Am I the only happy M11X r2 buyer?

I had the R1, when the R2 came out I sold my R1 and got the R2.

I have been able to play Cities XL, DOW 2 chaos rising, Supreme Commander 2 and Tropico 3.. and these didnt work well on the R1. For example, Cities XL would freeze up on large cities (because of the processor).

I understand that in many games R2 will only give you a couple more frames but in cpu intensive games it does make a difference.

Yes, I have had issues with optimus but once you tweak it and add the games it is nice not to have to press buttons. Also, it is nice how it kicks in automatically when you are playing a large video to an external monitor.

anyway, I am glad I made the switch and I think the R2 will just get better as software upgrades and better drivers arrive in the next couple of months.

So, anyone happy?

My specs:
i7 oc at 164, 120GB SSD, 4GB ram, artic silver for both gpu and cpu

 

glad to hear! pretty sure ill be a happy m11x r2 owner once i get mines =]

 

I'm very happy with mine. Mine has been stable at 166fsb since day one, I've had very little in the way of problems with games and applications playing nice with Optimus and I get a very respectable 6 - 6.5 hours of battery life on an almost daily basis. Heat and noise has not been a problem for me.

The quality of the LCD panel is the only major complaint I have. I would gladly have paid for an optional upgrade to higher quality display that this thing screams for.

 

I couldn't be happier with mine. Well at least when I finally have a fallout 3 compatible driver on it. It's a brutal little beast of a machine - Love it

 

Kind of off topic but how is Cities XL?

 

i simply love mine. i know a lot of complains over different things out there but i can live with what i facing since it never give me a single major issue except things which known to be software that can be fix over time. in fact i felt this is one of my best investment lately. now i am thinking of giving this baby SSD upgrade

 

I'm fairly happy with mine, I've had it for about two weeks. I've learned to live with the display's glossiness and narrow viewing angles, and I can wait patiently for good drivers. I can already tell this hinge is going to give me problems which is saddening considering how seemingly well built the majority of the laptop is. It can get pretty hot, and it's difficult keeping the laptop elevated in a way that doesn't block the fan's airflow especially when gaming. I haven't found a way to control the fan manually, since I would like to leave it on for a while after gaming to cool down the system when I want to browse the web. It's a little early to tell, but I have had decent battery life, I wasn't really wowed by it but I don't think it's something to complain about. All in all, these are only minor details.

 

I am happy with mine. I will be ordering my extra memory shortly (I only have 2 gb in it right now, and will expand to 8 soon), and that will make it even better.

 

i'm happy. the performance is great and even though the battery life is lower it is still good. 5+ hours is nothing to scoff, my first notebook which was a dell barely got 2.5 hours.

 

I love mine too, this is the first Alienware for me and so far the best computer I ever owned. I guess I got pretty lucky too because I OC'd the CPU (i7) to 164 FBS on day one and it has never crashed or anything, GPU is also over clocked to 550MHz and everything stable. I had a problem with Wi-Fi, but got it resolved, it was a software problem. I also wish I could play Fallout 3, but I can wait a few days. I got a soft touch stealth black, it's fingerprint resistant, ok, but collects all sorts of oils that are harder to remove than fingerprints, I kind of wish I would have gotten a lunar shadow.

 

I'm hoping to be happy with mine, my needs really are pretty meager. I want mostly a high performance netbook, and I want to be able to play some of my favorite games on it occasionally while proctoring exams, stuck in boring meetings or traveling.

I guess I'll know if I'm happy by Monday, assuming Dell makes their EDD of Friday.

This will also be my first Alienware, and having never owned or seen one before honestly I don't see what all the hype is yet...

 

@IceZ23

It is pretty sweet. At first I thought I wouldnt like the fact that it is an "online simcity 4" but the single player is awesome. It is one of the few games I have spend over 12 hrs playing it straight.. (the others were Diablo, Age of Empires, Simcity, Civilization and the old Lucas Arts adventure games).

The game graphics are amazing and the level of detail that you can build roads and houses is also pretty cool. It also does not become a management nightmare like some other city building games can become.

 

I have had my R2 i5 for a couple of weeks and so far I love mine. I got the i5 because it seemed like a good compromise between the R1 battery life and the i7 cost. The games I play did not seem like they would really benefit from the i7 and I have a decent desktop for video encoding. Plus I am from Canada, so I got no coupon deals or EPP.

