*OFFICIAL* "All Powerful" M15x Owner's Lounge, *Part 2*

have that already.

It says electronically shipped which means dell has sent them details of the shipping.

After phoning dell they said wed, and ups think usually 2 days after ups picks it up.

IS it likely they delay after they gt to this phase?

 

At that point everything is up to the shipping company, not Dell.

 

Questions are.

Is it likely they delay the shipping? Probably not. You never know though.

& How are they coming out of the factory at the moment ok? Not sure. Should be fine, but there's always possibilities that a system has a prob on arrival.

Also, would it be the new M15x or the old m15x, or is it the M and m 17 that are like that? M15x = new. m15x = old.

Um, why is your username so... ' weird ', do you really need the whole world to know that your wife has size 32DD chest? o_o; lol.

 

Hey Panda....and Joker..

So in conclusion....under normal usage and game WITHOUT overclocking, it runs fine right? for the moment as long as the gameplay is under normal load within reason M15x holds up well but when OC, it throttles right? I thought I understood a few pages ago but I'm getting more confused now lol..

That said...Panda and joker, what will you two do with your M15x? The coming ones. now that you two seem to have concern with this throttling issue.

 

Howard, the system throttles when the GPU is at factory clocks as well or even when it's underclocked. This occurs anytime the CPU hits 100% on all four cores and unfortunately we have not been able to arrive at a solution yet. My best guess is that it's something that can be corrected via a bios fix since the SXPS 16 has a very similar issue as do Dell's other line of computers (albeit more extreme). With that said, I'll be keeping my M15X.

 

I don't know yet, I might return it, I might keep it, or I might sell it.

Nothing changes the fact that the system throttles under heavy load. Put it another way, if you bought this computer to keep for more than 1 year, you're running into the possibility that it will buckle under power constraints from applications down the road.

Sure, for games out today, it isn't a problem. However, I doubt anybody buys Laptops so they can play today's games without an issue with a big question mark as to whether next year's games will bring the computer down to its knees, by not simply a normal computing inadequacy, but a power delivery defect.

Take your 5870 for example. What brand is it? What if you found out that your brand of 5870 had a defect where it was not getting enough power, but XFX, Sapphire, or HIS's 5870 had no problem. Assume today you are not running the 5870 at full power, but tomorrow you will need it to run 100% to get similar results. XFX, Sapphire, HIS or whatever owners will be running with 60FPS tomorrow on Crysis 3 but you'll only be doing 30FPS.
And you both bought the "same" 5870s.

 

This pretty much nails the issue at hand. Most users won't notice it right now because most games on the market don't push the CPU to 100% on all four cores (the majority of games are dual core optimized). Once more quad core games start hitting the market and they push the i7 to 100% useage, the video card (GPU) will throttle to 50% of it's performance. The synthetic tests I've outlined in the throttling investigation thread highlight this defect and can be reproduced by any M15X owner. I do believe Dell will come to some kind of solution eventually, be it a bios fix or motherboard revision. If it's the latter, I can only hope that they are willing to repair/replace existing system mainboards upon request or maybe even issue a recall (I doubt this would happen because recalls garner too much negative PR).

 

I can speak to the mainboards being replaced. When Nvidia has the dreaded GPU failure of '08, the M1330's were being hit HARD by this. Basically at this point if you call up and say your graphics processor is acting funky, unless you get a tool on the phone they will replace the board outright (The GPU is onboard.) I lost count of the number of mainboards I replaced the beginning half of '09/end of '08. I know there were days where I was doing 5-7+ M1330 board replacements in a row the same day. I will bet a paycheck that this is what will occur here IF....repeat if this can't be resolved via a BIOS update. I'm seriously leaning towards the belief that a BIOS update can resolve this...we'll see.

 

OOC, are you a Dell Tech?

 

I'm with SiliconAddict on this one. A buddy of mine is a computer engineer and I asked him to read up on this problem. He is sure that it's a BIOS issue. He wasn't thrilled that there is a 10w power lacking from the board to the GPU. However, he said the response I got about the system pulling power somewhere else to make up for it is about right.

