How far Alienware has gone backwards

That's not necessarily accurate. Some of the resellers do unique things. Eurocom, FalconNW, Mythogic are some examples. There are some things already in play and more coming from Eurocom that are exclusive to their brand and not available elsewhere. Using a Clevo as a starting point is a level playing field, but what they do with it sets them apart and adds value. The brands that just sell them with their name on them the lid, but otherwise exactly as they come from Clevo are not boutique brands.

 

I opened my P870 Killer- Edition today and delid processor and everything inside was easy and very fast to inflict. The internal quality is amazing... If I need to clean fans/heatsink later, this operation will take maybe 15/20 minutes. Not a 1/2 day as som other laptop models. This is something I like aka older Aw laptops. 8 of 10 people can do this fast tear down and clean inside... With other laptop models <maybe> 3 of 10 people can do the same. This is freedom. Not relay on other tech team for fixing same job.

 

I'll concede Walmart ain't an argument proper if you'll concede it is food-for-thought. On a side-note, dare I say it: OriginPc in true boutique fashion still offers custom paint jobs & color choices on their EON17-SLX 6700k dsktp rplcmnt which dares to go where the Aliens dare not tread (but certainly where they used to):

Spoiler: yesteryear

Inside the box is an Origin PC T-shirt, all of the retail component manuals, a notebook user guide, a driver disc, a recovery disc and a 16GB flash drive containing a backup image of the operating system (thankyou note included in the wooden shipping crate as well)

More food for thought, mind you ( I keep a soft-spot tucked away for Origin as should we all) ... boutiques may be scarce & hardly exist - but there - one right next door to Alien HQ aka the Mothership. One wonders if a 6790k is in Intel's pipeline for those & X9(E) owners to upgrade to eventually àla 4770k-to-4790k for that little extra oomph. In the meantime, what you said & what I heard's that Azor's got a stable of C300's up on the menu & an aging would-be AMG ... (edit 3.12.16 > A18 is now R.I.P put out to pasture).

Q3 2016: Kaby Lake (LGA1151) as Successor to SkyLake 6700k (LGA1151)​

@rinneh who errantly said the sockets all die-out anyways? It isn't written in stone yet that SkyLake sockets are a dead-end & that 6700k is the max cpu - & if it isn't - then here's the perfect example of how the laptop owner can upgrade the cpu without having to sell the laptop off & get a new one. Not that there's a Haswell-E lappy, but if there was then Broadwell-E would've been a direct drop-in for all x99 mobo's. These sockets don't dead-end in one generation as was hinted at in a prior thread ... time will tell if SkyLake gets a new top-dog cpu, (6790k) as Intel does pushout revisions which owners do take rightful advantage of (do I hear Kaby Lake???) which is the point of sockets, isn't it.

 

After owning M17xR2, M18xR1, M18xR2 and Alienware 18, and having used a borrowed Alienware 17, 17R2 and 15 and 13 for more than a month each, I feel the Sky X9 chassis is not as well built as the pre-Alienware 17/18 models, but every bit as good as the Haswell and newer machines in almost every way. In terms of easy to work on the Sky X9 is without any question the easiest of all. My Panther is also extremely well built and easy to work on. I cannot say that about all Clevo models. I don't know about all of them, but I have no regrets with the Panther and the Sky X9 is truly amazing engineering, design and build quality. Some have whined about the keyboard, but I think it is fine. The M17xR2, M18xR1 and M18xR2 chassis quality is unmatched, but they are also a thing from another era of quality that is gone now and probably won't ever be back again. They are not as easy to work on, but they are truly well built. I was not particularly impressed with the 17R2, 15 or 13 build quality. They were still pretty decent, better than most of the mainstream gamer crackerbox garbage being sold. But, not amazing compared to the models before them, and much harder to work on than any other Alienware before them, and not built any better than the Panther or Sky X9. This I know from handling all of them myself, and tearing all of them apart, all the way down to the bare motherboard.

 

M18x R2, that beast is a Legend now, It's still the best Alienware ever made.

