Alienware M17 *OFFICIAL* Owner's Lounge

FIRST POST

Hello just ordered the other the day. Specs below and if anyone can chime in on the best 64 bit video editing software that is reliable on the M17 it would be great.


[1] M17

Video/Graphics Card: Dual 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3870 - CrossFireX™ Enabled!
Processor: Intel® Core™2 P8400 2.26GHz (3MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
Design & Display: Black Skullcap Design
Chassis: 17-Inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 LCD (1200p) with Clearview Technology
Keyboard Options: Illuminated Keyboard – Alienware Exclusive Design - Astral Blue
Operating System (Office software not included): Windows Vista® Home Premium (64-bit Edition) with Service Pack 1
Notebook Tuners and Remotes: Internal Digital / Analog (ATSC) TV Tuner with Adapter
Memory: 4GB« Dual Channel DDR3 SO-DIMM at 1066MHz – 2 x 2048MB

System Drive: Single Drive Configuration - 500GB 7,200RPM (16MB Cache) w/ Free Fall Protection
Optical Drives : Dual Layer Blu-ray Disc Reader (BD-ROM, DVD±RW, CD-RW )
Wireless Network Card: Internal Wireless b/g (Full Mini-Card)
Sound Card : Internal High-Definition Audio with Surround Sound
Warranty: 3-Year AlienCare Onsite Service and 24/7 Toll-Free Phone Support


Scott

 

The black slip the laptop was in you mean?

And can i spray some water on a cloth and wipe it off or will that kill the screen?

 

Hi and welcome.

Congrats with a very nice laptop

 

dont get the ram and hard drive from AW buy them off of newegg and save 350 dollars

no it shouldnt, but i think it would smear it. Your better off with micro fiber cloth



i use that it works its soft enough to scratch and pull the dust off and its always on hand

 

Big problem. my vsync is on and i can find out why it's on. i looked in ccc and in all the games i play and still no solution. i had Win7 drivers and then i up'd to 9.1 and still no solution.

 

I believe Sony will be releasing Sony Vegas 64-Bit.

 

Can we Buy more of the Alienware Sleev ?

 

Hello all,

First post here. Good to see many M17 owners. I got mine this year and it's a beast. I was lucky not to have any of the issues I was reading prior to buying it. I was crossing my fingers actually, and it worked out flawlessly. Now my system has 2 harddrives and dual boots Ubuntu and Vista. Pretty awesome.

By the way, if anyone has issues with the dual boot send me a note, it wasn't too bad to getting Ubuntu working.

Cheers comrades!

 

Thanks for the tip mr.moo, worked perfectly!

 

Sry for OT but what was the name of this tool where you can see how fast your HDD is?

Greetings
Julian

 

HDtune. http://www.hdtune.com/

 

THX

Greetings
Julian

 

Hi all, sorry for the noob post directly to this thread, but I shortly expect to be an M17 owner (once I clarify what I want to order + awaiting 4870 release), and I have a few questions which I haven't been able to answer reading the last 100+ pages of this thread.

Obviously I'll get the minimum RAM and upgrade myself.

Does anyone know the make / model of the SSD device used in these (256 or 128), and ideally some performance figures for the drives in RAID 0? I'm not sure whether to get the 256 x 2 SSDs in RAID 0 or 500GB 7200 HDD's. I move a lot of data around (video mainly, but also VMs), so depending on the generation / model of the SSDs it may not be worth upgrading to the SSD now (OCZ Vertex drives looking very appealing, and I doubt the AW drives are Vertex of Apex).

Can the optical drive be swapped out under warranty (I can also get a blu-ray slimline drive for far less than the £200 option at AW), and does the bezel fit on standard slimline SATA drives, or do I need a specific manufacturers?

Thanks for any info you can give.

 

Used it and got this:

Alienware M17 with 2x Seagate 7200.3 Raid0



Are this good results? (I only saw non Raid)

Greetings
Julian

 

the SSD drives are Samsung IIRC, which apparently aren't notably good. the optical drive, no clue if it's exempt from the warranty-voided-rule. still, shouldn't be that hard to remove again if something goes wrong.

 

I guess this helps you

How to Guids by Alienware

Greetings
Julian

 

Thanks Julian, I spotted these before, but AW don't supply details on how to save money by buying for other suppliers. Actually swapping the drive is not a problem, my concern is whether the AW drive bezel will fit a standard SATA replacement (I assume so, but wanted to check). The how-to guides deal with swapping the drive, assuming you are provided a replacement identical / approved drive by AW.

 

we have got one m17 owner that has ordered 2 256gb ssd from AW and he is waitign his and he is the only one i know of that ordered them im waiting o see

 

Hey guys can someone tell me what kind of connection this is? Seems like coax? Hmmm not sure..its next to the power supply connector.

 

yes it is coaxial

 

Thats for TV's right? Is that default in an M17? As i did not order it as extra?

What can i do with it?

 

nothing its just there. unless you got the tuner its useless.......

 

Meh ok Thanks for the reply

 

Well it doesn't look like you will be able to take advantage of some of the read speeds above 1.5 Gb/s. The more info link on the config page says that it uses SATA 1.5 Gb/s (150 Mb/s) vs SATA II 3.0 Gb/S (300 Mb/s). Any chance does anyone know if this is bogus?

