One good M17...one bad M17...

Well, the SO & I received 2 identical M17's last week. Dual ATI cards, 64 bit Vista, etc., etc.

Finally had some time to play with them over the weekend after loading all the patches & various programs. We both game extensively on Everquest 2 and a bit on Lord of the Rings Online as well.

As we sat together on the couch & gamed over the weekend, I noticed that his machine was FLYING. Great frame rates at extreme high quality on EQ2. Virtually no lag, and there was detail in the game I'd never seen before (and we had been using two decent gaming laptops before we got the M17s). Beautiful gaming experience.

My machine...well, let's just say it wasn't working too well. Laggy, fans kicking on & off all the time, etc., etc. A very frustrating experience. I turned everything down graphically to relatively low & was still getting a bit of lag on the laptop.

Ran 3dMark06 on both machines (remember, they are identical builds). His was right around 11k scores...mine was right about 5k scores. OUCH. My Dell XPS laptop with a 512mb Nvidia card scored better.

So, yesterday morning, I called Alienware bright & early. Got a guy on the phone who connected in to the computer to reinstall drivers, run 3dMark06 several times, etc., etc. Most of my time was spent on hold while he checked on how to do things and navigated around the computer.

THREE very frustrating hours later, it was determined that they had to see the box in order to fix it. He was going to try to have me reseat the vid cards myself, but then determined that he wasn't sure how to walk me through doing that, and was worried about the thermal paste & heat sinks coming loose. Fair enough. I wasn't real thrilled about opening it myself, but if it would've helped, I was willing to give it a go. They don't provide the "on site service" that is promised in their warranty.

So, my M17 is on it's way to the repair facility to be looked at. Bah. I'll have to live vicariously through my SO until we get it back.

So, fair warning that they are still working out the kinks on these boxes.

After the run around we got in Customer Service when we bought these boxes, and the less than stellar overall customer service & now tech service, I don't know that we'll be going back to Alienware. They are lovely boxes, but it's just frustrating overall. We'll see how quickly they get this repair turned around. I expect it to be after the new year before I see my laptop again.

 

You purchased extremely expensive computers to play EQ2 and LOTR Online?
That is a massive waste.

Most laptops with dedicated GPUs these days can max out those games.

 

I guess, as with any newer laptop design from a company, you'll have some problems. Sounds almost as if the Crossfire wasn't working correctly on your machine. From what I've read here, scores in the 8K-9K range are not Crossfire enabled. 11K-12K are crossfire enabled.

Hopefully they get this corrected for your quickly!

 

gee, plasma, that was helpful

@OP: sorry to hear about your misfortune. i hope all works out for your lappy. any idea what might be the source of the performance drop?

 

What can I say, I'm the anti-Cin' :laugh:

You know who I am right? And +rep. All people with 2700 posts (especially helpful people like you) should have at least three bars of green.

 

course i know who you are, qaz. that avatar is unmistakable

oh, right back at ya with the +rep.

 

Hehe. Thanks for that!

 

Your brilliance comes out quite clearly in this post. Thanks for the helpful criticism. I'll definitely make sure to consult you and get your approval before buying another PC for my gaming experience.

 

Yeah, we suspected that they didn't have Crossfire enabled. The tech insisted that they did. So who knows.

 

5,000 3dmarks is too low, even for one (fully performing) card.

 

Thanks! It'll work out - just a bit frustrating.

We suspect either a card isn't seated correctly, or that crossfire wasn't enabled. I don't want to break open the box & possibly damage it more.

Something I forgot to mention. 3dMark was run on my SO's machine as a burn-in benchmark, while it was not noted on mine as being run. (So noted on the "invoice" that they include on your desktop). I only had Unreal Tournament run (believe that was the name) as a benchmark.

Probably the box shouldn't have made it out of the facility, but it did.

Oh well...lesson learned!

 

possibly the plastic cover around the gpu was not removed? like FusionSenses? i think his scores were similar with that issue.

 

oh, that could be. wouldn't exactly speak for AW's quality control though...

 

lol. uhh.. there have been too many examples of a "maybe a WEEE bit less than the 200point inspection" out of AW the past 4 years.

 

That's a good possiblity. We were thinking the same thing, but thought that the issue was resolved with the "new batch" of vid cards that these were supposedly built with.

 

As someone said, 5k is low even for a single card fully running. Make sure that your Power Management settings is not at "Power Saver" mode. It should be at "Balanced" or "High Performance."

 

Hehe - I questioned the tech guy about that yesterday - "what happened to the 200 point inspection process? Did we miss a step or two?"

He didn't have a reply...

 

poor TS guys, they always have to take the phone calls from the angry customers, even though they didn't even do anything wrong...

 

All of the vid cards & power settings were set for high performance. We went in & changed all of that before calling Alienware, just to make sure that there wasn't something simple that we were missing.

 

No, he didn't do anything wrong...however...he also didn't know what he was doing. I sat on the phone with him for three hours while he repeated the same tests over & over.

