machine which equals the profits of 3 user configured machines, we'll make sure to sell those instead of the ones we make a ton less. I don't blame them too much. Dell just reported a massive drop in profits to preserve revenue numbers so they aren't factoring in profits too much, but if you just launched a new unique product which has some pricing power, you should probably take it to recoup your r&d, etc...They are supposed to be a business to make money. At least they had and have coupons .

 

Here are some photos of my Alienware laptops:

https://plus.google.com/photos/1156...s/5913791192348716721?authkey=CJ2hts2N7ae5zwE

The new one looks amazing! Before I saw the new 18 in real, I thought the old one looks better, now I know I was wrong

 

Great shots buddy. The must say the AW18 looks have grown on me a lot. I still prefer the edge to edge glass of the R2 though.

 

Nice clear shots. Without all the lights turned on, looks pretty understated (maybe it's also the bright room)...other than people commenting on the size, I don't see how this stands out that much compared to any other laptop out there.

 

Yup, pretty much. I love both machines, but the M18xR1/R2 is aesthetically superior based on my personal preferences. The new 18 is a real pleasure to work on, though. I really do appreciate how it is assembled.

I do as well. It's much more attractive to look at and much easier to keep clean without a bezel.

 

I had the Dell tech working on my 18 today (fixing the alienfx alienware logo under the display) move the 2 ram dimms from under the keyboard to the bottom 2 slots. Ordered this RAM to replace it: Amazon.com: Kingston Technology HyperX Plug n Play 16 GB Kit (2x8 GB) 1600MHz DDR3 PC3-12800 Non-ECC CL9 SODIMM 1.35V Notebook Memory KHX16LS9P1K2/16: Computers & Accessories

Certainly much easier than going through the tear down process of removing the palm rest! Hopefully the new RAM is compatible, but I can't see why not.

 

You have to remove the palm rest for RAM? Sheesh

 

For some of the slots, 2 are on the bottom and 2 are under the keyboard. Unfortunately, and for the first time, my stock factory ram was placed under the keyboard >< Luckily the tech was nice enough to move them while he had the palm rest off.

 

It won't run at CL9, it will run at CL11, since you're using it in conjunction with the stock RAM. Because of how tight the RAM are placed together, the heatsink are not very useful at all.

 

Removing the palm rest on the new 18 is extremely easy though, so it's not a big deal. Although, some folks find something as simple as removing the bottom cover to be intimidating.

 

I am not using it together with the stock RAM. The stock RAM is 2x4GB , which I am replacing with the kingston 2x8GB. Does it at least look compatible and do you think the heatsinks will interfere with installation?

 

It should be fine. It's fine using RAMs with tighter timing, it'll just run at the speed of the stick that's slowest. Are you doing 32GB of RAM? Why not just keep the stock RAM inside?

I am cheapskate so I bought cheap CL11 Patriot RAM. I don't like messing with RAM timings, it affects stability. For the most part you don't really notice the difference anyway, unless in benchmarks. And if you use Win 8, well with the faulty RTC clock, most benchmark won't be recognized anyway. I prefer to spend the money on pure SSD storage. Now if only if I could get the Samsung 1TB SSD somewhere....

 

I took apart my 14x do I'm sure I could do something as friendly as the 18. just gotta dive into it

 

Just doing 16gb, didn't want to use the stock ram alongside new ram to avoid compatibility issues. Also planning on replacing my 750gb HDD that is currently being used as a storage drive with another 500gb Samsung 840 SSD, it makes for fairly cost effective speed and storage

 

Okay so someone answer me this. If you have two hard drives, and one you put all your games on, and the other is just storage, it will run more efficient or what?

 

Nope. If you have two hard drives, the benefit comes from one being higher performance than the other. Common configurations people use are small SSDs for the OS (speeds up actions like boot times and UI interactions) or an SSD for OS / commonly played games for fast boot and load times and using secondary hard drives for media (movies, music etc).

 

Did they lose the brightness control ( Fn + ....) keys on the new as i cant see them. Really have to go under power management to set it ?

 

You should find the keys below the right side shift key (page up and page down)

 

You won't have compatibility issue. I have 24GB running happily.

The difference is due to SSD vs HDD, not where you put your stuff. Of course you will want to put some of those stuff in the faster drives. To be power efficient, I'd put all stuff onto a single drive so the other one could go to idle, saving some power. But when you're plugged into the ac adapter, there's no need to be power efficient. To be space efficient, I'd put games onto another drive so there's space on the main boot drive. SSD will lose peak performance if you fill it up to full. Personally, although SSD caching works and is effective, I prefer just putting terabytes of SSD storage into the laptop. The only HDD that I will want to cache is the Hitachi 5k1500 1.5TB HDD, but unfortunately it's not in stock everywhere. I guess that's the conundrum of life. Sometimes you have too little money to spend, sometimes it's just too hard to spend your money.

 

Thanks..I look forward to taking this monster apart. Based on the feedback I am hearing, it is a lot simpler.

 

Can somebody help me? I manage to clone with clonezilla the two partition (the larger recovery, and the smaller Dell something) to the SSD. I thought, when i copy the two partition I will be abble to pres F8 and do a factory restore. But the Alienware will not boot from the SSD. Did I something wrong or is it not possible to do that like i thought?
I only wont the SSD in the Alienware, I have made o backup withe Alienrespawn Premium of the factory system...
So the easy way is to make a clen instal of Windows, then Alienrespawn and restore the backup?

 

it is, Ive used the same when upgrading my friends new 18... just don't mix LoVo with NON- LoVo...

 

I would say, max your ram out from dell itself... or get any standard ram that you want for whatever pricing... if it means saving 30-40$ is worth taking it all apart yourself.. but then get Taiphoon burner and burn a XMP profile into the sets or ram YOU HAVE INSTALLED, AND WORK THE TIMING YOURSELF TO SOMETHING THAT WORKS WELL.

 

maybe irrelevant question, but for what do you need more than 8gb of memory? Most games are far from capping out anywhere near 8gb, I haven't seen a game pushing more than 50% of my memory usage yet. So unless you are like developing on sharepoint or Hosting VMs I'm missing the point. You won't get much gaming performance increase from 8gb to 16gb, 24gb or 32gb... if any performance gains at all...

You'd get more performance increase just swapping in an SSD for os / games and apps that are the most used...

I considered upgrading my ram for visual studio 2012, but my ram is not that much solicited yet. Upgrading ram seem to me something you do cause you can, a bragging right. lol

 

More RAM means less wear on the SSD. Also less pagefile occuring. At any point I use more than 8GB of RAM, so 8GB is not enough for me.

 

I develop (in visual studio, as well as for mobile platforms, websites etc.), do graphic design, music production (in Ableton), video editing for my youtube channel, and much more. I use my machine in more ways and probably push it harder than 99.9% of owners (and I don't count pointless benchmarking as pushing / using the machine).