Thanks to the AW for destroying everything what they achieved in a decade,
As Papusan said the new AW's are totally crippled in terms of user servicing and upgradeablity
Add the bonus PSU gate (just a quick google result, I could't invest time to track the proper discussion threads for the early issues the BGA Alienwares had), ThrottleGate a.k.a BGA throttlefest to it, this guy had the worst, nightmare experience out of this brand. The great Alienware (Pun intended )

They've gone from the modern age to the barbaric stone age & Audi, BMW, Merc haha I can't even imagine that they don't even have a wheel atm LoL

Thus "Alienware gone backwards" the story oops, the Reality continues.

 

I think that's another pet peeve of mine with Clevos is that the keyboards are generally not great, but seeing as most of them are used as servers and engineering laptops (in my personal experience anyway), I can understand why that is last on the list of needs. I never got a chance to use the M18's, so I can't comment on them, but the ease of access to repair and upgrade on the Clevos is unmatched.

I think the Audi comparison is an apt comparison, they generally use VW stuff and brighten it up a bit, somewhat similar to Dell/Alienware.

 

http://net.eurocom.com/download/m347_Brochure.pdf

 

@rinneh You say you can have a desktop to do the heavy rendering, some of us dont. I treat my laptop as a movable m-itx desktop with a display attached and an additional 2 hour UPS. As a matter of fact, despite how heavy the 870dm-g is, I think it have more performance per kg than an alienware 15 r2. I mean, this thing have good performance vs price and performance vs weight. Alienware 15 r2 had neither?

You know what I missed? Easily detachable batteries that doesnt require opening the laptop. You can just carry 2 batteries for additionally battery time.

Completely OT comment, but it seems like the topic is derailed for awhile anyways.....

Still waiting on the official unlocked vbios... I hope I can get it next week.

 

X99 clevo anytime soon?

 

Not that I know of. But, I know a lot of people that would love to have that, including me. 5960X and dual desktop 980 GPU setup would be sweet.

 

I would doubt that dual 980 mxm would be possible considering the thermal constraints. Maybe 1 is more realistic.

I'd wait for Pascal though.

 

Of course it's possible

 

I hope so

 

Yet another nail in the coffin... NotebookChec.net has yesterday run a rewiev on Gigabyte P37X v5. Rebadged Aw 17R3 is now also rected properly by this new 2.92 kg slim (Much thinner and lighter than Aw17R3) fiery hot fullly throttled GigaBook. Nice Dell. What next?
I'm still waiting for new reviews of AcerBook, eMachineBook, LenovoBook and similar gaming Books for a fair comparison with latest rebadged AwBook. Is curious whether Aw can provide better or same performance against the mentioned gaming models... We have to see.

 

I actually owned a Gigabyte and the build of these laptops is horrendous, I mean truly horrendous. Very thin aluminum shells that bend under light pressure and do not bend back out of themselves for the premium models. Very cheap keyboard trays that are taped with adhesive inside the keyboard tray but still bulge out. Its just a bridge too far when it comes too thinnes for these specs.

I had 3 and this is how they came out of the box:
uneven laptop base:


keyboard that sticks to the adhesive under it:


Screen bezel not stuck on correctly and thus sticks for a little bit when you apply pressure on it:


The build quality of Alienware and Gigabyte shouldnt be even compared because this really ranges from good (if you dont receive a lemon) to really bellow mediocre.

 

Build quality that lousy is inexcusable. They don't deserve to be in business peddling defective garbage like that. I feel bad for the people that don't know any better. Running faster is no good if it falls apart in your lap.

 

It does not help with better construction quality if the laptop model lack performance other models with lower build quality have

 

The performance is pretty much the same. All these laptops have pretty much the same specs, all a skylake I7, Geforce 970m or 980m. Later reviewed models only receive benefits from gpu driver updates though in reviews.

 

Using the same CPU and GPU should produce the same performance, but that is sometimes not the case. Alienware have been doing things to cripple performance of their laptops for a while. Their machines often have firmware induced throttling issues where their competition may not. End users have needed to take matters into their own hands to resolve those problems. That used to be fairly easy to do and it was merely a minor inconvenience to deal with, but they have made that more difficult as well with worthless cancer like Secure Flash.

