Gonna buy m15x soon, a question

I read a post that most of the bios issues (that underclocked the cpu during gaming) have been fixed, and it looks like I will be buying my college laptop within a month. However, I have a question.

Looking at most of the sigs of people who own m15x's, I noticed that no-one owns one with the SSD. Is it because of issues with it, or because of the price, or something else I am not aware of? Price is no object for me (I am planning on spending about 6K) so if the only reason is because it is expensive, that doesn't matter. But if there is some sort of problem with them, please let me know.

Also, I will be getting the 200gb 7200rpm smart bay drive for extra storage, so the fact that the SSD is only 64gb is not a big concern to me.

Thanks guys.

 

ssd is way too expensive and in some areas isnt much faster than a normal hard drive. I highly rec you dont get ssd, you could save that money or spend it on some other upgrade for the laptop.

 

could you elaborate? As I said, price is no object, so could you tell me how it isn't that much better? Will the computer boot faster, bring up apps faster, play games faster, etc?

 

I think it boots up faster, but it runs applictions the same or slower occasionally.

 

Thanks for the info.

What about battery life? I will be taking my laptop to most if not all of y classes, so I will need about 4-5 hours of battery life each day. Can I get that with a hard drive if I run the m15x in stealth mode with the smart bay battery?

 

@Brendhan - I'm going to say go with 2 main batteries + a smartbay battery (or 1 main battery and 2 smartbay batteries) because I think that 4 - 5 hours will be a stretch and it is always nice to have over the expected time. I think the max that someone got here was a little over 4 hrs with everything turned off (except the laptop of course )

Here is my config for the rich you

1440 x 900 (Unless you can handle a small resolution while taking that many notes at school and whatnot)
8800GTX
T9300 @ 2.5GHz (Unless you are doing extreme photoshop or 3d graphics don't waste your money with an extra 100mhz or the gimped X9000).
Vista
1GB Ram (Upgrade yourself if you can)
NO Turbo Memory
320GB 5400RPM (Should be the same or faster in comparison to the 250GB 7200RPM)
320GB 5400RPM Smartbay
Just the regular DVD player (Watching Blue Ray on a laptop is dumb in my opinion)
Lighted Keyboard
Total: ~$3000

Use that other $3000 for something else. Personally, if you are a HARDxCORE gamer, buy a high end desktop from Alienware or something with that other 3 Grand you have or buy from another company. You could also buy a really nice monitor and accessories.

You really don't need to spend 6K on the M15x. If you ask anyone here they will probably tell you that my setup I listed is just fine. Put that money somewhere else.

 

I'm guessing alienware offers the samsung. it doesn't seem that bad, even though the hdd beats it sometimes. Can someone clarify what the HDTache is, and why the hard drive beats all the ssd's in that category?

 

Ugh. Benchmarks are just "meh" for hard drives. You really have to look at real world performance, not just all this crap. You aren't like writing 1GB files all the time so I doubt you are going to notice ANY difference except for startup, which isn't that big of a deal considering you will probably just leave your computer in hibernate.

 

I have gotten 5 hrs with main battery and SB just doing some typing and having everything off. I didn't use it till it died though I just used till I had to go home from work.

 

real world performance = high failure rate, no ones mentioned it yet?

 

Here is the Deal with SSD:

1) If price is no object, get it get it get it

2) the laptop will boot faster

3) It will generate much less heat, which is a huge plus for the m15x

4) This thing will outlive you, seriously, the MTBF is 80 years (I think)

5) at this point, SSD's are not about speed (to me), yes they are usually a bit faster, but the big deal is more battery life, and much cooler operation. with the m15x you want that much cooler operation


6) have I mentioned that the m15x is a very hot laptop, and every shred of help you can give it to help it cool down will be very good for it?

 

If you want, you can get an SSD internal HD then get a Smart Bay regular hard drive for more space...

