[A Message From Frank Azor] - Leaving Alienware?

A Message From Frank Azor
Alienware community, thank you for your loyalty, passion and support over the last 21 years. You’ve made this experience the ride of a lifetime. See below for a letter I sent out today regarding my next opportunity. Thank you for continuing to support the best gaming brand and team in the industry. – Frank

Family,

As you saw in Ray’s earlier announcement, I’ll be leaving Dell as of July 3 to take on a new challenge.

A little over 21 years ago, I met a couple of lunatics who had an idea they called Alienware. When I met them and learned about the company they were trying to build, I thought to myself, “This would be the coolest job ever.” I was right, but none of us ever dreamed the brand would come this far – which is a result of all of you, your hard work and passion.

We’ve earned the trust of millions of customers and the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of fans. Together, we’ve built the best gaming brand in the industry backed by a passionate community, remarkable products, exciting marketing campaigns, compelling partnerships, engaging conversations with press and customers, lifelong relationships, and thousands of awards. We’ve worked our butts off while having a lot of fun.

I’m so proud of what we’ve built together. Our gaming and premium consumer businesses are outperforming the market and are a huge priority for Dell.

But the builder and creator in me is ready for the next challenge. It will be very hard to leave this incredible team. Stop for a second and just think about what this team has accomplished. It’s truly remarkable.

Alienware joined forces with Dell in 2006. Despite all odds, this team preserved and strengthened the Alienware brand into the phenomenon it is today. Alienware is THE PC gaming leader with countless industry firsts, from introducing the world’s first liquid cooling desktops to the launch of the first gaming notebook. Alienware has defined the PC Gaming industry we know and love today.

A few years ago, the XPS team was adopted into our family and the team grew the product line to be the envy of the PC industry. For our most recent feat, we launched our G Series mainstream gaming line and merged our gaming businesses under one unified strategy. Today, our overall gaming businesses combined tops over $3 billion in revenue! This success is a result of all of you and your passion for gaming and building the best products and experiences for our customers.

For a company to have three brands in pole position in our highly competitive industry is an amazing achievement. I couldn’t be more proud, but most of all, I’m incredibly thankful. We’ve built awesome things together, but more importantly, we’ve helped each other grow into exceptional employees, leaders and generally awesome people. We’ve built the best brands in the industry because we are the sum of the best people, performing at our best, and in the best jobs for each of us.

So, yes, leaving is hard. But I do so with confidence knowing the talent here is the industry’s best and will take this business even farther.

I love what we’ve built together. I’ll always be cheering for you. It’s been an incredible journey together. Thank you for every bit and byte of it. #1T1D (One Team. One Dream.)

Love,
Frank

https://na.alienwarearena.com/ucf/show/2048661/boards/gaming-news/News/a-message-from-frank-azor

 

Hmmm...

 

Maybe now they can go back to being awesome at building amazing laptops and good desktops again. Been a long time. They need someone like me or @Johnksss with ultimate discretionary authority directing the business of the Alienware brand and saying no to all of the utter nonsense. Maybe when hell freezes over.

Should be interesting to see what kind of gamerboy wuss will replace him. They'll probably find a juvenile RGB junky that knows nothing about PC awesomeness and will do the work of a token yes-man GM for way less money. Or, maybe they'll just replace the Alienware line-up with similarly crippled XPS high-end consumer-grade Macbook clone garbage and call it a day.

 

I have waited for this a long time. His leagacy... Soldered ram and soldered WIFI as goodbye for the majority of todays Alienware gaming laptops. Yeah, it was on time. If he have continued in his job he would most likely worked hard with his engineers to make ready for welded on storage for coming Alienware's. Equal what he did for the new XPS 13 7390 notebook who in short is nothing more than a smartphone but in bigger package.

Not that I think Dell will do it different now as he jump of the ship. Because he have already put his approved stamp (his leagacy) on how tomorrow's Alienware notebooks has to be. See... Nothing will change!

