The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Alienware Upgradeability

    Discussion in 'Alienware' started by shawngt2, Nov 12, 2009.

  1. shawngt2

    shawngt2 Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    8
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Hi Everyone, I'm thinking of purchasing my first Alienware and have a question concerning component upgrades.

    I price out my m15x and of course would like to have top notch of everything, but the price just gets insane. I believe the internals are Clevo correct? If that's true then this should mean that the processor, video card, etc. are upgradable? Then I would just get the base things and update later when the prices of the components come down.

    Hope someone can clarify this for me.
     
  2. TecznologY

    TecznologY Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    26
    Messages:
    57
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    From what I've been reading you should be able to upgrade most of it.

    More difficult to upgrade would be the graphics card and perhaps finding another CPUs, but hard drives and ram should be quite easy.

    In my case with the M17x I learnt that it might be a good idea to get both hard drives and graphic cards from start, because when you don't, they don't give you, in case of the hard drives I think the bay to install the second one, and the graphic cards they don't give you the SLI connector. But I'm not sure if you would have any similar problems with the m15x.
     
  3. ZackB

    ZackB Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    4
    Messages:
    131
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    You can request the second set of harddrive mounts from Dell and they will ship them out to you. I did and it didn't cost me anything but a phone call. You can also order an sli connector through dell for how ever much they cost, probably at the customary Dell 40% markup of course :) Though I don't think SLI video cards are possible on the M15x, I think dual video cards is an M17x only feature while the M15x has the i7.
     
  4. TecznologY

    TecznologY Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    26
    Messages:
    57
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Yeah, apart from that issue he should be fine upgrading the components.
     
  5. EviLCorsaiR

    EviLCorsaiR Asura

    Reputations:
    970
    Messages:
    2,674
    Likes Received:
    144
    Trophy Points:
    81
    I've put in bold the statements which are wrong there. The M15x, which is what he's talking about, has ONE hard drive bay and ONE video card.

    In terms of its upgradeability...Complete. RAM, hard drive, graphics card and processor are all upgradable. Finding a better graphics card for it would be very difficult so just go with the 260M from the start. Better processor may be hard to find as well.
     
  6. ZackB

    ZackB Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    4
    Messages:
    131
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    Sorry Evil. I had no idea that the M15 only had one HDD bay as well :( LAME...