I did get angry at the very end, once I realized that I was losing the laptop that I had just gotten for yet another volley with Alienware, I'll fully admit, but I was pretty patient up until that point.

 

not eq2, its so buggy you need to nuke it with whatever you hvae, so many leaks in it

 

EQ 1 could be run on most laptops easily, but EQ2 has it's issues, like most MMOs. Now if it were something so graphically simple as, say, WoW, then yeah, we could run it on any laptop. My SO's older Dell desktop with a 256 mb card runs WoW for his son like a dream, and we think it will run on my daughter's Dell with an integrated card as well. But EQ2 isn't WoW. So we build bigger & bigger to try to get the best out of EQ2.

My XPS laptop with a 512mb Nvidia 7950GTX would definitely run EQ2, but it was running right at high quality with a lot of tweaking. I couldn't have all the "extras" running.

 

ahh the xps1710. long live its glory! and may my 2 year extended (for a total of 5 years - thanks work!) support be little used (haven't had a need yet).

It really has worked remarkably well. now granted, i use my desktop to play farcry2 (though my sli 8800gt are having a tough time keeping up and enabling dx10 hurt my frames by about 10-20), l4d, and others, but for occasional gaming and a lot of network administration ... its a dream.

 

Yep, I love my old 1710. Had to have the motherboard replaced for non-working USB ports (they worked for some things but not for other things - was very odd), but they sent a tech right out & he was done in about 45 minutes replacing it. Not a bad day since (knock on wood). I don't have a desktop for gaming myself, so the XPS laptop has been all I've used for gaming since I got it in Feb. 2007...I like to be able to sit where I want when I want to game & not be stuck to a desk. That way I can watch TV or whatever while gaming...

 

I hear ya. Our Credit Union i run the IT for is ALL-DELL. I love their onsite service. Even had my personal xps gen2 laptop serviced overseas in Italy since i had complete care. Left the laptop with the hotel manager. tech came and replaced motherboard. how cool was that?!?!? i had lots of problems with that gen2, and hence. the 1710. it had the balance of my warranty, and i love this laptop, so i extended the warranty saving my budget a few thousand for a couple more years. (it IS all about the bottom line when looking at new projects for hardware and monitoring software for my datacenter).

Anyhow. EVER SINCE DELL BOUGHT AW. i just keep wishing... PLEASE run their service and support department and offer TRUE next business day ONSITE warranty repair service. and COMPLETE CARE. i still cant believe the number of STUDENTS who like NEED THEIR LAPTOPS FOR SCHOOL ... who purchase an Alienware because of the looks. its like.. what the heck are you going to do when its at the mothership for a month or 2. I've had an AW desktop (never any problems). had a couple Sagers (uhh.. many issues but with that crappy 3rd party panasonic/magnavox warranty crap they used to sell). support is worth more to me than a measly 10 fps.

 

What's the score on the test sheet AW gave you?
It's in Desktop.

 

There was no 3dMark06 score on mine. NOW, my SO's laptop had 3dMark06 scores.

BOTH laptops had Unreal Tournament run on them. But mine had about 10 -15fps slower than his on Unreal Tournament if I remember right. Possibly more.

Unreal was the ONLY burn-in/benchmark listed on my test sheet.

I suspect that if it was run, the AW reps didn't want those scores to be known. Or perhaps it wasn't even supposed to make it out the door after Unreal came back with significantly less FPS than standard and it slipped through somehow?

 

that was my first thought as well... it does seem strange that they'd leave benchmarks out.

 

Dont feel bad--my M17 which was well specd came DEAD ON ARRIVAL! I Spend hours on the phone also and reseated every part in the laptop except CPU. They still could not fix it. I just sent it back to get my money back the day I received it. The guy on the phone said they actually will stop doing 200 point inspection if they have too many orders, like the upcoming holidays.

 

Yea that is quite strange. Every AW that I have looked at has the spec's included with the system.

Friend:
M5500

Other Friend:
M9700
Aurora Desktop

Me:
M5550
M9750

All had spec sheets included.

 

People in the AW forums don't like to rep+ other AW members for some reason 0_0

 

The spec sheet was there. Everything was included except the 3dMark06 benchmarks on MY spec sheet. My SO's laptop has a spec sheet as well - and it has 3dMark06 and Unreal Tournament on the spec sheet as a benchmark. MINE just had Unreal Tournament as a benchmark. The tech rep had no answer - he just agreed that it was strange that it wasn't included.

I suspect that it really wasn't supposed to make it out of the warehouse. Such is life...

 

Well at least the good one is good and you don't have 2 going back,

 

Hard to say.

Pleased user might tell about his super-duper M17 or other product 5 close friends. Maybe 1 user form 100, 500, 1000 will feedback some forum.

User with issues, breakdowns and failures will announce it to world in 95% cases. That`s why from reading all kinds of forums people can get impressions that almost every rig form AW/other manufacturer is producing crap.

