*OFFICIAL* M18x R1/R2 Owner's Lounge Thread

Sorry to hear of your woes - Corsair Vengeance ram has been noted of late for not being very good on a whole multitude of levels. A little while back, NBR was littered with threads about it. If you can, I'd maybe suggest returning it and choosing something else instead. I and many others have never had any problem with HyperX stuff - I'd certainly recommend it. As for fixing your current dilemma, I dunno if that's gonna be possible - there is no reason why your R1 cant handle that speed - mine's running at 1866 and Fox and Johksss have the same ram clocked up at 2133, so that isn't the issue. I'd put my money on another poor batch of Vengeance......

 

Turns out my dumb self forgot to remove the other 2 sticks of 1333mhz behind the keyboard! Got that all taken care of and this ram is running as it should. I appreciate your informative reply, stevie. Thankfully it appears i'll be one of the few dodging any issues with my Corsair sticks

 

Haha - well, that's great that you're running it as advertised! - quite a few people had problems with Vengeance, glad you're not one of 'em!

 

I spoke to my Alienware rep today about a warranty length problem I had. They allowed me to extend to the full four years for $352 (up from the standard one year I had), even though my laptop was purchased in September of '12.

Did I just get a monster hookup because I sure feel like I did.

 

Yeah I'd say thats a helluva deal. 4 years for that much?

If I had the dough, I'd do it.

 

Bought it for $2500.00 off the marketplace last week.
m18x R2
i7 3740QM
Dual Nvidia 680's in SLI
3x256 GB SSD's (768 GB total SSD space)
16 GB Kingston Hyper X DDR3 1866
BluRay slot load drive
330w PSU
Killer N Wireless
Windows 7

Warranty til December 2014.

 

Depending on the exact type I think that you did not get a good deal but ok. the prices are around that price range.

 

I disagree. I rarely see them in that price range with SLI 680Ms... Even refurb on eBay is more than that.

I think you got an awesome deal, especially with those SSDs.

 

Very nice. What department did you call

Sent from my SPH-L900 using Tapatalk 2

 

Yeah, I agree with AshBorn. That's a real nice price for 680M SLI, 3 x 256GB SSD and 16GB of HyperX 1866. Now all it needs is an XM CPU and it will be a real slayer.

 

except the price drops by like 500-1k when haswell comes out. sad thing is next gen isn't looking so good. probably skip haswell for ddr4 and ngff/sata express though, 1 more year would work right?

 

Yeah, I am not expecting Haswell to be worth pursuing. Of course, I said the same thing about Ivy Bridge and here we are. Will have to wait and see. The Haswell XM might have a trick or two up its sleeves.

 

duplicate....

 

Got it off the nbr marketplace from HookemAZ... I thought I did ok. And as far as cpu I think what I got will suffice as I only game. Just got WOW so yeah its taking over my life in a bad way.

 

good luck guys gave today.
I was told that my laptop came with a cracked screen and I could ask or request a refund again and wait 30 days.
I was sad.
what do you think I should do?

 

Congrats on the pickup, I've been watching that f/s thread since it started since it's really close to mine in terms of specs (I ordered mine with a 3740qm as well, just bought the 3920xm today.) I think it's a great deal. I paid $2,999 for mine brand new, and that's without the ssds or ram. You basically saved over $500 and got a bunch of nice upgrades for free, so consider yourself lucky Your laptop probably cost the first owner well over 4 grand.

How much warranty is left again? If it's not much, it might be a good idea to upgrade, especially if you plan on keeping it for a while.

 

full accidental warranty til December 2013

 

my biggest regret was buying R1 and getting a modded R1 without bottom chassis I am really looking forward to haswell because there just might be thunderbolt.. and faster usb 3 =D

 

i will be doing that. i would think the warranty would be void if i change graphics card, am i right? also how much would warranty be?
(any idea?)

 

No, Alienware's warranty is special in the sense that you can do whatever you want with your machine, as long as you keep the original parts and do not do any willful or negligent damage on your machine. If you intend to change the graphics cards, as long as you keep the original ones, the warranty will not be void - just make sure you re-install the original parts if you plan on taking it to Dell.

If you're from the UK, I suggest contacting StevieJones for info about warranty prices and even a reduced price on warranty extensions - he can contact his rep to help you further. That being said, it depends on how much you want to extend it.

 

well guys following image courtesy staff resale.

View attachment 94007

 

Edit: Figured it out. Reconnected CF cable.

 

oh is that screen messed up? what do you mean staff resale?

