*OFFICIAL* Alienware 18 Owner's Lounge Thread

That and getting your money's worth out of the machine

 

Hmmmm....OVERKILL must be one of those acronyms, methinks:

Owner
Verifiying
Every
Resource
Kept
Installed (is)
Lovingly
Lavished

 

I think this sums it up nicely...

<iframe width='560' height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ym4VmVwd24c?rel=0" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

I don`t have audio where I`m sitting now, but I`m guessing that is the infamous "UUUULTRAKILL "M-M-M-MONSTERKILL" etc

God I miss Unreal tournament. I hope they make a new one soon

 

That's where the killing spree streak in Dota 1 & 2 came from. Most are used but not all. Dota 2 is currently the most played PC games on Steam, but using the 18, I just need 1 GPU to play it. Keep the CPU clock high enough and you will have constant 60 fps no matter what happens. Older Source engine games are more CPU intensive than GPU intensive.

 

i have tried to install SRT on my system and it destroys my boot OS on the msata
no acceleration select in SRT ROM
is my problem due to using the msata as my boot drive
i have shrunk the partition size to leave 64gb available still no luck

 

You have to do it in a certain order. Creating the cache does destroy everything on the mSATA SSD. So, you would need to create the cache volume first, then install Windows to the partition on the unused SSD space. When I did this it was a dual-boot scenario, with one version of Windows installed on the mSATA volume with a cache having already been created. Once the cache is set up, it will still be implemented by the Intel RST OROM without Windows being installed.

 

ok so i have to make my raid hdd bootable install RST on that
wipe msata
then configure msata for cache
then restore my msata to bootable OS
is there no way to get intel RST OROM to see the msata for acceleration at power on
to save having to install OS on raid HDD

thanks for your help

 

Hmm. Mine is partially shipped, e,d,d 9/24/13.

 

I have not tried it starting from scratch, but I think you still can. Press Ctrl+I to enter the Intel Option ROM utility at POST and see if you can set up the cache volume in there. You will most likely need to use Intel RST F6 drivers during Windows Setup or Windows Setup will not be able to identify the unallocated disk space on the mSATA SSD as being available for installation. (This is the same for any RAI0 volume, which the cache volume is.)

 

Dude what's your specs in the new 18?

 

Does anyone know if this is the same PSU for the AW18?

330 Watt AC Adapter for Dell Alienware X51 Desktop / M18X Laptop : Computer Accessories | Dell

If not, can anyone share the part number for the AW18's PSU?

 

Yes it is.

 

Hi brother! Max out.

 

I just picked up a 3TB external Seagate drive for only $109 US over at Costco. Best deal out right now. I use Acronis 2014 to to backup the main drive. I need to do full backup every week, so I need lots of space... . I am saving my 750GB HDD and 64GB mSATA in a disconnected state which has the full complete operating system ready to run as an emergency backup. Used Samsung migration software to install new 1TB EVO, had to re install the NVIDIA drivers and AlienRespawn (which I don't really use). Running at Raid 0 speed approx (600-1000) Read/Write; so fast enough for government work. I don't game, I just use PC for busines$.

 

Cool. Thanks...

 

well, time to fixe my signature.

 

Nice specs bumbo

 

thanks brother cloudfuego

 

I had to share this with you guys lol so AWESOME! And it has an EPIC! Ending

http://youtu.be/JyL8G4XFB2A


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk - now Free

 

Hey Bro Congrats on the new BEAST Hope you get many years of enjoyment.

 

Oh, I've been meaning to ask: How is the HDMI port on the AW 18? On the M18x, we were required to shave off some plastic on HDMI cables for them to work. Is the 'fit' better?

 

thanks man.

 

Finally got my Alienware 18!! This thing is a beast as far as power and build quality is, I love it! So far everything runs on max settings with the exception of some games where I have to turn down AA.

I do have one issue with the WIFI though. It's really sporadic where it would jump to download speeds of 4mb+ all the way down to 300kb or so. When trying to play Battlefield 3 I'll rubberband like crazy!! It drives me nuts. I know playing multiplayer games over WIFI isn't ideal but that's the only option for me and it was working fine with my old laptop. It's not my connection as well, my sister's computer has no issues with the wifi. Any ideas? Please help!

 

I had exact similar issue with my latitude. Are you running WEP? some of the new wifi cards, dont play nice with WEP. And change the channel as well.

 

Do you have to take the palmrest off to put extra ram in the 18?

 

2 slots under the base cover and 2 slots under palmrest. But palmrest is super easy to remove in aw18, after removing base cover & fan cover, one needs to remove odd and hdd. After than 9 screws and 4 cables. An old credit card comes in handy at this stage though

 

Anyone?