They ratcheted that kind of nonsense up a few notches with the BGA machines. Doing things like crippling CPU performance unless an eGPU is connected is pretty retarded.

 

I still have to experience any throttling on any Alienware machine that I used, In fact I OC'ed the GPU everytime.

THe GIgabyte's I owned on the other hand.....I had trouble to keep them even running at base clock of 2600mhz, with undervolting and a proper repaste.

I wont say some users do not experience thorttling though. But I consider their machiens lemons.

 

1000p lower graphics score in 3D11 between tested laptop models is a big difference. This is a very big difference between two drivers from nearest time line. Different drivers can not explain the all too big difference. 10% difference in graphics score is huge. Remember also 3D11 tax the whole hardware harder than Firestrike.

 

2 samples i took from the benchmark thread

http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/9509663
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/10974483?

 

Look for 3DMark 11 benchmarks to get a clearer understanding of overall system performance because it is far more demanding. Fire Strike is more of a fluffy feel-good GPU benchmark. and largely ignores both good and poor CPU performance when calculating the overall score. I can also overclock my GPUs a lot higher on Fire Strike than I can on 3DMark 11. Having a system that can look good in Fire Strike doesn't mean it will look good with 3DMark 11.

I think part of the reason for that is Fire Strike was designed for systems running Windows 8 and newer, and those newer operating systems handle CPU performance very poorly.

 

80p difference in graphics score. Physics nearly doesn't count in Firestrike. 3Dmark Firestrike isn't a good benchmark test to tax the whole hardware. I taking about 10% difference in graphics score in previous post. This is huge.

 

I will run some later. I always use FIrestrike because I see more results for those.

 

Here's a 3 way comparison using the higher of the two links you previously posted.

http://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/7332252/fs/7024516/fs/7707865

That's because it's more popular and most people don't know any better. In fact, it looks like the top 20 3DMark 11 scores with 6920HK and 980M might be the same person running the same benchmark over and over again, LOL. If that's the case and there are not any serious MSI, ASUS and other BGA gamers running 3DMark 11, there might not be enough reliable information to work with to draw any conclusions. Benchmark results are only as good as the people running them. It they don't know what they are doing or just running their machines stock, their benchmarks don't offer much in terms of valuable insight about what a machine is capable of achieving.

 

1 of them has a fairly high overclock though. BUt the second. THat must be an error, 540mhz? Looks like the Afterburner bug.

 

No, it's not a bug. That is how the new vBIOS works for 980M. It's normal. Until GPU-Z and Futuremark Systeminfo (which has the same problem as GPU-Z) are updated, the only way you can know the actual core clock is to look on the sensor tab or in a program like HWiNFO64. Futuremark only captures the information Systeminfo tells it, which is wrong.

If I am not mistaken, 540 is stock clocks for 980M. Multiply it times two and it is 1080, or non-boost clock. So, since it is only showing 540 that benchmark is probably running the GPU core at stock clocks.

Look at this screen shot score and you will see the same kind of thing. http://i.imgur.com/5nChGkP.jpg
http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/10905808

 

Oh when I used afterburner on the 970M in the past it went to a lower powerstate and being stuck at 540mhz. Only a full reboot would fix it for me.

 

Yeah, I don't know why the new vBIOSes are like that. Not sure why it was changed, but I don't care for it. It does not seem to affect GPU performance, but it looks really goofy. I have different vBIOS for 980M that change it from the old way to the new way. @Prema said it will be corrected once the monitoring software applications like GPU-Z and Futuremark Systeminfo catch up with the newer firmware. There may be another bug with MSI Afterburner as well. I haven't used Afterburner in a very long time. It sounds like you may have had something else going on with the powerstate and clocks getting stuck using Afterburner. That benchmark score would have been really low if the clocks were literally stuck at 540MHz.