Think of hundreads (thousands?) pleased customers that don`t participate in any forym, blog or portal with opinion sharing.

 

Well, just an update...

Got a call yesterday from "Michael" from Alienware Corporate. He said that he had been reviewing my case, and that he wanted to offer me a chance to get a brand new built M17 instead of fixing the broken one. He assured me that it would be quicker to do that instead of waiting on parts to fix the one that's not working. I still do not know just what was wrong with the computer in the first place.

So, he "cancels" the RMA number that I had out, and so that computer is now supposed to be back on its way to the AW junkpile.

I was offered $50 in gift cards for my trouble, and also offered a free name plate on the computer (didn't take the offer of the nameplate, but I'll always come up with a use for gift cards).

So we'll see what happens. I'm a bit concerned because the order isn't indicated in AWs system as of yet...and of course Michael is off of work today & the other people can't give me any answers.

So we'll see what happens. Not sure WHY it would've been faster to get a new build, but I'll also not complain too badly about getting a new laptop, providing it works...

 

Its a pretty simple answer if you think about it, whats harder to do? Build it up, or take it down?
Say you built a house, you had everything layed out for you to place the parts and pieces. Now to take it down, you got to worry about what else can go wrong by taking it down, worry about faulty wiring, having to clean up debris after, removing the parts from one place to another. I believe it would be easier to have a new one built than one that is already built. Then again, I can be totally wrong since I have no experience how to build laptops.

 

Just throwing this out there, but is the power settings set to performance on yours? I had an issue that even with mine plugged in it was cutting my CPU and GPU clocks

 

All vid settings were at the high quality options. We went in & tweaked them ourselves.

My SO's vid settings haven't been changed at all since it came out of the box, and he was beating my box by 5-6k on 3dmark06. So I would expect similar performance on mine. He's running EQ2 at very high quality with great framerates.

But I appreciate everyone's help & ideas. Sitting on hold with AW right now trying to figure out if the "new" box has even been ordered at this point.

 

pretty nice on AW's part to offer u a brand new one...this goes against all the bad **** ive ben hearing about their CS....

 

An update to this saga. (SO here. unbound is working on a different e-mail)


Attempted to yet again contact the mythical Michael at AW. Everytime we call, he has "just stepped out" or is "Out of the office today". Unbound, here to with know as UN, is now rightiously po'ed.

Today, the amazon gift cards arrived. Have not opened them.

At lunch time UN calls AW again. Michael as "just stepped out". Un then asked if he was really there and just ditching her calls. I could not hear the other side of the conversatoin for this. Un relates that "you have my money and my computer and you are real close to hearing from a lawyer". Not much said on either side for a few minutes as she was put on hold. When off hold, she asks to speak to Michaels supervisor. Supervisor has "just stepped out" and the other supervisor that is there does not feel right stepping into this (ie...i ain't touching this one with a ten foot pole). The person who she is talking to suggests that she e-mail her complaint to [email protected]

So, as of this moment, UN is working on that e-mail, and including the BBB complaint that we filed. We suspect that the complaint reached corporate last week and that's why Michael contacted us.

So, it's not looking good for AW. I told her to rip them a big new one in this e-mail. She's instead going for the formal, pleasant, hit them with a glove covered brick approach. If that does not work....I get to rip them a big new one.

So, if you're still considering buying an M17....don't. Go buy the OCZ or such and avoid AW like a plague.

 

Just a quick update. My "new" M17, after a month of run around, is on the way to me. We'll see how it goes. It should arrive tomorrow. (AW couldn't even spring for Overnight shipping...instead did 2-Day.)

We did receive a response to our BBB complaint from Alienware, however, that case will not be closed until I have a satisfactory working laptop in my hands. They have received a response indicating such and also outlining our customer service ordeal in detail.

We were telling members of our gaming community last night about our saga...they all agreed that Alienware is just not worth that kind of hassle. While I think the box will be nice once it gets here & is working correctly, I also have to say that it's likely the last time I'll buy an AW.

I will say that my SO's laptop is working great, so far. Just a few glitches here & there, but I suspect that is more of a driver needing to be updated than anything.

 

Quick update, if anyone is interested. My SO (dcsobob on the forums) received the new laptop this morning, and promptly 1) checked to make sure AW did their benchmarks on them (AW reports 11,155 scores on 3dMark06), and then 2) ran his own 3dMark, which he got a score of 10,778 when running. MUCH better than the 5k-ish scores on the first laptop.

The customer service agent that I've been working with assured me the laptop was double & triple-checked by the QC guys.

We'll see how it goes over the next few days once we get it home & are able to use it some. Thanks for listening to all the gripes we've had - hopefully we'll not have any more anytime soon.

 

wow thats one of the worst stories of Alienware POS service i heard in some months. i will never waste my money on Alienware crap in my life. if i wanted to waste money i would rather donate it to charity.

 

Yeah, sorry to hear such a poor experience.

It isn't the good times that provide the mark of a good company, but the bad.