M17xR2 Survey/Evaluation

It has been a while since the M17xR2 has been released upon us and I believe it's time for some evaluation.

Like many others, I might be really interested in purchasing this system.

Before spending $2000-$4000 on this thing I might need some more info about the system in term of problems, quality, reliability, etc. from people who are current owners.

One way to get that info is to read every post related to the M17xR2 in this forum or just ask (again and again and again....)

the above method is OK with the limitations that it takes considerable effort to search all the posts and becomes very difficult to balance the good and the bad once you do so.

At the same time if one just asks "should I buy it?"...well one will usually get mixed responses.

To help with that I propose a small survey to be taken by current M17xR2 owners. The survey is ready and can be taken at any time between now and lets say April 10 2010. The results will be posted here and anyone interested to see what owners think about the system in relative detail can just glance over the results of the survey.

Let me know what you think.

Survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KDFHMX2

Current data from 26 people:

Overall satisfaction rating 85% (Scale: 0% extremely unsatisfied - 100% Extremely satisfied).

From

Overall Recommendation rating 87.3% (Scale: 0% Stay Away - 100% Go buy the system).



People who were happy with the system said they were happy because:



People who were unhappy with the system said they were unhappy because:



The distribution of the reported problems by processor type is as follows:



The distribution of processor types of the 26 people I have so far is listed below. Note that the majority of the sample seems to have systems with 720QM and 820QM. It is thus expected that the majority of problems reported will be in that range. The 920XM is sort of unique because 67% of the people with a core i7 920XM have reported suffering from flickering. All but one of those owners still reports flickering even after applying the new bios.

 

good survey, I would like to see the results. I have not received mine yet( 9 days to go) but be ready to wait a very long time to receive it. ordered 2/12 and suppose to receive it 3/18 but looks like they might be a delay. Some people have gotten 3 or 4 delays. Be prepared to wait a few months to receive it.

 

I will start posting results once I have at least 15-20 people and from then on at regular intervals. Let's say as fast and as soon as I can without misleading people.

I'm not in a horrible need for a new laptop so I am currently waiting for any new video card configurations that might show up before I make a purchase.

 

posted! I agree, great survey.

 

I would like for you to add to the survey.

1. Did your m17x come in on time or
2. delayed 1,
3. delayed 2 times
4. delayed 3 times
5. delayed more than 3 times

 

Good coverage of all the issues surrounding a purchase, I would have added the option to buy through the EPP program as a point too...

 

Done! Excellent survey.

 

Delay comments have been mentioned by a number of people on the "other problems" section of the survey. Also after reading a large number of posts concerning cancellations and delays with shipping I think its fair to say that it will be a valid point that will be mentioned when I publish the results. At the same time though it doesn't directly affect the M17xR2 per se but rather Alienware/Dell. I mean you could go buy the system from Best Buy and have it delivered through a totally different venue and it would still be the M17xR2.

 

Good point! It is true that with Dell discounts and through clever Rep manipulation you can drop the price of this thing significantly. There is a whole section on the forum dedicated on that topic so I guess it is safe to say that people do like the discounts which do make the notebooks more attractive. I will definitely mention it on the results.

I currently have 16 people. If I can get some more it would be great. Just a heads up for people who have problems with the system. It is sort of important to specify what is wrong or why you are unsatisfied. I have some people on the survey who indicated that would not recommend it and have rated the system low on the like scale but I have no further information from them as to why that is, as in they didn't specify what they don't like about it. It would be rather puzzling to have a bunch of low ratings at the end without any information to back them up.

 

The problem with this survey or any forum survey is that it opens it up to non-R2 owners that feel like screwing with the results. So in the end the results can't be trusted unless you verified each vote.