 

Here is a comparison between newest Clevo and latest Aw Echo models with stock clock in FireStrike. Forget physics score in this cometition because this is almost no counted in 3DMark Fire Strike.


VS hardware who works as intended.


You can clearly see that both Aw15R2 and Aw17R3 underperforming pretty much... The same also applies to the first Echo models from Dellienware with Haswell. We are talking about almost 14% lower overall score + graphics score in an no demanding bench test. All models are tested with stock clock. This gap in performance will be bigger and bigger the more you overclock your hardware due to better firmware, much better cooling and socket hardware.

This bench is from an antique EOL Aw17R4. Can you beat this one easily with your brand new Aw in more demanding 3Dm11? This should be easily done by your machine, who is nearly five years newer...

 

That 980m in your last pictureis not running at stock clocks but has a fair bit of a higher boost clock.

 

I know . But this is an old EOL Aw laptop that you can compare your benchmark score against. A new modern laptop with the latest hardware should crush a nearly 5 year old laptop in benchmark tests even though both have the same graphics (even both overclocked).

But what's your response to the whole post I wrote?

 

FOr some reason the benchmarks on NBC are always crappy with the ALienware and people have problems with the laptops while I do not notice any issues on my models and better benchmark scores.

BUt regarding the 5 year old laptop. It kinda shows how stale the CPU market became because it seems only the GPU's matters and a 5year old laptop can still fully utilize a 980m.

 

Yes absolutely all newer Aw laptops deliver bad benchmark performanc against other brand in NotebookCheck own rewievs but the blame is not that they get crippled laptops from Dell every time they shall have a rewiev. Same bad benchmark scores are also available on 3DMark. com...

Here is the 3Dmark11 scores you can compete against as in the pickture ↑↑↑above http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/10989723 Everyone in this thread looking forward to see the result against this near 5 years old Aw laptop Especially the ovner @j95 All Gtx980m is overclocking friendly so just tweak and bench.
You say that your Aw Echo work very well, so it should not be a problem to crush this benchmark score to pieces as you have a brand new Aw model.

Happy benching

 

I've been involved with selling and repairing Alienware since 2009 when Dell first took over from Alienware Corp. My first purchase was a M17x with Intel Core 2 Quad and GTX285M's, dam that seems like a lifetime ago.

I've watched the brand go from strength to strength from the M17xR2 to M17xR4 (The R4 IMO being the "pinnacle") And then at first a slow decline that has seemed to accelerate as time goes on, I still remember when I opened the box on the M17x I first purchased and found a alienware baseball cap, gaming mousepad, colour coded sleeve, customized engraved nameplate, software DVD's including OS all displayed perfectly in a cool looking box.
The even decked out a Hummer at west coast customs for the USA game expo's some years ago...

All of the above "extra's" have now disappeared, the ultimate customizable laptop is no longer customizable, the "exclusive" and "part of a club" feeling customers once received when seeing these things have been taken away.

I wondered for quite a while what was driving this push by Dell to force the Alienware brand into mediocrity and have never been quite able to figure it out until a chance conversation with a customer (We'll call him Jack) recently who recently moved from the UK to AU.

We were chatting about the Alienware brand and I mentioned some of the things I listed above, his response was quite offhand and surprised the Hell out of my, I wont get it "verbatim" but his response went something like this.

According to Jack, he worked in quite a high position in not only Dell UK but also Dell USA, he said that when Dell purchased Alienware from Alienware Corp it come with a few conditions.
One of the conditions was that the original "inventors" of Alienware would have either total control of at least a high level of control on the design of all Alienware systems for the first 5 years, after which Dell would take over completely.

Now this (If true) would explain almost everything.

2014 would have been the last time the "old" Alienware Corp had any input into designing new systems, it may have even been a transition period then as we all know the AW 17 and AW 18 had an identity crisis.

Now in 2015/16 any influence from the "old" Alienware corp is gone, and we are left with the mediocre crap available today.

How the mighty have fallen

 

How can "Jack" verify this information? Even if he is in a high position at Dell, internal rumors exists and cause misinformation.