 

the company that made the import for me.
they told me that there were problems in transportation as a box of m18 and less protected than the m17x r4 ended up damaging four notebook m18x r2 r4 and 2 M14x and I was one of those affected by it.
I have left now and wait for 30 days

 

So, my current system is in the sig, but I have owned a m17x r3 before and sold it. One thing that bugged me was the always lit keyboard it had. I really like that the xps and precision keyboard lights up when you touch the keys or touchpad and then dims after a few seconds, so that you dont have this bright light staring you in the face all the time while watching movies. Is that feature possible on the m18x (the model I'm looking to possibly get)?

And second question, I currently have 3 hard drives in my precision because I bought an optical hard drive caddy slot thing for it for a 3rd hd. Since the m18x is slot loaded, am I out of luck for a 3rd hard drive?

 

sorry dude...

 

thanks buddy :thumbsup: i collected it last night and its a monster!.

rep given for your help :thumbsup:

 

a box of a m18x is less protected than a m17x

 

Unfortnuately, yes...

 

i thought my m18x was well boxed. it got knocked around in the back of my car.


anyway this may have been asked, but i cant find this. The last owner didn't install the start up sound, can i do this? or dose it need to be dell? also dose you warrant still get voided for have a a non dell ati driver? as i don't want dell finding out.

 

To be honest, I'm surprised you didn't figure the lights out when you had the R3 - you can turn the lights off on ANY Alienware machine by opening the AlienFX software and choosing the option to "go dark" - this turns off any lights so that the KB and other areas do not light up at all. It's the same for the M18x - I turn my lights on and off fairly regularly via the icon in notification area/task tray. You can fully customize the lighting to suit you, brightness, colours, themes - everything.



Regards the HDD's, with the M18x R2, you have x3 normal size HDD ports and an mSata port by default. You can remove the optical disk drive (if you wish) to add yet another drive - more storage space available than you can shake a stick at! (at a push, with some user modification, you can get six drives in the R2 if you use the empty PCIe slot that's intended for the WiHD card)

 

I assume the startup sound you are talking about its the Windows 7 or 8 startup sound? That can be changed or disabled on any Windows PC, not specific to the M18X. Just Google "Windows startup sound" for more information on that.

Dell/Alienware doesn't care what you install software wise on your machine, including non-Dell drivers. If/when you call them for support, they may ask you to install their supported version to help with troubleshooting, but you are free to install whatever software you want on your machine otherwise. Their supported drivers are more times than not many versions behind the current 3rd party driver, so it would be stupid of them to expect you to stay with their version, especially with Discreet Graphics, as many new games require up to date drivers. Dell just doesn't QA each new driver released as that would be too much work with all the different hardware platforms they support and the frequent driver updates by the hardware vendors.

 

Thanks for the response. The thing is, it's a bit inconvenient to have to switch the light on when you want to use it and then off again when you don't need it. If you've used a xps, precision, or even a MacBook you would notice the backlight comes on when you touch the keys and then automatically turn itself off a few seconds after you stop usage. So, it seems a bit odd that a premium computer like Alienware forces the lights to either be always on or always off.

As for optical bay hard drive modification, do you have any suggestions on how to get a caddy in there? (Never ever put discs into my computer anymore)

 

I guess it could be considered a slight inconvenience, still, it takes literally 2 seconds to do 2 mouse clicks and you're good to go either way - lit or unlit or dimmed even. As for adding a hard drive to the optical bay, you just buy a relatively inexpensive caddy that hold a regular hard drive and remove the optical drive, install the assembled hard drive/caddy and plug in the sata connection and that's it. Pop your ODD into an external enclosure and the job's a good 'un! - have a look below:

 

I have 5 drives... 3 SSD in the standard HDD caddy, 1 mSATA and a 1TB HDD in the optical bay. It's a simple bolt-in procedure for the ODD mod. Remove the ODD, take the bracket off of it (screws) and attached the bracket to the ODD-to-HDD caddy and put it back in. I light the AlienFX lighting like it is and don't care about the other features you mentioned. AlienFX has limited options, so if those lighting features are more important to you than performance, you would be better off with an inferior system like those you mentioned. The XPS and Precision are both well built laptops, but they pale in comparison to the M18x in terms of performance.

You can dim the lighting (two options, bright and dim, not infinite scaling) if you want to. In my view, having the lighting only turn on when a key is pressed defeats the purpose of having it in the first place. I like the AlienFX lighting for the aesthetics, and for being able to see the keys in the dark. If they automatically turn off, what's the point? AlienFX has other configuration features that the other systems don't offer.

I'm going to move this thread to the M18x Owner's Lounge since it is two simple question for M18x Owners rather than a discussion topic for the entire community.

 

Thanks a bunch for the responses though! Guess I can get used to the backlight, not really a deal breaker.

