Alienware - Was it intended to be NVIDIA orientated from its design since times of M17XR3 M18XR1 M14X ?

Just looked at the nvidia wallpapers purely accidental while I had green backlit set on all zones on my m18xR2 and then copped on to the nvidia logo and the front grills of my laptop, they seem to follow some sort of similar pattern, curve, and especially when in green it does catch my eye so much

what do you think?

Especially now new AW14 AW17 AW18 they now are finally off the AMD wagon so totally green, but no more anything to do with old nvidia-like front grill design ...

throw here what's on your mind

 

Alienware does look good in green, but also in red... Here's my take on your question:

No, I don't believe Alienware was ever intended to be married to NVIDIA. What company they partner with is decided based on a simple fact: money (revenue). NVIDIA controls approximately 62% of the market, AMD controls about 34%. AMD's market share has been steadily decreasing over the past few years. This decision to partner with NVIDIA was made based upon data, and the fact that it was no longer in Dell's best interest to proceed with AMD for the Alienware lineup.

Spoiler

You can find data all over the web to corroborate this information. Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD are all public companies. All of their financial data is available to the public. AMD is now focusing on a new venture with Mantle and other innovative technologies improving on their processors, which is leading them toward greater market capitalization. Estimations are being made that by Summer 2014, AMD will have control of at least 40% of the market. However, the green vs red war has just begun. There is no end in the foreseeable future.

The decision to stick with NVIDIA was one that was made to save and earn money. The new Alienware lineup wasn't attractive to many owners of Alienware systems in the beginning. Launching an entirely new design is risky because you can potentially lose customers, with hopes of finding new ones. It's only now starting to grow on some individuals. If they had launched their systems with AMD chips, it may have only made things worse, considering AMD's history with Alienware (e.g. service requests and issues with driver support). They wanted to minimize the damage for the introduction of their new lineup, and NVIDIA allows them to do just that.

I'm assuming once AMD releases Mantle, Alienware may consider adding them back into the arena. Until then, I can only speculate as to when and if that will happen. My personal opinion on this is that not having AMD products in their systems means they are potentially missing out on approximately 40% of the market. It may be more of a risk to partner with AMD, but in doing so, they will have potentially reopened a previously closed door to 40% of the gamers out there. This means increased revenue and market capitalization for Alienware and both NVIDIA and AMD.

We'll see what Michael Dell does this year. I hope things change, I really do. Customer support/service should be improved as well. He said it was most important aspect of the company, and I hope he lives up to his word on improving it.

 

I agree with J.Dre for the most part. The 40% number is probably pretty darned close to accurate for market share, but keep in mind that market share does not represent a percentage of happy customers that would buy AMD again. I suspect the number of satisfied customers that wanted to roll the dice on another set of red cards is something less. Things have ranged from mediocre to dismal for mobile AMD for a couple of GPU generations. The last truly excellent mobile red product I have owned is ATI 5870M CrossFire.

I suspect they lost so much money on 7970M failures, had so many unhappy customers, together with the fact that AMD had absolutely nothing new to offer at the time of the new product launch that it did not make any sense to consider AMD as a viable option for an Alienware gaming beast in this latest release. They could have released the new product line with 7970M, but that would have meant a continuation of dealing with reliability issues and they would have found themselves needing to provide extended service and support for an end of life GPU.

This doesn't mean they won't have a product refresh with a red option in the near future. In large part, that might depend on AMD and what, if anything, they bring to the table. I would really like to see them pull out of their tailspin and give NVIDIA some serious competition in the mobile GPU arena. Not sure the new R-series is a good answer to that on the mobile landscape if it has serious temperature issues like the desktop counterpart. We need something extra killer to keep NVIDIA on their toes. This would be a win for everyone.

 

heh, you folks looked in bit too hard in to the title

what about leave the marketing out of this and just have a look at the big picture, does the front grill design not feel like inspired by nVidia?

 

Pretty striking resemblance with the color scheme and grille pattern matching the wallpaper.

 

Well, it almost makes me think that the designer(s) who worked at the looks of the line of these alienware models were really inspired by the looks of nVidia logo shapes and curves and likes, but its not direct a mirror of the NV logo design as that would be like badging the product of nVidia only, trademark violation crap, which can not happen as it wasnt nVidia-only based product and so on just a wild thought I let out there, coz nobody knows for sure and hard to say if we will ever know (not that anybody really cares to know haha)

 

AMD's GPU *hardware* continues to be awesome (as is Nvidia's), but I've seen NOTHING since 1998 to change the fact that Nvidia just does better drivers than everyone else. I sort of feel like everyone else JUST figured this out or something, what with the microstutter and fact their notebook drivers are a decade behind Nvidia's, but it's like that's really been the case all along...

 

You say that but nvidia can still write drivers that kill your chip lol.

Hopefully we get a strong return from AMD since no one wants nvidia to have a monopoly.

 

Maybe that was just NVIDIA's unofficial attempt at euthanasia for the old NVIDIA cards that are still going strong.

 

Are consumers really that loyal to either red or green? I would think at this level of performance, people would be more concerned with what runs better. I wanted AMD originally purely from a cost perspective and that it could do Eyefinity as well, but that was pretty much it. There were a lot of problems with the previous AMD offering so we'll see if people go back (most probably would if it's much cheaper)...

With the new display port daisy chaining, maybe eyefinity isn't as important...not too sure since I don't see any games I play allowing me to change the resolution for even 2 screens.

 

Some are are pretty die hard, but I think most don't really care about red or green. The AMD fanboys always make an argument based on price and the NVIDIA fanboys always argue based on quality, drivers, etc. I have been tickled with 580M, 680M and 780M based entirely on what they have delivered, but I don't really care about GPU brand and price is a secondary concern. I'm looking for performance and reliability more so than price. I am only loyal to a brand to the extent that it gives me what I want.

I view it as a matter of self-centered utility with little room for allegiance to a brand name. I was a loyal ATI customer for many years exclusively because their products served me extremely well. I turned my back on them based on my recent lackluster experience with their products. If they eventually release something decidedly better--price being largely irrelevant in my definition of "value"--I will turn my back on NVIDIA in the blink of an eye. As I used to say fairly often, "the best GPU is the one that runs the fastest and lives long enough to tell the story." The secret here (learning from my own examples of being foolish) is to not have a knee-jerk reaction to new products that seem to be better looking at specs. An extremely powerful stock GPU that sucks at overclocking, has a short lifespan and lousy driver support might be pretty impressive at launch, but quickly loses its shine once reality sets in and it starts to get its hind end torn up on the battle field by overclockers.

 

Performance here, I used to be pretty much ATI due to value but these days it matters less to me.

 

But Alienware didn't design that look, that was the Dell XPS laptop line. After the buy out Dell renamed the XPS to Alienware and they look nothing like the original designs from the AW team (based on Clevo/Sager laptops back then).

Being a longtime AW customer I thought Dell released some of the most god-awful tacky looking things ever. I held out on my upgrade as long as I could but ended up with a M17x (R1).

I do like the toned down look on the latest series (and have the 14).