 

QFT (10 char)

 

I would stay away from ssd's until they mature in a couple years.I would: stick with t9300 for processor, 8800 definitely, and 320 gb internal and 320 gb external as well as the smart bay battery. That would be a perfect setup! Also, configure it with 1 gb ram and buy 4 gb RAM off of newegg, because replacing RAM is really easy on the laptop.

 

since everyone else is, i'll throw in my $.02...

SSD's big selling points are: faster data speed (this is two-pronged) and power consumption.

since the heat generated by a harddrive is usually well within tolerable limits to be air-cooled (passively), the heat issue is typically moot. though, as pointed about before, this particular laptop is very hot in general... any heat savings could be a good help.

speed: two prongs, access times, access speed.

Access times are usually measured in ms, as seek time. most of the time we ignore this point... especially in recent days... with 8 or 16MB cache, it's not AS big of an issue. but what you have to realize is that SSDs will NEVER need to be defragged. the speed at which it can find one piece of data, whether in a series or scattered around different sectors and fragmented, is the same. to compound this factor, the "seek" times on SSD's are usually a fraction of what they are on standard harddrives... thus the speed of finding the data initially is increased.

second, access speed. standard harddrives, usually can occupy 25-50% of a harddrive data channel. for example. some of the fastest drives i've seen, clock in around 60Mbps on an ATA/133 bus. this is quickly becoming a physical limitation of the technology surrounding the harddrives. this speed will likely be broken by the new parallel interface harddrives, which currently can only be found in 500GB+ drives. but i digress. the SSDs can usually perform throughput at 2 or 3 times the speed of standard harddrives... giving better throughput.

what does it all mean?

it means it will be able to get to your data, and transmit your data through the system faster. meaning faster boot times, faster application startup times, faster... just about everything.

even more, the system needs less power to utilize the disk, giving better battery life in the process.

the cons? untested technology, could be prone to faults (though, it's hard to say at what rate), fixed amount of possible writes (this is a limitation of all flash-based storage media, though, it's rare that it's ever a problem), the list goes on...

i'd like to say go for it. you can always replace the harddrive if you have problems with it... though, that'd be an expensive paper weight.

my recommendations, if you get the drive: get lots of ram. 4GB I'd definitely recommend. however with alienware do this upgrade yourself (unless you're really into WASTING money), as it will cost 1/3rd of what AW charges, and the RAM will likely perform just as well if not better...

don't get "turbo memory" ... the turbo memory WILL NOT increase system performance AT ALL because it will be AS FAST as the SSD (if not slower than it), plus, the system will have to do all the necessary calculations to try and load the Turbo memory with frequently used applications, etc etc. deteriorating system performance further and more than needed.

the reason I recommend more ram, is so that there is little or no pagefile usage, in fact, if you think you can live on the RAM you have, ~3.1 GB, then disable the virtual memory space all together. why? pagefiles generally "scrub" the disk. as they're basicly shadows of ram spaces, which can be very frequently written to/read from, most of the time unnecessarily. all these excessive writes deteriorate SSD drives, shortening their lifespan.

for other system components, i'd recommend:
low ram, upgrade yourself, it just doesn't make sense to get the factory RAM upgrades.

T9300 CPU - 2.5Ghz. the only difference between the T9300 and the X9000 (the best CPU available), is 300Mhz. which doesn't cause much of a performance boost at all. the T9300 has the new core, extended instruction sets (SSE 4.1) and the largest amount of L2 Cache available in a CPU (6MB), literally there is only a 300Mhz difference between that and the uber expensive X9000. simply not worth it.

Turbo memory - but only if you're not getting the SSD. this will initially slow the system down. however, after a few weeks, when the system starts to "learn" your usage, it will help speed minorly, and more importantly, it will help with reducing the need to continually access the harddrive, leaving it powered down longer, and giving the system more time on the battery.

