M17X - How reliable it is?

I have tried 64 games (from baldur's gate to the latest wolfenstein). I had no glitch, everything worked.
The OS was windows 7 with SLI 260m.
No notebook cooler but it remains perfectly stable. Never had a BSOD.
All drivers are stock.

 

That makes no mathematical sense. The equation does, but the reasoning does not.

And SLI usually doesn't render top half and bottom half, the cards alternate frames.

Nirvana RAID'd 24 256gb SSDs?

 

Actually SLI is more future proof than memory, remember games have the ability to leverage system memory if need be.... however even 512 MB would suffice for most games.... 1 GB is plenty. Worst case scenario in 4-5 years you can upgrade the video cards, at that point the vram is not going to hold you back as much as the core speed is.

 

They might as well have for the lack of relevance RAID0 has to this thread.

 

Oww.. never realized one innocuous question can cause such intense debate.. though I am still very thankful to all of you and now I learn a bit or two about SLI..

In layman terms, I understand that in dual / SLI configuration, both cards memory is processed in parallel and the graphics work load is shared. Main difference with a single 2 GB card (if there is one!) and two 1 GB GTX cards in SLI, if I am not wrong, is that in the former we sequentially utilize the graphic memory from 0 to 2 GB (going above 1 GB may not be likely, if I understood one of the posts, that 1 GB is more than enough for most games) but in the later SLI divides the graphics work load into two chunks for both the cards to process simultaneously / in parallel.

I think in video games more than the peak VRAM requirement (which may be for most of the time much less than 1 GB), it is the rate at which the memory bytes has to get processsed and surge through the bus that matters. I mean, in a matter of a minute we may have 1 GB worth of video data exchanged but at any second the requirement may still by about 15MB per second or so. And SLI does this better than having a single card.

Please correct me if my understanding is incorrect.

 

Dude, M17x is a great machine. I don't like Dell though, but I will not bash the aesthetics or general quality of a good product. Kudos to Alienware.

Here's what I like about the design and general mechanics.

- Sleek.
- Well built.
- Decent parts.
- mGPU has its perks.
- Powerful options and configurations for present and future upgrades.
- In general, all these factors reinforce something very important: The machine runs nice and cool! And that to me is a very pertinent factor because it could very well determine the life-span of your GPU and system.

If you're considering getting one, then all the best, and I'm sure you'll enjoy the machine.

Off topic:
As for the rest of this SLi fiasco. . . right. I never knew digressing could be turned into an art form. Oh, wait, politicians already do that everyday. Hell, I do that everyday. Bah. I gotta' stop living under a rock.

 

I'm with Kade! I've had nothing but good experiences with my M17x!