I don't see this will happen. Too much is already destroyed.... Just look at the pict from the inside of latest Alienware's


And no Ram Slots... They took all too much space in the 17 inch notebook chassis. And the MB all too small for more than soldered chips...


Edit.


Frank Azor leaves Dell notebookcheck.net | 2019/06/25

 

Yes. This is why I said...

...when pigs fly.

 

What if Azor was the one that brought back LGA into the Area 51m? What if Frank is the only one fighting the good fight against the bean counters all along, giving blood and bone in concessions just to keep things Alienware alive?

Who else at AW will keep that fight going?

 

You think/mean he was forced by the bean counters going (full Apple) for solder ram chips and Wifi for the rest of the new AW gaming book line?

I don’t think rest of Dell’s new notebook line have everything welded on the MB

And how many of the other Dellbooks have soldered storage as coming Xpx 13 7390 ?

As the General Manger for Dell’s XPS line I expect he had some influence on this... https://www.notebookcheck.net/Opinion-What-on-earth-is-going-on-with-Dell-s-XPS-lineup.422865.0.html

“Dell's XPS lineup is supposed to be their flagship. Short for "Xtreme Performance System", Dell's website touts that the series is "designed to be the best". So why does it not feel that way anymore to me?”

“I feel like the XPS division is taking notes from Apple on how to take customers for granted and miscarry a product line.”

 

Frank has always been a tremendous help whenever it came to solving customer problems that were not being addressed in an appropriate manner by support. I've also heard good things about him from a couple of friends that are in the Alienware R&D section. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing for Alienware.

 

I think simple questions begging simple answers ignore the extremely complex problems involved, and without knowing first hand what happened - is happening - it's impossible to know what we don't know - every thing else is speculation, often myopic at best in focus on ones own limitations.

It's quite possible that fighting the good fight, and doing the right thing can be just as failure prone as not doing the right thing. Observing from the outside it looks like the best plans of mice and AW were led astray by failures of implementation.

You can't get something done right, unless you do it yourself - or train others how to do it the same. And, you can't exchange expertise between humans without the recipient of the training thinking that they can do it better, or easier, or what does it matter?

So many creations fail by not enough involved strictly following the "plan".

Applying paste the right way, putting the screws on in order, QA ignoring failures of tolerance, letting components out of spec slip through the process and none of those things being caught in the end by not doing complete system tests, all contribute to stellar potential falling to earth - going up in smoke. Or, the initial design is rushed and not "smoke" tested before approval, to save time to market.

There are many paths to failure or mediocre success.

A guy doesn't stick with it for 21 years thinking he's getting away with something, he's putting it out there - but needing to give in to the give and take - which also sucks away from the soul of success.

Watching AW consistently having success snatched from the jaws of disaster on every release shows just how difficult execution is even with everything and every resource working toward a positive end goal.

Then you have all the entitled buyers with more money than sense enabling the whole mess. Real success comes from training the user community, giving them expectations that are realistic, and being open and communicative above and beyond. That is the behavior I recall from Frank...

Frank may or may not have been a hero, but what we see is what happens when a heroic effort meets reality. To have the drive to keep that going for 21 years is heroic, even if the results weren't always allowed to be so.

It is also easy to be so wrong about something that seems so right that it paints failure on success time after time, because it doesn't meet one's own selfish desires. Pushing for success for others dreams is as important as pushing for success of ones own dreams. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Frank doesn't need to worry about AW any longer...

 

I doubt anyone at Dell will listen to you and Johnksss and will continue to push BGA clowns to make you responsible. Why waste time on Dell when smaller PC company from US/China will listen to customers or experts and make BGA which is powerful and less expensive because no throttling algorithms need to be implemented because they have proper hardware thus making less reliant on SW.

People should know that small factor hits the practical thermal headroom limits even though Intel docs say 45W even on 10 year Quad core chips. Maybe in next 5-6 years new management at Dell will use proper hardware rather than SW tricks.