 

Yep. Along with other companies, but our bread and butter is Dell. I knew I wanted an Alienware when I replaced a m17x's system board. I was in love with the design.

EDIT: For clarity sake. I'm a Dell warranty tech. I'm the guy that comes out to your house, to your busisness, to your server room to make repairs on your system. Don't me off or I use spit as thermal paste..

Just kidding.

 

bwahahahaha! Well played sir!

 

update:
did manage to download a different driver and the express card mini remote that came with my old xps 1530 is now working with the M15
driver was here http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R196531&SystemID=STUDIO1737&servicetag=&os=WLH&osl=en&deviceid=17446&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=1&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=17&fileid=271594

 

Joker/Panda
thanks for persevering with this: I was one of many that didn't understand your initial concern, but the last few posts have helped clarify and explain the relevance.
Let's hope that the next Bios revision accounts for this issue.

 

hey guys think of buying this sdd. cuold someone tell me if this fits the M15x. intel x25-m 160gb Model # SSDSA2MH160G2C1. also if you think $350 is a good price.

thanks

 

it will fit yes

price is to astronomical for me :/

 

$350 is excellent... where are you finding this price? I would buy another one for that price. My 80GB cost me $290 @ Newegg.

 

its off my local craigslists. but do you think it fit M15x? he has 3 of them for sell rite now.never mind didn't read moo's post.

Thanks guys

 

I would make sure they are sealed and not bricked by the old buggy firmware.

 

will do that. thanks panda.

 

Thank you Joker and Panda, kinda doubt what I do will use all 4 core at 100% plus doing GPU intensive work at same time but the fact this happens still bugs me a little. Mine arrives tuesday and will think hard these 2 days and see what to do.

I have no doubt Dell is stern about 15% restocking fee, they wanted to charge me 15% restocking fee recently on a refurb system return even though I have purchased over 10-15 computers from them within the last 10 years where they normally wouldn't have before. Oh well, such is life.

Thinking about it.... with my G60vx's P7450 C2D I burn CD/DVD, play MW2, DL stuff in background w/other minor stuff runningin background, neither of my 2.13 ghz C2D core has reached 100% simultaneously, or even 1 of them at all. i7 CPU is much more capable and faster core per core than core 2 duo, now with 4 of them around, there is no way what I do will max them out at 100% altogether when it doesn't happen to my G60vx's 2 core. The only thing I have ever maxed out is the memory when I transcode videos... such as AVI or the more demanding MKV files... where nearly all 4 GB are used, but that's easily solved by M15x's upgradeability to 8 GB ram whereas my Asus max is 4 GB. I think M15x should do just fine.

 

Tell them after an hour of gaming you get blue screen of death or some other bs. In my experience they will mark it as defective and waive any fees.

 

I just checked my order and it say it's been shipped on 12/5 and when I checked my tracking number it said it been shipped in april and delivered. Looks like they gave me someone else tracking #.

 

Check out my specs on my new M15x I just ordered:

Processor: Intel Core i7 920XM 2.0GHz (3.2GHz Turbo Mode, 8MB Cache)
Memory: 6GB DDR3 at 1333MHz
LCD Display: 15.6-inch WideHD+ 1600x900 (900p) WLED
Video Card: 1GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 260M
Hard Drive: 256GB Solid State Drive
Nameplate: Personalized Nameplate
AlienFX: AlienFX Quasar Blue
Operating System: Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
Avatar: Alienhead 3D
Adobe Reader Acrobat SW: Adobe Acrobat Reader
Optical Drives: Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BR-ROM, DVD+-RW, CD-RW)
Sound: Internal High-Definition 5.1 Surround Sound Audio
Wireless: Intel WiFi Link 5300 802.11AGN Half Mini Card
Automatic Updates: Automatic Updates: Off
Primary Battery: Primary - 9-cell (85Watt) Lithium-Ion Battery
Service: 1 Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis - Important Information
Wallpapers: Alienware Logo
Bluetooth: Internal Bluetooth 2.1 Mini-Card - 2.1 Enhanced Data Rate
Standard Nameplate Trigger: Thank you for Purchasing Alienware

Grand Total of $2852.10

 

FILE A CLAIM

 

Guess again Josh. ;-)

In their own words, they are aware of the issue, they read these exact boards, yet they will not accept any M15x without the 15% attached. Ask me how I know.