I have an Aspire One 10" netbook with a 12 cell battery that I loved. It gets almost 10 hours of battery life for surfing and general use. I would play casual games and the old classics, but I wanted more, and became frustrated by what I could not do with it. Then I found out about the M11x R2 and it seemed like the perfect fit for me. 5+ hours of battery life is great! So far it has handled everything I wanted it to do and I have not OC'd anything yet (I will once I need the extra frames in something or I have some extra time).

The screen is very reflective, but so was my Acer netbook, so that is a wash for me. I usually use it in the evening anyway. I use the reflection to watch a tv that is behind me at the same time.

I am extremely happy with my R2.

For FO3, check out this post, it worked for me. According to the Steam forums it is not a video driver issue, it is a game issue for newer multi-core processors.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...-discussion-relating-11xr2-4.html#post6461708

 

I'm also happy with my R2. However, I also still own a R1.

Have to say that I don't feel the R2 is better than the R1. Some aspects are better, some are worse. Not a real improvement imo. Hope the R3 will be more of an upgrade.

 

I am one of those guys that upgraded from R1 to R2. I couldn't be happier. No issues whatsoever.
My R2 has been running stable at 166mhz fsb. GPU 575, Shadower 1200, memory 800mhz.

 

slickie, how are you getting that battery life? I am strongly considering returning my R2 and they one of the main reasons I would do so is b/c of the battery life. I am getting 4.5-5 after checking out the battery life thread. Any tips? I am really on the fence between returning it and just gaming on my desktop as battery life is HUGE for me.

 

I absolutely love mine! It gets a little bit hot, but other than that, I haven't had a single problem running any game over 30 fps. I do have an off-topic question though, how do you add games to the nvidia list of which works for the nvidia graphics card. I just don't know where to go in the nvidia control panel. Thanks!

 

You are not alone! I love my "R2D2". It can run all the games that i play, 5 Hours battery life, 8k 3dmark score, and its small enough to take it anywhere. One of the best laptop out there. I'm glad that i sold my MBP for this.

 

One more happy R2 owner reporting in. I also get a stable 166fsb OC on the i5, and coming from an ancient toshiba that only had 1 hour battery life, 5 hours is pretty sweet.

 

I like it now that I can play Risen and Just Cause 2. I wish the BC2 Punkbuster thing would get fixed.

Every time I sit and play something for an extended period of time on it I'm always amazed at how well it runs most things at pretty high settings and that I can just pick it up and walk across town with it and play in a park.

It totally gets hot though. Not the internals but the case. After two hours of Risen you could fry an egg on the case but the CPU and GPU temps remain under 60C.

 

I'm happy with mine, but I'm not sure its powerful enough for my desires. It definitely powerful for its size though. Its like a gateway gaming laptop (as in gateway drug not the Brand), its tempting me to get something larger and more powerful.

 

u got one of my point there. i rate this machine as for the size it is. at this size this thing already rock at best. just because it's alienware does not mean it should be an alien tech. at least that how i feel. in fact its high tech enough comparing to whats out there at this point of time. i aint gonna have this compare to a full blown 15"or 17" laptop. neither I want to take a 15/17"out which is so big and heavy. not to mention those machine battery only last a faction of what M11x does. I think this is fair deal.

 

Only think I'm not crazy about is the heat from the R2 while surfing the web. Other than that I am extremely satisfied.

 

Another happy customer here. For the most part, I never really had any Optimus issues, been getting 5+ hours as well and it's pretty quiet to boot.

 

I'm happy with my R2 system but havent been able to get facebright to work. Dont know if anyone is having issues with the film on the system to make it feel soft is starting to peel off, mine is beginning to peel off on the corner near the mic/headphone input.

 

The finish on the corners of the lid on my ThinkPad have rubbed off. The soft touch coating does not seem to bond fully to the slick plastic underneath. I can tell from the areas where the finish has worn that this is caused by carrying it around in the laptop bag, or perhaps just by sliding it into the laptop bag.

It isn't too noticable becuse the surface under the soft coating is also black. What color is the rubbed off area on the M11x?

 

I really enjoy mine! Have installed about 30 games on it so far and no real issues so far. The glossy screen didnt bother me at all (my Gateway P7811FX has a glossy screen too so I am used to it) but I decided to get a cheapo screen protector off eBay and I'm even used to that now.

If I had to pick something to complain about, it would be the cheap SD card slot. Every notebook I have used (granted, not many) have had the slots where the card is pushed all the way in then spring ejected (whatever this is called) when you push on it again. The m11x R2 doesnt feature this - the card hangs more than half-way out the slot. Even my Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook has the spring eject type of slot. Yeah, there is alot of tech inside, but still there was a lil disappointment on my part about this.