Goodbye Frank Azor.....
I hope he doesn't join Clevo or any other desktop mobo manufacturers to implement throttling crap.

 

OMG... if he joins Clevo, then PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING THAT IS HOLY AND SOCKETABLE:

Start your own TRUE Highend Gaming Notebook Brand! @Prema @Mr. Fox @Johnksss @ajc9988 @iunlock and the rest of the LGA community

Sent from my Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (Oxygen) using Tapatalk

 

Clevo BGA with AW logo.

 

Cut that guy some slack!

It's not easy for a founder to remain in his company after it has become part of a larger corporate entity.
He put his head on the line by returning his brand to the LGA roots and took a lot of heat from both sides for it.
The hardware design errors where not his, but he was as open and helpful as their corporate lawmakers let him be while fighting the good fight.

Happy 4th of July Frank Azor, you picked the right time for your Independence Day Celebrations!

 

To be fair to him, the Area 51M was a step in the right direction - just a poorly executed one. I'm more interested in who at MSI is responsible for the GT76 having a BGA GPU. The whole industry is going in that direction unfortunately, and one man can't make a huge difference.

 

These are my experiences as well. He took the time to listen to my concerns and issues. Arranged support and put me in contact directly with some team members. They were all a great help in my opinion. Kinda sad to see him go but wishing him the best of luck in his future endevours!

Regarding the direction of Alienware. I am by far not seeing some of the changes as such a negative thing as some other forum members and each and everyone have different needs and views. The soldered ram was/is not for me. But people shouldnt forget that they have the numbers of what user want. Their sales have increased tremendously from the numbers that I saw the past couple of years so they must do something right.

 

rumor is he is joining AMD

 

A rumor...

Exclusive: Frank Azor Joins AMD As Chief Gaming Officer
By Usman Pirzada
2 hours ago
https://wccftech.com/frank-azor-joins-amd/

"...Frank has mentioned that he will be leaving Dell on the third of July so we should see the official announcement from AMD sometime after that date. [This is a developing story and may be updated intermittently.]"

 

Nah, let's hope he goes to Razer, where he belongs. Can't do much damage there! LMAO!

 

From what I saw of Frank from the Area 51m till the new m15 r2 and m17 r2 he was just a figure head. He straight up didn't know there were no ram slots in the R2 models. So really all he did was make appearances and talk at shows. But, like @Mr. Fox I'm worried who will replace him? Because we could do worse. Umar Khan would be even worse. He knows what's going on but he just lies about things without a second thought. That's grade A management material right there. And that's someone a company would want. Someone looking to prove themselves and not care about hiding the truth from a customer.

At this point I'm waiting for the R2 Area 51m coming next year with everything soldered on. These guys are taking a pretty big step back from what even the last year laptops were like. Let alone from the good old days. Hopefully I'm wrong. . .but when you expect the worst then you can never be disappointed, but you can be impressed.

 

Time to celebrate AW fans, hopefully they can find a lead guy that’s more consumer friendly and get their mojo back.
While they have been on the right track ( sort of) with the new products the practice of soldering hardware really pissed off a lot of loyal customers.
It might take a while because they “new” line of laptops won’t be replaced for a while but with a little hope I wish they find a guy to get back on the right track.

 

I hope he doesn't takeover Ryzen and Navi to BGA levels. As a gamer oriented expertise he will do good for AMD's PR. Maybe we'll see AMD 39xx on A51 MII!??

 

Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. We don't know what we don't know. But, at the end of the day the brand is dead to many of us that once appreciated it. Romanticizing based on fond memories of a dead entity won't fix the problems. I won't pretend to know what happened on the inside, but what happened on the outside cannot be forgotten, ignored or dismissed. The problems relating to core values began long before they started to surface in poor decisions relating to hardware selection. Merely selecting the right components wasn't enough in 2012 and it wasn't enough in 2019. Skunks do not change their stripes, and hoping they will is pointless when you understand that they are incapable of doing so. Poor execution isn't unique to their laptops. Their desktops are equally cursed. The issues are much larger than Frank Azor. They are entrenched at a corporate level.