I will never purchase another Dell/Alienware product again. Any company that admits they are aware of a defect yet will not honor thier own return policy regarding defects is simply a buisness that deserves to fail in my opinion.

Mine is boxed up and in the back of my car headed to UPS tomorrow...

 

Nothing to guess about. I just returned one that had a couple of defects. No restocking fee. If they tried to charge me, my first call would be to my CC company, the second call would be to the better business bureau.

 

I used dell financial svc for that 3% discount and 12 mo no interest......so dun have the luxury of a dispute. aiya... bu tthen I haven't received it or used mine yet, so pobably worrying too much now.

 

Just keep in mind the BBB is not a government entity and has no power. It's just a rating organization and is essentially useless. The best thing to do is contact your CC company to file a chargeback and then if Dell persists, contact your state (or the Canadian equivalent) attorney generals office. I know in Florida there is a lemon law here and technically Dell is breaking that law by willfully selling systems that do not perform as advertised. Even if pushing the CPU to 100% is not common, the system should technically not throttle. Otherwise Dell needs to update their advertisements and put a * by all powerful AW that says, "system performance may be degraded at peak CPU use". If Dell doesn't get around to resolving this throttling issue for the M15x, XPS 1645 etc. then they deserve a class action lawsuit (it's already being talked about in the studio xps forum). If I was a Dell engineering manager, I'd have my guys pushing overtime to fix this to avoid a lawsuit that would draw a lot of media attention.

 

Where did you get that price from? I customize the same thing like your at dell website and the total is $3918. That before tax and shipping.

 

AAFES my friend, saved so much money. I called Alienware because they said they could do a price match. Yeah you guessed it they couldnt price match $2800 over $3900. They just said just buy through AAFES so I did and saved a bundle. And I saved money on car insurance by switching to geico.

 

We do not get the option here in the uk for a nameplate. WHY?

 

Holy Crap!!

My laptop has been shipped! The laptop went on Thursday into Production and Today (monday) it was appently shipped! So it was 3 work days in production.

me does happy dance!

Btw, I will post pictures as soon as the lappie arrives and maybe a short review. But I have been looking over reviews of this lappie and nobody mentioned the following:

The laptop is left-hand unfriendly. All the "Big cables" plug in to the left on about the center of the laptop. That includes power cord and VGA. This means that there will always be cables in the way of the mouse. Since I am a right-hander I couldnt care less, but it seems odd that Dell would be making it hard for lefties to use this laptop

 

that's odd as I just returned one two weeks ago and no restocking fee. same with my 1730 last year...

 

My guess is that its because of the Dell takeover, but I have no idea. 1.5 years ago I purchased the old m15x and I got the nameplate. Now it seems that it doesnt work in Europe anymore?

 

What reason did you cite/use for return?

 

dead pixel and I wasn't happy with my experience.

 

UPDATE:

laptop #3(screen #4) arrived this morning. dead pixel upper right/middle area. no personalized nameplate.

at this point i do believe i'm officially cursed. maybe the M15x isn't for me. maybe i should nab an M6500. the orange is pretty...

funny thing is...there is a display port to HDMI adapter in the accessory box.

 

That explained it..yours had more visible defect than throttling......hence the no restocking fee.

 

but your post said ANY M15x and i was letting you know that was incorrect.

 

1st post!