 

Man it sounds like a real PITA. With the R2 you just take the keyboard frame off and undo 5 screws of the keyboard and flip it over.Don't have to disconnect any ribbons. Does anyone know when they ship an 18 with 16Gb of ram is it 4 dimms or 2x8?

 

4x4, cheaper

 

I'm on WPA2 and channel is set to auto I believe. I'll have to check router setting when I get home. What did you do to correct the issue? I tried all sorts of stuff... disabling QoS Scheduling, assigning static IP address, creating regedit keys (can't find the exact post here on NBR on how to do it).

It's so fustrating, can't play any online game. Only game seem to run stutter free is League of Legends. Even that my ping spikes like crazy and go anywhere from 12ms to 900ms.

 

NBC review: Test Alienware 18 Notebook - Notebookcheck.com Tests

 

Same issue here. I haven't tried anything to fix it yet though. Has anyone who has been having this connection problem found a solution?

 

I just bought myself these to accompany my new notebook. They costed me a hefty amount of money, but the sound and the extreme comfort was just too tempting.

I highly recommend them to other HiFi enthusiasts :thumbsup:

 

Actually, it's easier than removing in bezel on m18xr2. You have to try it, to understand how easy it is. The ribbon cables are of much better quality aswell.

On all of the routers, I have dynamic ip addresses, qos turned off(never worked reliably for me), wpa2 and channel is set manually. In my case my cordless phone interferes with wifi if I am on auto, channel 13 seems to work the best.

 

:thumbsup:

 

No problem connecting HDMI port, its all new. I don't have an M18x to test though for comparison. One of my cheap HDMI cables will not show video, so you need high quality HDMI, preferably 1.4 spec for any Ultra Hi-Def monitors.

 

Hey guys, after careful consideration, I pulled the trigger on a new alienware 18. Specs are i7-4800MQ, GTX 780M SLI, 256GB ssd 750GB hdd, 16GB DDR3, blu ray, 2 year accidental protection. Can't wait

Also, whats this I keep hearing about throttled bios on the 18, no overclocking?

 

There is definitely a cpu throttling issue that is holding the beast back in performance. You can overclock your cpu (the way to get around it in the short term is to use Intel XTU). There are many posts with suggestions. Alienware needs to fix the problem asap. This is becoming more and more of a concern, as it has been a while now and still no BIOS update to fix the problem.

 

Beyer T70p Frequency Response and CSD Waterfall Plots

All is well, until it hits the resonant peaks, one at close to 5kHz, and another at 7kHz. Hallmark of a well designed driver is to avoid and prevent ringing, ie resonance. Unfortunately a lot of newer Beyer headphones with the so called Tesla drivers, has rather peaky response. A step back, according to some. It has very low distortion, and good transient response, albeit inverted polarity on the driver, it's the ringing that's the real problem. Sounds like drum cymbals that's near the 5kHz spectrum will sound a lot sharper than it should, and will induce listening fatigue.

Compare the T70P's response to the Sennheiser HD 800's CSD graph ( http://www.changstar.com/index.php/topic,49.msg149.html#msg149) and you will know what's ringing. It's the continuous ridges that won't go away.

DT880-250 Frequency Response and CSD Waterfall Plots
Battle Of The Flagships (58 Headphones Compared) UPDATE: AUDEZ'E LCD-2 Revision 2 (6/4/13)

A lot of what David Mahler said is BS, but I will have to go with him on this one.
You'd be better off with the DT 880, if you want Beyer. Below $500, some of the best headphones are the HD 650, HD 600, the Hifiman HE400, HE 500, used Audeze LCD-2, a few AKG, etc. What one chooses depending on the taste, but I'd avoid any stuff with driver ringing.

Upwards of $500, then the choices opens up. All measurements and graphs courtesy of Purrin from Changstar.

Back to the topic at hand, the wait for a BIOS fix is getting too long, it's showing the tardiness on Dell's part. Can't really blame them, Michael Dell just bought back his Dell earlier this month.
Michael Dell buys back PC company he founded in $24.8bn deal | Technology | The Guardian

 

Agreed, I keep checking back every several days and now we're getting into months. The BIOS on these new boxes is just junk, I mean these boxes don't even perform at standard, rated speeds out of the friggin' box, how this isn't a gigantic customer sat issue I don't know...can only assume people just aren't really noticing and don't come to this forum to find out.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...ienware-18-please-promote-ideastorm-asap.html

 

The first response that popped up in your head was to criticize? Seriously?