 

You said it! +1.
At the end of the say, impressive hardware is limited by improper cooling, more soldered junk, more proprietary slots which will be deprecated and waste of time. Year 2017+ are the years of Open hardware initiatives and people don't like closed sources....
Anyway, what's happened is already past and we must look at the present. I won't touch any Dell stuffs and would be happy in investing in Ryzen based laptops or older Thinkpads or Zbook refurbs which will suit my needs. Spending 3000$+ with inferior firmware, hardware mods, time invested etc.. aren't worth for me.

 

Cutting people slack is appropriate. That's the right thing to do. Cutting the company some slack isn't. At the end of the day, Frank was a pawn, whether he was drinking the Dellienware Kool-Aid as an architect of their garbage, or not.

Those of us that have to live and work in a large corporate environment know what I am talking about. What customers want and expect only matters to the extent that it affects the bottom line, and you give them just enough to set the hook. Giving them what they actually want and expect isn't in the cards. You give them part of what they want and try to give the appearance that you are presenting a product that is exactly what they want, or the lesser of the evils available for them to choose from. The latter is how it generally works out today, as we are surrounded by varying degrees of garbage in the notebook landscape. Excellence doesn't really exist and we have to pick our poison.

It's up to the consumer to decide what they are willing to put up with. Some are informed and lower their standards accordingly. Some are unwilling to compromise. Some don't have a clue and they are just in love with a brand... and, these are the ones we all need to worry about. They ruin everything for the rest of us.

Seems like not a good thing for AMD. It certainly calls their intelligence into question. If he was just a token leader serving as cog in the wheel, taking orders from the top and the crippled garbage wasn't his fault, maybe it will turn out OK. If he had the right ideas and vision, but was hog-tied and not allowed to do what he knew was right, it might even turn out good if he is allowed to execute on doing awesome things. But, if he was one of the master minds behind the garbage, probably won't end well. There's too much we don't know about him or what he might do without the dark cloud of mediocrity looming overhead. I guess time will tell.

 

oh beautiful, two opposite worlds crashing together:

AMD on one side who go out of their way to make their hardware backwards compatible in terms of cpu sockets, for example.

and frank azor whos turned his back on ANYthing upgradeable to make the perfect disposable trash machine.

but, of course, AMD now wants to take on big blue, so they gotta change everything they did before, amirite?!?!

so....whats next? BGA desktops? exclusive from AMD? "oh look its SO small and THIN, ZOMG! I can hide it behind my big curved screen so I can show off to my gamerboy buddies! totally worth it that i cant upgrade ANYthing, not even storage, wifi or ram! yay!"

geez....give us a break already!

Sent from my Xiaomi Mi Max 2 (Oxygen) using Tapatalk

 

" Looks like AMD took a leaf out of Intel’s book and went out on a talent hunt of its own, managing to grab Alienware Co-Founder, Vice President and General Manager, Frank Azor.

Frank had been with Alienware/Dell for almost 25 years and this is a big score for AMD as the wealth of experience Frank will bring to the table will surely be something the company can make good use of. I have also been informed that Frank Azor will be joining as Chief Gaming Officer.

Frank Azor, Co-Founder of Alienware, joins AMD as Chief Gaming Officer
My source tells me Frank Azor will be reporting to Sandeep Chennakeshu, EVP of Computing and Graphics Business Group at AMD.

Frank is a well-known force in the gaming community and had recently tweeted and posted the following on his alienwarearena page, announcing his departure from Alienware and Dell. While he had talked about the next challenge, he hadn’t revealed any details. Now that we know he will be joining AMD as Chief Gaming Officer, we can’t wait to see what he will be working on."
https://wccftech.com/frank-azor-joins-amd/

Apparently the people that matter, that have the money and pay for people to work for them, aren't worried about Frank's past efforts and actually consider his experience valuable...