Meh, forget that... I love my m11x R2!!!

 

I'd venture to say that most people are turning off AlienSense altogether.

 

I have access to a lot of thinkpads at work and it's my impression that the soft touch finish on the R2 is thicker than what they have. We'll have to see how well it holds up over time.

 

Aliensense works really well for me and often recognises me before it shows me my own face, as long as it's not too dark. It's easier than a password so it stays

 

Count me in...C'mon who can reisist more power? Sucks for those that can't OC stable, but got mine at 162 rock solid for weeks...

 

Yeah, I'm also wondering about this..

 

I am actually really happy with my m11x r2, for a short while I was a bit dubious about the screen and it's not perfect, but it does the job; this thing plays great games so well I just can't but love it.
TF2 is perfect, bioshock is slick, BfBC2 single player plays better than on 360 and hopefully the punkbuster issue will be fixed soon for multiplayer. The sound from the speakers is great for a laptop, it looks cool (not nearly as "teen" as I'd feared) and well it's just a cute little machine!

 

i am getting close to 5.5 hours, not quite the 6.5 slickie was talking about

1. McAfee had a lot more processes running in the background than nod32; changing to nod32 helped decrease the discharge rate.
2. Disabled ports i don't use in the BIOS: the ieee 1394 port, sd card slot and the 10/100 port.
3. Disabled AlienFX and the Alienware Face Recognition Software in the start up programs
4. Disable FaTraymon, a service for the Alienware Face Recognition software, in the startup services.
4. Disable indexing
5. Make alterations to the Power Saver profile: Change the minimum processor state from 5% to 0%, the maximum processor state to 50% and the amount of time it takes to turn the hard drive off from 5 minutes to 1 minute.


Those changes helped me get an extra 45 mins to 1 hour of battery life.

 

still waiting on mine.. Dell messed up my order, and I didnt notice for a few days Had to cancel and reorder... EDD is July 29

Spec
i7 640
4gb RAM
320gb hdd -- Already have a 500gb Momentus XT to pop in when it arrives
BT
Soft touch black

The good thing is since they messed up the original order, I got them to give me the 3yr advanced warranty for free.. not too bad

Order came out to $1250 CDN with tax

Im sure I will be happy with it, since I upgrading from a Acer A0751 netbook

Does anybody know if the Canadian version has those damn stupid French keyboards?

 

Sorry, guys. Not sure how I missed the request for a follow-up yesterday.

1. Power saver plan.
2. Screen brightness down to 1 bar. Down all the way occasionally, but that's sometimes difficult to read unless I'm in a dark-ish room.
3. Disabled indexing.
4. Set minimum processor state to 1%.
5. Made sure that IGP settings are set to maximum battery and maximum battery life plan (2 places) in the Graphics Properties control panel.
6. Disabled Windows Firewall service since I'm always behind a hardware firewall. Turn it on when I'm on a public network.
7. Run Adblock and NoScript with FF so that this generally keeps Flash content/ads to a minimum unless I explicitly allow them.
8. Nod32 4.2 set to scan default file types rather than all files. Sometimes I'll turn it off altogether, but not as a rule.
9. Disable BT radio.
10. Disabled Firewire in BIOS.
11. Disabled the 802.11a band in the wireless adapter config.
12. Disabled services I don't use. AlienSense, FATrayAlert, Intel Persistence Module, Broadcomm Wireless Manager UI, Acrobat stuff, Quicktime - hell a lot of stuff.
13. There are times when I go wired if it's convenient, but I'd say that's about 30% of the time.

That's all I can think of. This wasn't all done at once, but rather over the course of the first week of ownership. If there's more that I recall I'll pass that along.

Attached is a screenie of my discharge rate with Outlook 2007 (exchange account), FF (2 tabs), an a couple of other apps running.

 

That's amazing Slickie! Do you keep the FSB at 166? Do you memenber your out of the box discharge rate?

 

Yes, I keep it at 166. I have no idea what the discharge rate was when I got this thing a month ago. At the time I was focusing more on the settling of the Full Lifetime calculation. Only recently have I bothered to look at discharge really. It's common for it to spike up to 11ish if I'm streaming Flash video. I also do a fair amount of 720p video playback with Media Player Classic HC and CoreAVC over a wifi connection while on battery. IGP only for that. If I'm watching any 1080p stuff then I'm always plugged in.

 

If you ordered the comp with the English version of windows, you get the American keyboard layout.
Cheers!