 

Once I saw trhe scores, I was like "hey thats pretty low, it should be higher..." then read rest of your post, I agree.

 

How the mighty have fallen indeed !
Thank you for sharing this information, very good to know.
+1!

 

This. Explains. Everything. 100%
The M17x chassis had pretty much minimal to no changes cosmetically (other than going from 2 GPU to 1 GPU) from 2009 up through 2013 when the M17x R4 was offered. It was a classic, Alienware design that was shared across the M11x, M14x, M15x, M17x, and M18x. It worked. It was beautiful and unmistakable. Come late 2013-early 2014 and everything is in the sh!tter as far as the Alienware design is concerned, as well as the sudden (and stupid) name change from M17x to "Alienware 17" (barf) and M18x to "Alienware 18" (barf again). They could have called it M17x R5 or M18x R3 and kept the chassis the same but no.....lets call them Alienware 17 and Alienware 18 and ruin the chassis. yeah. Let's do that. Most retarded branding move in history.

 

I did say in my initial post, and I quote "Now this (If true) would explain almost everything.

With Alienware and Dell being secretive in the past I very much doubt anyone will every get 100% verification this is true, they wont even tell us when a new model comes out, it just appears on the Alienware website, that's the way they roll (Or perhaps limp now)

It's as good an explanation I've heard, no one else has come up with ANY other explanation that fits as well as this does, I also know personally there was a large restructure around 18-24 months ago inside Dell, a lot of the competent people I used to deal with on a regular basis disappeared overnight, replaced by Dell droids.

Maybe these two incidents are related, we, the public will never ever know.

Corporate American is billions of light years away from being transparent

 

Really the old legacy systems are the best looking laptops ever made, the Area 51- M5xxx series...they were cool !
Later on the first time I knew about them was when they had M17x and the M17x R2 then they evolved into these beautiful machines M17x R3 R4 and the M18x, R2 just flawless M15x (even works with Maxwell without any hiccups LoL).

Even on the desktop realm they gimped out, the old ALX , Aurora , Aurora Area 51, they had legendary chassis I only dreamt about them back then and now they just have an abomination.

Sadness it is.


EDIT : Btw the Alienware 17 R1 (2013- Ranger) is still official M17x R5 since it has the "M17x" tag on the backplate, atleast that shows a bit of DNA of a once legendary brand.

 

Just look at the whole new Aw line and you clearly se the big change. Everything you say match the new line. + rep for the explanation.

 

Doesn't the 17R1 have inability to flash a modified bios? And some people say that the stock bios has a lot of problems regarding fan tables specifically?

 

You can't flash a mod bios because of Secure boot. Fan tables are trash but you can use Hwinfo for the fans. Also problematic with resetting of bios after wrong power settings(overclocking).

 

Anything that's left to be desired with the dell bios? (except the fan tables)

 

Secure flash restricts us to use a modded sBIOS unlike the M17x, M18x lineup, but svl7 had a hard mod for the 17..
Fan tables , NVRAM everything is trash except it's not a BGA & throttle infested garbage like the new machines with that puny mobo and stupid GA, downgraded options...

I was late else I'd gone for that beautiful M17x R4, she can even boot with Win7+ UEFI for maxwell. M15x's nehalem doesn't have this UEFI it boots w/o any issues while the R4 needs sBIOS mod, R2 needs Full UEFI also like 17 with exception being optimus allows to use Win7 without UEFI. About 18 I don't know what that sBIOS update from dell grants them (Still broken fan profiles even with Dell's official BIOS, that's Alienware now rekted, regressed....)

I remember your post @Mobius 1 that you have the ALX chassis, It's a great pleasure to own that piece of art.

 

Still need to experience any throttling.....

 

It might not be 100% that is crippled, but if the result is for example 1 or 2 of 20 laptops WHO does not work as intended, then it is really bad. 1 of 30 or 50 machines is also a massive fiasco.

 

I know from the companies where I worked, which are big companies by the way. Failure rate of electronics is considered very acceptable if it is 5% in the first year. I am sure Dell would have taken massive action if it was surpassing 5%.