I finally ordered my first Alienware. I've wanted one for a few years, and I was really hellbent on a MacBook Pro. Mainly because of OSX, but after the favorable reviews of Win 7, and hearing that there probably won't be a OSX version of Star Trek Online, I've decided to go with the "most powerful 15inch laptop in the world"! (according to Dell). I will say, that I have some reservations about dealing with Dell, since there's a lot of horror stories out there. But after seeing the price savings through aafes, I couldn't resist. I kept the price around the same as what I was willing to spend on a 15inch MacBook Pro, and feel I have a much stronger system. Another major problem with Apple right now, is the exclusion of BluRay. I've already decided to jump on the BluRay bandwagon, and my laptop will be a huge part of my entertainment, especially when I deploy. Well enough of that....tell me what you guys think of my build. I REALLY wanted to opt for the 8gb of ram, and the SSD, but that would've added another $800 and a serious case of buyer's remorse. I told myself, that both of those items are easily replaceable and due to come down in price by the time, I'd actually need them. AAFES says Dec. 5th as my order date, and the Dell website gave me a projected ship date of Dec. 16th. I have no way to track this though, since the AAFES link to "track through Dell" has a javascript error. The AAFES site says "Box 01" and "Order received by supplier, shipping in process". For those that went through AAFES, how long from order to delivery did you guys have? As you can tell, I'm a lil excited, and can't wait to open up my new toy!

Here's the build
Cosmic Black ($2385.xx)
Processor: Intel Core i7 920XM 2.0GHz (3.2GHz Turbo Mode, 8MB Cache)
Memory: 4GB Dual Channel DDR3 at 1333MHz
LCD Display: 15.6-inch WideFHD 1920x1080 (1080p) WLED
Video Card: 1GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 260M
Hard Drive: 500GB SATAII 7,200RPM
Nameplate: Personalized Nameplate (Irb Digital)
AlienFX: AlienFX Terra Green
Operating System: Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
Avatar: Alienhead 3D
Adobe Reader Acrobat SW: Adobe Acrobat Reader
Optical Drives: Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BR-ROM, DVD+-RW, CD-RW)
Sound: Internal High-Definition 5.1 Surround Sound Audio
Wireless: Intel WiFi Link 5300 802.11AGN Half Mini Card
Automatic Updates: Automatic Updates: On
Primary Battery: Primary - 9-cell (85Watt) Lithium-Ion Battery
Service: 1 Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis - Important Information
Wallpapers: Alien Cyborg
Bluetooth: Internal Bluetooth 2.1 Mini-Card - 2.1 Enhanced Data Rate
Standard Nameplate Trigger: Thank you for Purchasing Alienware

Woot!

 

Roger that, thank you , mine arrives tomorrow, we shall see how it works out

 

I called up AAFES about that after placing my order on the 4th and they told me ETA is Dec 29th.

 

Ouch! Some of these guys were saying 8 days. So I was shooting for 2 weeks. AAFES needs to fix that Dell link, or give us the info to look it up on Dell's website. I hate being in the dark.

 

EH???? Instead of wednesday... FEDEX shipped my M15x over night for some reason, its on fedex vehicle now for delivery 2 days early???? but I'm at work .. oh well..out of caution, I put a note for driver to leave the package at rear door..hope it's there when I get home...

 

have to sign for it i believe.

 

it is 3rd party signer. So it must be signed for when receiving. You will have it re-delivered or you must go pick it up from your local FEDEX outlet. Call FEDEX

 

Wow what was your config?

I have had mine in production since Dec3 with a delivery date Dec 28

I got the i7 720 3 gig 1080p and Nvidia 260 with a custom Nameplate.
I figured I can upgrdae CPU and Memory when prices com down a touch

 

in short: 920XM , 3GB DDR-1333, 260M GTX, 250 Gb HDD, 1080p screen and reg. dvd drive. Also, I did not have a custom nameplate. Maybe that is why? (its currently not possible in Europe to get a custom nameplate)

That is one hell of a set up you got there. I did the same as you did. SSD is right now really expensive as is DDR3. The additional 4 GB might not even be used unless you aim to do a lot of stuff at once (e.g. run one or 2 virtual machines). If you had taken the SSD you would see a huge speed up in boot and in loading times, a probably huge speedup in file intensive programs (winrar, copying...) and possibly a slight increase of ftp (but little) in gaming.

In short, I think you did the right thing, as both of these components can be easily upgraded at a later time. Also, it wont void your warranty

 

Ah maybe it being built in Europe may be the big thing along with the nameplate..

BTW NICE RIG Wattos

I wish I could drop the 920 in mine.

Differance between 1400 and 2300.