There are a ton of Beyerdynamic T70P reviews out there, that praise it. A norwegian HiFi magazine tested them and found it was the best headphones they had tested in that price range.

T70P is bright headphones, no doubt about that. The good thing about that is that you can hear all details in a song. At the same time it doesn`t have the artificial bass amplification either that a ton of brands have. The headphones output what needed to be output. Thats what I like about them. Different users have different tastes.

There is no ringing issue on T70P from what I can hear. Neither have any other reviews mentioned that. The sound isnt as warm as some other high end headphones due to the slim soft material they use, but that can be corrected some by buying leather which moves the element further from the ear.

Comparing it to HD 800 is like comparing apple and oranges. HD 800 is open, T70P is closed. And HD800 is an entire different price league.
DT880 is good headphones too and users are devided on what is better than T70P or DT880. It depends on your taste and what you prefer. DT880 is also open, which I don`t like.

T70P is much better than my previous headphones: ATH-M50 and MUCH better to wear. I love them..

 

I really like my "18"...

I might have mentioned that before..

 

ATH-M50 is pretty much the best monitoring headphone one could get for below $150. That I will agree with you. If you're looking for closed headphones, then I guess it's another story altogether.

By the way I wasn't criticizing you, you could say I was criticizing the headphones. As for why did I do that? Because more and more manufacturers are charging more and more these few years for inferior products.

I prefer to use in ears for isolation, and have open back headphones. I guess that's up to personal preference again, you might say in ears feel like ear raping for you, and headphones are much more comfortable. If you say so, then I'd say you should try out custom made in ear monitors to see how comfy they are.

Very few closed headphones is what I'd consider high fidelity, and none of the closed headphones will have less distortion than a reference quality open back headphones. If you're talking about the output of the headphones being like the source, the T70P's freq response is far from it. Measurements are measurements, pardon me from saying this. Even the Beyer T1 has peaky treble response.

If you can't hear the ringing, it can mean a few things. A normal person wouldn't train their ears to pick up every small details and anomalies.

Beyer in recent years have been slacking, and you can see it from their driver matching. Sennheiser on the other hand has much better matching on their drivers. As of now, until Beyer up their QC, I do not consider any of the Beyer headphones with Tesla drivers a good value. Too little improvements is brought on the table with the increased price Beyer is demanding.

You might not agree with what I have said. But when it comes the day you can listen to something like the HD 800 on a proper amp, or a Stax SR-009 on proper electrostatic amp, you will know what I mean by reference quality, and what it means by saying the headphone output is like the source.

Actually, don't audition those high end stuff. You won't ever be happy (like me), once you have heard something that good. Also, no point in having Hifi headphones/speakers unless the source is good enough.

My attitude towards Hifi is like Mr. Fox's towards Alienware. Good is not enough, best is not good enough.

 

I made the jump to 18"

So far I had a Pre-Dell m15x r1, m11x r1, m14x r1...


Status So far: In Production
Estimated Delivery Date: 16/10/2013

4th Generation Intel(R)Core(TM)i7-4700MQ processor (6MB Cache, up to 3.4GHz w/ Intel(R)Turbo Boost) 1 SR
18.4 inch (467.36mm) WLED FHD (1920 X 1080) TrueLife Display 1 SR
8GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz 1 SR
750GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s + 64GB mSATA SSD Caching 1 SR
Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M with 4GB GDDR5 - NVIDIA SLI Enabled 1 SR

Pete..

 

congrats! Awesome machine!

 

Problem with headphones and reviews is, people are reviewing a product, that cannot be made to please more than 1 guy at a time, it's simple, everyone has different set of ears.

What sounds good to my ears, might sound bad to you. Buying a headphone after reading review on audio reproduction is like buying a painting because reviewer likes it, one has to try the headphones and then buy the one that reproduces sound best for there own set of listeners.

 

Thats why I spent the last 2 days going to this audio shop here in my town that have headphones in all price ranges, where I could listen to a bunch of albums. Beyerdynamic T70P was love the minute I tried them on.

You are ansolutely right, and which is why I reacted when kh90 posted critique. He doesnt know my audio priorities, he doesnt know which soundscape I adore and prefer. Ive seen people who love this headphone, as well as people who didnt like them, because for example they had too little bass. I personally is in the opposite range: I cant stand bass head music that drown all the other mid range sounds.

He is probably right that the HD800, beyerdynamic T1 etc is much better, but they were way too pricey for me. These headphones was orignally that too, coming from a $150 set, when T70P costed me $600.

 

Well it's just a fact, can't do much about it, personally I am not an audiophile so for my music tastes, a pair of elcheapo Sony headphones suffice

Now if I can get those minidiscs back in fashion, that will be something