The BGA / LGA thing isn't even thought of let alone considered. Form and function dictate design, and designers consider that people don't want huge hulking laptops that generate hurricane levels of noise under full performance.

I don't think anyone that matters enough to affect change in the laptop manufacturing life cycle cares enough to make LGA laptops any more, and being long suffering over it isn't going to change it. Frank may have been the last one at AW that could and would fight for it.

If you want them to be built and work as you want them to you are going to have to build them yourselves, and then try to figure out how to sell them well enough to pay for the development and manufacturing costs. If there isn't a market for a product it can't be made profitably.

If anything Frank probably was the guy that held together the vision of AW huge hulking laptops that generate hurricane levels of noise under full performance, but had to compromise those ideals to fit into what customers are willing to buy.

 

It’s called payback time. Azor was one of very few that put AMD’s hardware into their products outside Apple.

Still no need go fully Apple and solder WiFi and ram chips so people is forced to buy the most expensive models. If they don’t customize with max ram they are screwed with what they got.

2 out of 3 Alienware’s is with fully soldered package. How many of Dell’s other models have soldered on ram chips? And how many doesn’t have WiFi slot?

Maybe same reason Alienware said before? First gen of AW’s BGA books hadn’t raid options. Dell said gaming-books don’t need such features

 

Frank used many thousands (millions? billions?) of times more Intel CPU's in builds than AMD CPU's, and likely as not Intel could have offered Frank a lot more compensation with similar challenges and opportunities as AMD.

Perhaps Frank saw Intel as being in bad way right now and wanted to build with AMD instead of Intel.

Frank made the smart choice.

 

I'll definitely take one for the road, the last of the AW laptop, Alienware Area-51M. RIP Alienware. Frank will be missed.

 

Or Maybe unlocked BIOS and 2667MHz+ XMP RAM options will be MIA as well!

 

You forgot add in “getting all power from an single 330W psu”. For now, power capped at around 240/260W. You see... Dell won’t let you get full power out from single 330w

Some prefer bring with them only a single power adapter for maximum portability. They won’t get everything out from their purchase.

 

Yes, but not so sure AMD made a smart choice with his hire.

Look at his current reputation with the enthusiast laptop community. We all acknowledge what alienware was at one point. Sure, we all know Dell basically came in, OEMed the boards, cut costs on production, when they could have saved costs AND kept the premium and reputation of Alienware brand intact, etc.

We also saw Frank tow the company line when these changes were made and consumers lashed out, critiquing hard the changes made.

Regardless of if it was his call or not, due to his position and public commentary, the community sees him as part of the issue. His brand was sullied as Dell sullied the Alienware brand, if I am to speak frankly on this.

Hence why we now see fears related to WHY AMD hired him and what position he will be in, or in other words, what purpose he serves within the company. If it is for OEM and community contacts, to help get AMD chips into more devices, then AMD did it for the right reason, so long as there is no disruption on what the community wants. And if he can talk OEMs into doing socketed implementations of the desktop CPUs and APUs, like the rumored 35W chips, the 65W chips, and even talk like MSI to do a 105W variant like they did for the 9900K, then he will have served a great purpose.

But, the truth is, as Mr. Fox said, we don't know what we don't know. Due to his brand being tarnished, this translates into fears on what this may bring moving forward. Those fears are valid until more information arises to quell those fears, whether it be through explaining his role or him taking stances contrary to what people see as his legacy with the destruction of the alienware brand under dell, which then would harm his purpose if his purpose is to help get AMD into more OEM builds.

 

Forget that feature because its engineered by design to work that way.

But none look at NbR community and all of them see us as a bunch of whiners who cannot afford 6-10k$ laptop that performs worse than our old laptop with superior hardware cooling and less SW tricks.

 

It’s on firmware level. I mean those higher up at Alienware said they should look at it and see if they could raise the power cap limits. But nothing has happened as you know the last months.