Smart Bay Battery - with both main and SB Batt fully charged, the system can go a staggering 5hrs, with wifi on. (with the screen brightness turned almost all the way down, in Binary GFX mode).. if you need more time than that, you can get two main, and two smartbay batteries. the system will stay on with just the main, and/or just the smartbay battery (or just AC Power), and drains the Smart Bay battery first... so, when the smart-bay battery gets to about 10% the main starts draining. by the time the main is down to about 30% the SB Batt is dead (0%)... thus, you can swap for a fresh, fully charged SB Batt, and extend the life even further, or, swap the SB, then Main for even longer on-time (without turning off the computer).

it just makes sense if you need the up-time. the issue is, there's only one way to charge the batteries.... in the computer. and they take a while to get from 90% to 100%. so the charging cycle for this setup could be very long.

get an external mouse. too many complains about the touch pad. only use it when doing casual work... too much usage lends to aggravation with it.

and I think I've covered everything.

 

I apologize if my points have been stated elsewhere (Sorry Mystik, but that wall of text is just a bit too daunting for me), so here you go:

Reasons now to get an SSD:
1) In non-sequential synthetic performance benchmarks, they blow most hard-drivs out of the water. In Sequential reads, they are on par with, if not below standard HDDs according to most reviews I've read.
2) While the parts will outlast you, the drives are only rated to hold data for up to 10 years.
4) From the reviews I've read, and based on specs, an SSD uses only a hair less power than an idle HDD. So unless your HDD is reading constantly, your battery life is going to be on par.

Oh, and those HDTach results are from a program that measures sequential and non-sequential read speeds.

Basically, I recommend against them. Get a 320Gb 7200RPM drive, and configure your power settings well. it'll outperform an SSD by a pretty good margin I believe.

 

@Riebart - I totally agree. SSD's aren't worth it for another year or so until the price : space your getting ratio is better and they are sped up a little.

 

If you wait about 6 months or a year the price will be cut in about half and the capacity will be greater, about 250-500 gigs for half the price. So if you buy now you'll prob. regret wasting 1k on 64g in 6-12 months

 

Another USD 0.02 cents

Disabling pagefile is good when u are not gaming. but when u are gaming powerful games (crysis) u will experience jerky movement after an hour into the game. WHy? u just ran out of memory even if u have 4gb ram installed. U might need to set pagefile to at least 500mb - 1gb to cover everything.

But if u are playing old games, disable your pagefile and your laptop will be in lightning speed. But watch out if u have a power failure - your unsave data will be gone forever.... and ever...

 

it shouldnt use 4gb unless there is a memory leak in the game, if the game deallocated ram well. Ive never seen 4gb used in crysis even after like 4 hours

 

I have 4gb installed. OS uses 3gb. I use another 500mb = 2.5gb left. I have got a prompt in the middle of the game. "your system is running low on memory". Crysis becomes jerky. Check on memory widget n realise it uses 95% already. quit crysis n re-run. This time adjust page file virtual memory to 500mb on my HDD. Crysis fly through the game for another 2hrs++ .

The reason--- When I have 95% usage on total memory and none for virtual, any activities that runs suddenly in the background (windows schedule is main culprit + some auto updating program etc etc something always runs in the background - thats y your HDD tick every 5-10secs) crysis starts to jerk. Each activities happen = 1 jerky movement in crysis.

Right now I am on 500mb virtual memory. No choice I hope windows can recognize 3.5gb and everything will be good.

EDIT: by the way how do u prevent crysis from memory leaking? This may help.

 

well the lastest patch should have fixed it, i dont have this issue at all, but maybe because it can fit more video memory on my 768mb gtx cards? i have no clue dude

 

I'm gonna go ahead and agree with you. I havn't seen too many systems require more than 2GB of RAM regardless of what's going on... even Crysis, I see it's memory footprint in the 500MB to 1GB range.

 

dont buy ssd as people said. just reinforcing the point.

the only up to its seems to be faster boot times and this can be aachieved wth a turbo memory over time.