 

No School For Me Tommorow!

 

why? ???????? im jealious?

 

it's snowing in CT. and i think these are sata 1.5Gb/s

 

man i miss the snow lol..

 

Lol you use to live up here?

Nice review
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/new...is-big-black-and-ribbed-for-your-pleasure.ars

 

i live in lousiana hasnt snowed in 3 years here and before that 5 years .... but i did live in NC for 14 years and we got 2 foot of snow one time it was awsome

 

Its nice to experience snow sometimes.

 

True but living in Colorado I am ready to experience some SUMMER!

opps, back on topic... CONGRATS NEW M17 OWNERS!

 

Can anyone confirm this, does the M17 only support SATA I? This is a concern for me, and certainly makes the SSD options almost worthless over the 500GB 7200rpm drives...

 

im pretty sure it uses both, but without running ssd's you will never ever get near that 300/150 MB marker. you will however get past it on a burst rate. even in raid we still dont hit the 150MB mark....

 

Halo breaking 150MB sustained on 320GB RAID 0,

If the 320s in RAID 0 manage to break 150, then then 500s will do even better (that said, the 150MBps is per disk, so still not a restriction with the HDDs).

As I mentioned, I am considering a pair of Vertex / Apex SSDs, and these can do over 150MB/s write, over 200MB/s read, so I'd very much prefer to not be limited by the controllers (plus when future faster drives come out, then I would like an upgrade path).

Still, the question really is what performance do the AW SSDs actually get? At £400 per disk for the 256GB ones, they are a lot cheaper than retail OCZ drives, and if they can regularly max out 150MBps SATA I (in both directions), then it may be worth it, even if there is no upgrade path in the future.

 

oh, im sorry
300MB= 2 sata 3.0 drives hitting 300mb
150mb= 2 sata 1.5 drives hitting 150mb

ocz 256 gb ssd drive (1)
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showpost.php?p=347461&postcount=11

and im pretty sure that's without advanced performance enabled...

 

Thank you very mutch!

Why is the last picture a "disapointment"?

Greetings
Julian

 

not really sure....

 

Hm ... ok other topic^^



I'll call AW today (hope I have the time, still in school) and tell them they send me the wrong lid ... but I am not sure whether I should send it in and let it chance or just stay with the riplay desine ...

I wish I never had seen how great the ripley loos ...

Greetings
Julian

 

tough call there...9 out of ten times aw will want you to send it in so they can take care of it...but things may have change....

 

At least you understand where the bottlenecks are with any of these systems. Getting the fastest possible hard drive should be everyone's priority where speed is important. I just think SSD may be a waste of money without the SATA II controller. Would be nice if they upgraded this with the new ATI cards. If they do I'll be ordering one.

 

Exactly, SATA I is a real concern. My hope is that the pop-up you have attached a pic of is a legacy thing that AW put together a long time ago, when SATA first came out for laptops, and they simply have not updated it since...

It seems odd that OCZ would have had a range of SSD drives for a while (even the older SOLID series are SATA II as they can do more than 150MBps read), yet still not supported it in the whitebook...

If I could get the full benefit of 2x OCZ Vertex (RAID 0), this would make a truly stunning machine...

BTW, did I see someone mention an AW Approved OCing bios coming out soon (if you have the Extreme procs only I assume)? I'd be getting the X9100, and at stock it would be good enough, but these have been seen stable at 3.33, or even 3.5....

 

hey wait a minute...now how is it the ocz whitebook has a sata II controller and the AW doesn't? and they are both the same machine?? or we're the ocz people in error?

 

i dont know if this helps

 

well thank you dondadah88!!
i knew i wasn't crazy.

sata 2 controller right there big as day.

 

No problem. but there is a external sata on this to so iknow if there talking about that.

 

hummm, your right...that could be up for scrutinizing.....

 

I thought about that also and it's always possible.

 

I would bet the JMicron JMB360 is e-sata.

According to drivershq.com it is the e-sata controller. No one here with SSD and the M17?

 

So FU#!..

Let me get that out of the way first.

I was playing WOW on the couch friday night and noticed some extreme lagging while I was in the middle of a 5 man instance. I'm thinking windows update? indexing? ? It stops after a few minutes and everything seems fine.

Saturday the same thing happens again.. flying around the storm peaks in wow it all of a sudden starts lagging bad. Check my temps cards are running at 77 which is fine i suppose (i've seen higher reported temps on this forum). I'm noticing that my power button led is switching from blue to orange and back to blue. My charging led is blinking on..than off.. than on.. again.. ? power brick? I look at my power icon and it's set to perforamce as usual but it to is swithing from plugged in and charging to plugged in and not charging to not plugged in. FUK!

So things just go from bad to worse and after a few reboots it wont even reboot. Press the power button and it turns orange and the charing led just blinks.

So I open up the back and and remove the slave card and thing boots right up and works just fine.


Sooo.. this puts me in a awkward postion as far as warranty. The laptop is only a few months old. I work and game on my laptop. I use it pretty much 24/7. I'm in IT and i have alot of remote networks to admin so I can't be without a laptop even for a day.

Ideally i'd like to call Roswell and have a new card cross shipped.

Yeah.. some how i dont think thats how the conversation is going to go.