Dell’s engineers is probably afraid we will see more smoke and burning come if you is able to utilize the maximum power from a single Dell power adapters via 1 of the 2 power connectors.

 

The word Look means they will keep looking at people's request but will not be made into #1 priority list.

 

I agree. Using BGA garbage in laptops is one thing. Bad enough by itself, and reason enough for me to say no to the filth. But, throwing the baby out with the bath water and going full retard BGA on everything is inexcusable. But, I am done caring about laptops now. They are all dead to me and I don't give a rat's butt about any of them. Cheap junk or good older laptops that I can buy dirt cheap are all I am interested in. I am not wasting any more money on expensive mobile rubbish. It's just not worth it. I only need mobile garbage for web browsing and email, and as long as it has a keyboard and doesn't rely on a slimy crap touch screen, and has a fairly decent display, that's all I need it for. ChromeOS and Linux are perfect for this, too. No need to waste money on Windows junk for mobile.

Maybe he just got tired of working there and found an opportunity to make more money working somewhere else. In this case, AMD. That's principally all that matters to most people, including me. Money talks, baloney walks. As long as the work environment isn't overly caustic and benefits are reasonable, money is absolutely the most important thing. Almost nothing else matters in the grand scheme of things. Believing in the products and services you offer is certainly very nice to have, but it's not nearly as important as doing what's best for #1 and the family. The only thing almost as important as money is not having an imbecile for a boss. (As they say, there are no bad jobs, only bad bosses.)

 

Regardless of what everyone is saying about Frank , I believe he tried his best and he gave his all on this last model of the Alienware laptop. I assume he probably knew he was leaving the company. He left the Alienware community on a good note IMO.

He tried his his best to satisfiy both side of the end user.

 

FYI. Last model of the Alienware’s is the brand new Aw m15 and m17 r2 in the new Legend industrial design. You have seen those disasters? Both with soldered WiFi. Not even Razer went this route this time. Razer even used ram slots so you could upgrade your ram Btw. Have Alienwares new flagship Area-51m XMP support? What with the rest of Alienwares new models? I don't think they ever had for their models from the recent past (2015/19).


Edit.

Azor plays down job speculation, takes a cryptic swipe at AMD and Dell in the process notebookcheck.net | June 26, 2019

All sources point back to Wccftech, which claims to have received information from an anonymous source that Azor will report to Sandeep Chennakeshu, the EVP of the Computing and Graphics Business Group at AMD, as Chief Gaming Officer.

 

While effort is certainly important, at the end of the day results are what matter. We acknowledge effort, but reward results. That is not a popular way of doing things in a messed up culture where it is expected that everyone gets a trophy merely for participation. Thankfully, the old way is still (mostly) how things work in business. With respect to meeting customer expectations, this famous quote from Yoda applies.

 

I don't look at those m15 or m17. I'm saying specifically the Area-51M. You will never see me sporting those models.

The last Alienware I bought from Dell was the Alienware 18 .... And never looked on anything newer. Now I look at the Area-51M.

 

Frank, where is Alienware 15 with RTX? It died on your watch, and BTW I wonder how the soldered cr*p m15 R2 is selling

 

Will probably get hard competition from his other brand... From the thinner and slimmer coming XPS model with the old fashioned SODIMM and Wifi slot. Remember thinner and slimmer doesn't always mean you have to solder on everything of hardware on the MB. Yeah, 2 less screws for the new designed heatsink but at least can upgrade the ram As well the Wifi.

As you can see in the link.... Ride two horses is an very difficult task. This is nothing new. Treat your first born child worse than the other will never ever end good

 

I think Azor already resigned during m15 r2's. So, he can ask us to tag Umar khan.

Size Zero laptops.... Haha....

 

Sure, it's possible he had no choice regarding either the killing of AW 15, and the design of the m15 R2.

Perhaps that's why he quipped "you can even do some RAM upgrades on this bad boy" when presenting m15 R2.