 

Ok I would like to add my experiences I am gonna be totally honest with you.
I have purchased an M17X-R2 about a month ago but at the end I shipped it back for a full refund but I had a week with it and I have tried a lot of games as well
Well lets start with the pros, btw you can see my specs below
It is a total beast no deny about that if you want you can check by yourself on youtube .
But I can say I ve played prototype, street fighter 4, call of duty mw2, call of duty world at war, left 4 dead, mass effect 2,dragon age origins and colin mcrae dirt 2 all set to absolute max resolution settings everything and all the games where flying. I am not a benchmarker neither I care about using fraps or fps whatever but I know when a game is flying or it lags.
So the RGB-LED well put it this way I have never seen such an amazing screen before in my life. I have actually finished Modern Warfare 2 before on the xbox but just because of that screen I couldnt stop playing until I have finished it again.
Other thing that people ask is the fan noise. Well yes it exists and its lound for a laptop but I mean cummon you wont be playing battlefield 2 with the sound off right. The noise its not really an issue even with the speakers not set to max you dont really notice it.
Emmm I suppose other pros are that the loading times where blistering but at the end it depends on the processor you will get.
And yea it does look really cool and I loved the aluminium chassis.
So cons now
Well the flickering problem is fixed so full stop to that.
On my machine I had a problem with the blu-ray writer, it just couldnt play a blu-ray movie without lagging every 2 minutes. As I am not a computer expert I dont know if it was a hardware problem or driver issue here but still it was there.
On my RGB screen I got 3 bloody dead pixels which was the biggest factor that made me ship it back to dell as I dont really trust any technician to come at my place and replace my screen. I mean in my mind I see it like the laptop is brand new, therefore the screen should be perfect, I dont want a technician messing it up, I just bought it damn it. Also I have to note here that a lot of people seem to be getting dead pixels on their AW LCD's .
Other problem I had was that sometimes the laptop would recognise its charger as a non dell one and wouldnt boot up windows for me.
One other time when I started it just kept working with the fans spinning at max revs all the time but it just wouldnt start.
Hmm I think thats probably all the complaints I had with mine.
However I am gonna give AW a second chance since I know that if I get a fine working machine its gonna be awesome. I am actually waiting for an opportunity for a good deal and I will take it with the hope that my next m17x is going to be fault free. Wish me good luck and I wish you good luck

 

Oh something I forgot. Its not really a complain but seeing other gaming laptops or my brothers dell xps 1710. I was expecting something like 4-5 speakers and a subwoofer. Unfortunetly you only get two speakers They are quite loud though

 

All in all really if I had to rate it out of 100 it would be really difficult. Out of my experience lets just say I wouldn't reccomend it to a friend of mine because he might end up with something that has problems and at the end wasting one or more months of his life with Dell and Dell reps. But I would have it though under the knowledge of the consequences. Is like an Alfa romeo really. You wouldn't recommed a friend one cause he would end up at the side of the road for the rest of his life but you would take that risk because they are such beautiful cars.

 

Some configuration data is missing from the survey, like 160GB HDDs (both single and RAID) that you can get in Europe, for example. Also, it would be good to include which Wireless Adapter one uses from the two available configuration choices - Dell Wireless 1520 or Intel Ultimate N WiFi Link 6300 a/g/n as it can make a difference.

 

Generally when you forget something you just go back, edit your post and add to it instead of making 3 separate posts in a row. Just a friendly heads up for future reference so the mods don't give you an infraction, they really don't like that stuff, it's against the forum rules.

On Topic: As for the survey I will do this it once I get my R2 tomorrow, I can't wait.

 

I agree, that is always an issue. However if the results of the survey closely reflect what we already know from the compendium of the forum posts on M17xR2 then we should be happy, right? Ex. If a number of people mention that they experienced flickering which was resolved after the bios update we could believe that. This survey is supposed to summarize what we already know so that it's easy to process. If it turns out not to be representative then we should not use it.

 

Yes, some configurations are indeed missing. The reason I included the configuration details was that I could filter the results by different configurations. For example, let's say that I have 15 (or X number of) people who are happy and 5 (Y number of ) people who are unhappy with the system. A good question to ask would be do the Y number of people who have problems have the same problems. In addition an even more important question would be do they share similar system configurations? The more configuration options I have available the less people I can group in each configuration category so I decided (correctly or not) to just keep what I thought were the bare essentials to maximize the number of people per group.

 

It's true, non R2 owners can throw the results, but it seems that few troll this forum so I wouldn't get too worked up about it in an informal poll.

@Crylo - kudos to you on your delivery!

 

I posted some data on the first page. I have data from 26 people so far,

Thank you to those who participated! The survey will be open up until April 10. The more people the better but please note the you need to be a current owner to participate.