Which M11x to keep

I'm trying to decide which M11x to keep and which to sell. Whether to keep mine or to keep one I will be buying for $350 from my cousin.

Mine: R1 that won't overclock stably. Transferable warranty for 500+ days. Already had the hinges replaced. Having a speaker replaced by Dell on Friday. Cosmetically it's great. It looks new because when dell replaced the hinge, they replaced the whole lcd panel and the palm rest.

My cousin's: R1 that will overclock stably. No warranty. Light scratches. Bad hinge. Dim speaker light.

Dell should fix the hinge out of warranty. I'm hoping they replace the lcd and palm rest again so that it looks new. Has anyone else had their hinges done? Did they replace everything the same way?
I'm assuming I would get about $550 for the one without a warranty and about $650 for the one with. I would prefer to sell mine, make more $$ and keep the overclockable one but I'm hesitant to give up my warranty after having two repairs on one machine already. What do you guys think? Has anyone had issues besides the hinges? Obviously I'd be taking a risk but is it worth it?

 

I'm sadly think your cousins,mainly because the R1 is kind of unusable without overclock,and also i'm pretty sure Dell said they replace all hinges,doesn't matter if with warranty or without. Of course you will have to deal with no warranty which really sucks

 

I would sell both and get a M11x R3 or a M14x.
But I'm not sure you'll sell them for that amount, speculation of course.

 

The M11X is a fine beast,at least the R3 is. But seeing as those are both the R1 I would recommend not staying with them,thanks for reminding me katalin. But the M11X R3 is probably going to be available for the price range you could be seeing if you sell both,assuming you sell each for $600. Personally the M11X R3 is all you need,I can play BF3 and Deus Ex,actually I've noticed there has yet to be a game I can't play on my R3 i5. Seeing as the battery is also less for the M14X I'd go with the M11X still,seeing as it looks small when you look at it but when your gaming you get engrossed (Even the the speakers,which are great) so you forget the size of it.

Just my mini M11X vs. M14X Opinion

 

Selling both is not really an option. I'm selling one to cover the cost of purchasing my cousin's. I don't have the cash right now or I would be looking for a m14x or maybe an Asus G series. My M11x does okay without the overclock but yeah, I really do want to squeeze every bit out of it.

 

Ok, since you put it this way, scratch what I said above.
Have you or your cousin tried calling Dell and see if warranty can be purchased for your cousin's laptop and for how much?
From my experience with Dell, warranty on a system can be extended up to 5 years, regardless of it still being or not covered by the original purchased coverage. It might be worth it if it matters to you.

 

Is it really possible to do it? I contacted Dell Support for extending mine (Even though I still have another year) and the Dell Chat Agent told me that it was going to be 400 to extend it,granted he did say this was an estimate since he forgot the exact numbers and couldn't get them at the time.

 

Your over clock isn't covered by warranty?

 

No, they say well it CAN overclock, but we don't promise it's stable, yadda, yadda...

I've spent hours on the phone with Dell support trying to get them to replace the motherboard to no avail. They sent me some higher clock speed ram, but I knew that wouldn't make a difference. The tech really didn't know what he was talking about anyway. He told me I could pay $200 and they would teach me how to overclock but it would void my warranty. Riiiiight.

 

Here's an idea, "borrow" your cousins m11x, swap the motherboards and keep yours! Lol

 

^^
Warranty is tied to the service tag and the service tag is tied to the motherboard.

 

Warranty is tied to the service tag. The service tag is tied to the "unit".

But the "unit" is not tied to any hardware. You could have warranty repairs on every single part of your laptop, and have every component replaced multiple times (including the motherboard), and your service tag would not change.

 

What do you mean "tied to the unit"?
If there's no motherboard there's no other possibility to know the service tag of a machine except reading it on the sticker!

What i meant above is that swapping motherboards with his cousin is not a solution, his system will post the service tag of the system not covered by any warranty.
When a motherboard is new, the service tag is manually typed in and can't be changed after without serious modifications.

And of course the unit has a specific config, Dell won't repair your aftermarket HDD per example.

 

Would if I could. lol

So I got his today. Going to call Dell soon to have the hinge fixed. It's not bad yet but it's going. Unfortunately it's the su4100 chipset. How much difference does that make? I know the su7300 has a 3mb cache and the su4100 is only 2. Think my su7300 not overclocked is about equal to the overclocked su4100? Definitely leaning towards keeping mine with the warranty now, but at least I can churn a small profit. Hell, my girlfriend might even end up keeping it and I will end up selling off her Acer.