 

Azor was one of the people who was there since Alienware's foundational roots, as I have mentioned many times here. When Alienware became a part of Dell, there was a contract that Dell would exercise the power slowly controlling top down of the Alienware product line from design to everything. And I always suspected the changes started when they went Private in 2013 followed by Haswell machines huge limits on the NVRAM BS, Fan tables, Secure flash, Power cap on the AW18 and the entire aesthetic design change from total MG Alloy to only the skeleton and the lid. Also remember how old laptops used to have the batteries with a latch and they just snap back in with a flip ? One Instant you get 0-100%. Look at the stupid trashbook pro design, damn soldered KB, touchpad, touchbar and Battery, speakers too WTF ?!

Apple happened, Intel was a stooge to Apple for they cash and served them the BGA processors for the damn whole time since when Apple moved away from Power uArch to x86. When the companies grow the businesses take over the engineering teams and dictate how the product should serve and function, look at the business reasons that Google gives on the nightmarish, Scoped Storage BS ( here devs voices, star if you care) which is a drastic change in the whole 10 years of Android history castrating the potential entirely by removing the Filesystem access. Same happened when the Chevron tool was giving access to the Windows Phone users to enable .cab/reg hacking, CEO sent a C&D to the developers and now repenting on that won't change a damn when the seed is corrupted. So all of that is dead, Companies (CrApple) lobby for anti-repair things and enforce so much of draconian control. Just have a look at the existing portable market and see how the I/O options are regressing, exactly how Apple dictated, the bs 2 port drama same copied, the bean counter managers are the worst here. Stripping away the control from our hands and fueled by the shills on YT and all media outlets, to make sure the subversion tactic is working.

So we might not know exact truth whether he is a lone crusader or not, but that AMA session where he mentioned LGA is crap and all the BS when brother Fox asked him, it was total blasphemy of the Alienware when the BGA Echo models started. Also becoming a mouthpiece for the Dell filthy tricks of the horrendous BGA Wifi card and Soldered RAM. So actions speak for them right ? What about that... those are crystal clear examples which came from them. Again, you die a hero or see yourself become the villain



And Actions speak louder than words, I will not believe that he was a lone crusader based off the Alienware steps and see these, Umar as second in command and doesn't know jack about their own product. I mean they are so delusional and so lost that their fat cheques are giving them reputation too. So I think the contract has been fully exercised now, the reason we saw the new M15/17 models having total BGA trash anti consumer cuckabomination and kick in the nuts worthless pile of kool-aid junk.

And honestly as for me, I don't give a damn. Alienware died after the 2013 to me. The BGA trash they went, and the A51M is just a reason to stay ahead in the game because Intel doesn't have proper processors which can scale well and don't have BS castration limits like all the 8950HK, 9980HK and all BS, unlike the rPGA Exteme MX/XM mobile chips from Haswell gen, fully unlocked and binned processors, plus the CFL-R heats up a lot and to cool in a die cooling with coldplate pressure on the awful tripod trash won't work, they need a high area which is where 9900K comes into and LGA with the massive IHS, So always used to milk the dumb customer to think they are getting a powerhouse but reality being robbed off the baseline itself . No one can help them, according to Dell 100C is normal too. Look here on the disaster that XPS is now from NBC

Under engineered rubbish JUNK, VRM limits. I mean using less components on the chipset, such cheap garbage moves. They fixed it how ? By pushing the VRMs to peak, thus will fail the HW eventually.

And for the DTR scene, It's dead to me. I don't care an inch now about this market It's filled with fanboys and shills all over youtube, fake reviews and mouthpiece to the corporate backs. Plus the mutated GPU MXM cards, how hard is it to make an MXM standard when MSI/Clevo/Dell are involved. The Quadro still using 3.0b perhaps Ngreedia still allows the "reference" design (BS excuse). A 4.0 revision slot would be great, but nope the damn A51M has a proprietary abomination which is half-baked and has no rigid PCIe slot instead uses those weird engineered cables which ONLY work on that machine has zero re-sale, secondary market is dead with that trash. Add that massive unoriginal ASUS type arse at back protruding to cheat without Z-Height and stupid I/O as well. That machine is inferior to my Ranger tbh. Clevo killed the P8 series because Nvidia didn't allow NVLink but why refresh 3 times with Z170 to Z370 and the MXM port/pin drama.