 

Not having Optimus or Enduro is one of the many things that makes the M18x R1/R2 a superior product compared to anything else available. The manual graphics switching is far superior to hybrid switching. It improves performance, eliminates problems, and enhances battery life. (The M18x R1/R2 has a battery run time of nearly 5 hours running on IGFX with the right settings implemented.)

 

Hey Guys,

Well after many moons of saving I finally went as balls out as I could on a laptop. I had 3k to spend including shipping/tax so I got this:

i7-3630QM
16gB 1600mzh ram
CrossfireX 7970m's
750gB HDD + 64Gb SSD Cache drive

Also came with the free orion backpack and TactX headset.

What do you guys think of the build? Should be able to max out any current games right? Was trying to future proof a bit, but couldnt justify the price jump for SLI680m's.

Also is dell pretty good about there delivery times? Supposed to ship on the 10th of April.

 

As long as your happy with it thats all that matters..

sure i could be captain obvious and name all the upgrades you could have gone with but (in before others do!) whats the point..

will you be able to play all the latest games...yes.. will you set any bench mark records..no..(unless no one has benched your cpu before.)

over all i think you will be very happy with your set up!

welcome to the club! and welcome to the forums!

 

Welcome mike, your build could use tweaking but overall a good machine. You'll be happy.

Sent from my SPH-L900 using Tapatalk 2

 

Ya not interested in breaking benchmarks

I figured if anything didnt meet my expectations I coul always upgrade some of the components.

This is just a pure gamimg machine so I skimped a hair on the cpu and went for the dual amd option.

Cant wait to get it though.

 

Dell had the 30% off refurbs this week and I ordered the first thing I could that had either 7970 crossfire or 680m SLI. They only had the 7970s at the time so I purchased the system and after chatting multiple times over a few days they finally had a system with dual 680s in stock so I ordered it and plan on returning the first one I ordered or resell it. The 7970 system came in today. Everything is great except there is a stuck pixel near the center of the screen visible on dark backgrounds.

This is the specifications of the 7970 system:

Processor: Intel Core 3rd Generation i7-3840QM Processor (8MB Cache, up to 3.8GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0)
16.0GB, DDR3-1600MHz SDRAM, 4 DIMMS
750 GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BR-ROM, DVD+-RW, CD-RW)
Dual 2GB GDDR5 AMD Radeon HD 7970M - CrossFireX Enabled
Intel Centrino Wireless 2230, 2x2 bgn + Bluetooth
18.4 inch (467.36 mm) WLED WideFHD (1080p) display (1920 X 1080)
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium
Space Black Anodized Aluminum
12 Cell Battery
English keyboard
1 Year Complete Care Warranty

I'd like to sell it for around $2300.

You guys think its worth the hassle of getting them to replace the screen and selling it for a bit of profit? I'm thinking of just returning it, I would like to make a bit of money on it to help pay for the second system since that one only comes with the 36xxQM and 6gig of ram so I would need to upgrade the processor and ram.

 

Dibs on 7970m's if you plan on parting it out for whatever reason lol

 

I decided to return it, there was major graphical glitches while testing out fallout new vegas in crossfire mode, black bars appearing and disappearing causing a shaking motion. Could be the cables or drivers but whatever already called them up to set up a return.

 

xfire 7970 has plenty of power for games, it just requires drivers to run correctly
you will definately be happy with the laptop. i know i have since i bought mine

 

Ok, I made recovery discs for brand new M18x R2. Then I installed magic jellybean and got my Windows 8 key. Then I installed 2 180gb SSD's. Tried to re-install 2 recovery DVD's, but alas, as others have noted, if new drive(s) partition not at least as large as original drive, won't work.

Ok no problem except the clean install directions are for Windows 7. I need the file to create Windows 8 ISO dvd then the order for drivers unless they are the same as for Windows 8. Also, Dell did provide an M18xR2 resource DVD. But when I looked over the files on the disc it seems like they included every possible driver ever made for an M18xR2. It would seem easier to go to Dell support page and download only the current drivers for the items inside my notebook.

Any assistance or links would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Brad

 

Forgot one question, when I booted up after installing the 2 SSD's, I entered BIOS and the only raid option I saw was already "on". Is there anything else needed to have RAID-0??

Thanks again,
Brad

 

You will love it. Congrats on saving up and buying a sweet system.
I just ordered one from the outlet, and it showed up three business days (5 days total) before they estimated it would. Here's hoping yours shows up early too!

 

Congrats and welcome to the party I just bought one of the NBR Marketplace you won't be disappointed with that machine

 

Awesome setup! congrats and welcome to our M18x* fellowship, brother. You'll be plenty satisfied with your rig