Then again, I'm thinking about pin modding the su4100. I may be more inclined to keep that if its running at 2.0 ghz...

 

the su4100 and su7300 are basically identical in terms of performance, your not really losing anything so dont worry about it

 

So hooray for Dell's stupidity. I was scheduled to have my speakers replaced in my warrantied laptop today. Instead of sending the tech speakers they sent a new motherboard. I asked him if he could install it anyway and he did! Now my warrantied M11x can overclock stably! I'm running some benchmarks now to compare the two machines.

 

Awesome!That's like the best outcome possible,you get both overclocking AND Warranty! That's a pretty awesome Christmas gift from Dell!

 

3dMark06 results:

Mine - OC'ed CPU at 1.6 ghz (GPU still won't take an MSI Afterburner OC) = 6500+ (Previously 5800+)

Cousin's OC'ed CPU @ 1.6 ghz and OC'ed GPU @ 585/1404/894 = 6800+

I wish I could overclock my GPU also but if I set anything other than stock in Afterburner it underclocks it =(. Either way though those results are pretty negligible, guess I will be keeping mine with the warranty =). The Dell tech messed something up though as now I have NO sound (I tried re-installing the driver but no device is detected) and there is some error on boot about some cable not being hooked up. They are due back out next week with the speakers that didn't come anyway so I will just have him fix it then.

 

That's good to hear glad they fixed your oc ability. Now if only hey could fix the speakers for you. Good luck

 

Well, Dell came out again today. I came home from work early to find out that once again they didn't ship my speakers. But they did ship a new palm rest, keyboard and power button cover for seemingly no reason. The tech let me keep them to install on my non-warrantied M11x, now it looks new =) Of course whatever wire is loose and causing all of my sound to go out (not just the one bad speaker) starting working while he was here and stopped working after he left, so that still needs fixing, along with the now back-ordered speaker replacement...

I'm happy to be getting these free parts but really Dell?? This is like the 3rd or 4th time they have sent me parts I don't need and the second time I didn't get the parts I do. I've had nothing but a bad taste in my mouth anytime I've dealt with Dell's tech support.

On the plus side, I've volt modded my warrantied R1 now and with the CPU and GPU overclocks I've managed to get 6900 in 3dmark06. Wish I could pinmod but I don't want to void that warranty.

 

Unfortunately, this is the quality control Dell provides to it's customers. I've been shut down many times by people claiming Dell support is fantastic when in reality, I have only seen a mere few Alienware models that are not faulty and work up to expectations. That includes all alienwares. Now, I could go on and on about this but obviously I'll be shut down by the Alienware fanboys.

When I pay over a thousand dollars for a product, I expect top-notch quality control, not mediocre service and quality control that Dell provides.

 

Some folks need to understand a few things:

- very rarely you'll see owners of whatever brand signing in just to say how happy they are with their product so most of the times what we see here are complaints and issues, that's why it's a forum.
- Companies like Dell and yes, Apple too, outsource everything and QC can't hold them all.
- Third, yes, Dell's service is one of the best, but as with every OEM, the road can be sometimes bumpy.

 

@ The Garfield
Well, you should try to service an Asus G series that also costs more than 1000 usd...

 

Now, don't get me wrong... I'm not here to tell you you're wrong, or that your concerns are invalid. Quite the contrary - you are absolutely right that customers should have the expectation that the products they buy will be reliable and well-supported.

However, I wanted to put something in perspective... $1000 is a lot of money, but it isn't a lot for a gaming laptop... especially an 11.6" gaming laptop, which has to incur additional cost for miniaturization.

 

Welp, I'd keep yours. Just reinstall windows. On my M11X, I reinstalled Windows and killed the recovery partition. Runs like a champ. A lot fast I might add. I had to send it into Dell though, because when i reinstalled windows, the backlit keyboard stopped working, and I don't know if it was coincidence, or if windows caused it.

Anyhow, All the driver versions for command center didn't work, so I juts sent it in and they fixed it for free. Ended up a cabled being lose and I couldn't open it or it would void my warranty.

Bottom line. Keep yours. If it breaks your covered. Better to have "Insurance" when something does break down.

 

Yeah, I fully plan to keep my warrantied one now that the motherboard has been replaced and I can overclock stably.