Still Clevo is better than all the junk because the P870 got from 6700K to 9900K, and doesn't have any BGA plus real cooling and proper Prema BIOS, plus the SATA ports and all. Without BS.

I'm done. It's all junk, middle finger to power users, So I'm moving off to the Desktop market where true journalism exists, like GN, HBU and freedom is still an essential backbone of that, a fully standardized PCIe slot. And removable CMOS, Flashback BIOS, Socketed Chips, Military class PCBs. Frigging no holding back, Longevity.

I mean the Z390 Dark can run Win7 forever so as ASUS boards and can run all games until 2020. I have the best games so many FPS, all archived. I will enjoy the best that Industry got for us rather the politically correct BS drama nowdays happening around all the damn games and movies etc. I will enjoy a few masterpieces that will come, perhaps like The Witcher 3, DOOM, Prey on that Simplix pack Win7 installation, Hopefully. Unfortunately to me the Ryzen 3000 doesn't have ASMedia chipset (So no Win7 drivers for USB, unless there will be a third party USB controller, unlikely due to the PCIe 4.0 options they give to OEMs alr) and using a repurposed half engineered active fan Hot chipset Matisse I/O die. And AMD is known to go well with M$ just like Intel in bed for colluding on killing the xHCI on the Win7 USB 3.0 and lack of drivers despite the official support. Adding to that even if adding a PCIe slot to the mobo for USB ports won't work because Zen arch needs constant updates, waiting for 7/7 to make the decision based off lot of variables. Ofc will use Win10 but not the always 6mo alpha stupid junk, LTSC for me.

All in all, Alienware is dead, a while back not just now. Oh how can we forget the horrendous failures in the Desktop arena.

 

I foresee Dell killing off the AW brand... As nice as the 51m is, I feel internally they have to see it is a failure with all the machines dying. The new machines are really stupid. Even Razer and other brands with tin and light are expandable. AW's new obscene obsession of thin and light is going to be there downfall. Replace a whole system board if ram or wifi fails. There is NO WAY they are cooling this with cryo3 or whatever. Also why they aren't offering 2080 in the 17mr2.. sad days... Im sure Umar will tag along behind frank

Sadly it seems Razer is the only innovator right now with vapor chamber in thin and light 17 and 4 fans to cool it.

 

Brother Prema, isn't that why the other AW founders created Origin PC after leaving AW?

 

If only the walls could talk. Would love to know what really happened. A potentially interesting story... one without a happy ending. But, at this point it's not relevant. What's done is done. Que será, será.

 

Gotta say I was surprised to hear this. Now in a few years we will find out if he did try and keep AW "at its roots" and if Dell was the one pushing all these decisions.

Area-51m might be my last AW laptop if all goes downhill and everything becomes BGA.

@Rengsey R. H. Jr. you will like the Area-51m. With a 1.3.2 or 1.5.0 BIOS and 200w 2080 vBIOS, it runs really well. Even without XMP support or a unlocked BIOS, the system performs quite well. Especially considering all the BGA stuff they've been producing all these years.

M18xR2 will always be the pinnacle of AW to me. I will keep mine til it dies.

Let's see how things go with AMD & Frank (is this a confirmed thing BTW?)

 

The only benefit I could see him at AMD is using his relationships in the field to bridge the gap between AMD and laptop oems and get us some new offerings.

That also means that AMD would actually have to want that market. I've finally got a few grand laying around and basically only the helios 500 is in the market.

I'd like to get something that dwarfs everything in my ranger, that's also AMD powered.