Complain about Motherboard Issue M9750?

I was thinking about the problem with the m9750 that all its users have, and that is that it only supports 2.5Gbs of Ram. Is it possible to complain to Alienware about this and get some sort of deal from it since Alienware says on its website that the m9750 supports 4Gbs of Ram? Has anyone tried this? Can we get a new motherboard from Alienware that will support more Ram that isn't necessarily for the m9750? I bought this with the intention of sticking 4Gb of Ram in.

 

Nope....the tech is too old and the m9750 is being replaced with the m17x. Yeah, it is sort of false advertising for them to quote 4GM workable ram, but I don't know if you can coerce a deal out of them. Probably the best anyone could do is get them to lower the price of 4gb of ram. Otherwise, we have to live with the limitations of the tech, and hope 4gb isn't. a requirement for a few more years

 

@KockM - I will get back to you about this. You're right this is false advertising. On the website it says "up to 4GB of DDR2 ram". Well why am I paying more money for 4GB of ram when I can only use 2.5GB? I'm going to talk to my brother again and see what he says about it...

Up to 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 at 667MHz (nope )

 

Like I am sure we can even go through the small case court and get them for false advertising, but that’s a little harsh.

 

they'll argue the motherboard accepts 4 gig of RAM though. the site doesn't say it uses it, it says the motherboard supports it, meaning, you can put up to 4 gig of RAM onto the motherboard. though it is some tricky advertising but i think it's kinda late to bring that up at this point.

 

fixed my own stupid statement. sorry.

 

The 2.5 GB of RAM is a windows 32-bit limitation. The M9750 does work with 4GB of RAM that would show up in the 64-bit versions of the windows operating system. However, at this time Alienware does not officially support any of the 64 bit operating systems on that platform.

 

I hope you are not actually from Alienware, that would be disappointing. Here is what happens. This motherboard only supports 3.5GB of TOTAL RAM. Windows Vista 32bit supports 3.5GB of Ram. This means that 2.5GB of reg. ram + 1GB of Video Ram (SLi cards) fills up the motherboard. Windows may recognize more than the 2.5GB of ram, but we are only able to use 2.5GB of regular ram + 1GB of video ram. Kind of disappointing as I need more ram for photoshop

 

Yep, even with Vista 64-Bit or XP 64-Bit it still does not support more than 2.5GB of Regular Ram. Its a problem with the motherboard not windows. Alienware sold us faulty motherboards. It wasn't their fault intentionally, but the provider of the motherboard to them.

 

Let me guess...the SLI cards total 1GB of VRAM right (yup, 2x 512MB)? And the rest of the system needs about 512MB of address space...

So yeah, there's the 2.5GB cap right there. Can't really do anything about it since AW cannot defy the laws of computing. This isn't a motherboard defect...

 

Okay, Im still new to this 2.5-4Gb thing. I currently have 2 gigs, so what everyone's talking about is that I shouldn't go and someday upgrade to 4gig cause i'll improve the system by just 512mb? Not even a Bios update would fix that or anything at this time? Okay just so im clear not to ever upgrade my RAM on the M9750! Right!!

 

No, a bios upgrade won't help. The Chipset is the issue, it only supports 4mb addressing. The chipset has to allocate memory used by peripherals. 512mb for each Graphics card and 512mb for System resources, in a SLI config this is 1.5gigs. The issue is present in 32bit and 64bit OSs.

Alienware will tell you that the issue is fixed with Vista SP1, but it isn't. The OS displays the amount of memory installed not the amount used, like it previously did. Microsoft changed the way the OS DISPLAYS memory but not the way it USES memory.

Major false advertising. I called for a Class Action Suit on the AW forum but my message was rejected and then the public Post has somehow disappeared.

 

Yea it is a bit rediculous. We were never told when we purchased the laptop that we would be capped with 2.5GB of ram. Pretty soon we are going to easially need more than 2.5GB of ram. I wish we could do something about this as we were not aware of the issue when most of us purchased the laptop.

 

If, we were able to sue Alienware for false advertising, I think Apple would go broke, since they are the kings of false advertising.

 

so is a 2 gig stick anda 512mb stick the best combination for this motherboard then?

 

Okay, so it's still okay for me to get 4Gig cause the mother board is a memory hogger. But I just won't be able to use the full 4 gig cause of OS/32bit/64bit/SLI/ the major Chipset! Intel 945PM + ICH7M-DH! Claiming to support up to 4Gig of DDR2@667mhz! Well, I did a little digging and found this on intel's website. Im not sure if Intel or alienware is liable now. http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/945pm/index.htm

At the specs states to be supportting 4gigs. So I also did another thing and went into my system, device manager and found out that my actual chipset installed is not the 945pm and it says something like this:

Moblie Intel(R) 945GM/GU/PM/GMS/940GML/943GMLand intel(R) 945GT Express processor to DRAM Controller - 270A

So it's like WTF? it's confusing me what's really my chipset installed. Did AW lied and installed the 945GM instead. Here's some specs on 945GM's:

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/945gm/index.htm

I think it's the 945GM that all of us is getting that's why there's that memory problem. Wondering if those other people (DELL,HP,ETC) with the same 945PM chipsets are getting the same problem were getting. Can someone correct me if im reading my chipset right! Thanks!

 

i believe what it's saying is that you have the 945 chipset, the last two characters probably have some meaning which i don't know of exactly, but PM is under those character pairs.

 

I just upgraded to 4 gigs of ram in my m9750 of course since it was XP x86 it does not see all 4 gigs. So I upgraded to XP x64 and it sees 3 gigs and that is all the bios would see so I called Alienware and the rep told me that it required a bios flash. So he walked me through downloading and flashing the bios. My bios now says something like physical memory 4 gigs, but available (I forget the exact phrase) is only 3 gigs. He said when I booted back into windows if it was still saying 3 gigs that I would just have to reinstall the OS so I did that and of course I'm still just getting 3 gigs.

 

Are you running with SLI?

 

I am only running one 7950 and I have a t7200 for the processor.

 

yea this is junk. I was always wondering why task manager reads only 3gigs of memory but my specs say 4. (cuz im only runnin one 8700GT). i think we should all get upgrades to the m17x.

 

so its alienware fault their saying they support 4gig, when they dont...

 

To say that we should get m17xs is a little over the top. However i am still extremely annoyed at them for saying something that their laptop really doesnt support

 

Well its too late now, my laptop is a year old now, and since i'm using it just for gaming, i dont think the extra 1 gig would be my savior in any game outthere. its still anoying, but nothing can be done now.

 

>.> I know it sucks that the system won't utilize the full 4 gigs, but it's hard to believe anyone really needs that much on a laptop. I've never gone over 2gigs myself, but that was under XP. Vista uses a bit more ram than xp so at the most I think they should provide a downgrade to xp,

 

@Bwh - I am constantly using all 2GB in photoshop (It uses 1.2GB of ram for some of my work) and in flash so really I could easily use the extra 2GB.

 

No, it is the 945PM, its just that the system uses the same bit of system software for all those chipset versions

 

The m17x is also having problems just like the m15x, I think my next laptop will be a sager. I hadn't really have a problem with the m9750 except the primary hard drive failed and a problem with the battery

 

i havent seen a big problem with the m17x yet. ive seen a couple of software issues but it isnt major. the only hard ware issue i have seen is a key falling off which is also minor.