Took the plunge and ordered an m17x

Hey folks...

After much deliberation, I finally took the plunge and placed an order for an m17x from Alienware...aside from the usual inclusions, specs below if you're interested.

I'm not expecting it before October but I'll come back with an update on progress and some opinions when I finally get it!

Cheers!
J.

===

Display: 17" WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 LCD with Clearview Technology with Webcam – Black
System Lighting: Alienware® AlienFX® System Lighting - Aqua
Operating System: Genuine Windows® Vista Home Premium - English
Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme X9000 2.8GHz (6MB Cache 800MHz FSB)
Graphics Processor : Dual 512MB NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 8800M GTX – SLI Enabled
Memory: 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SO-DIMM at 667MHz - 2 x 2048MB
System Drive: Extreme Performance (RAID 0) - 256GB Solid State Drive (2 x 128GB)
CD/DVD/RW: 8x Dual Layer Writer (DVD±RW, CD-RW)
Turbo Cache Memory: None
Smart Bay: 200GB 7,200RPM (8MB Cache) Smart Bay with Free Fall Protection
Sound Hardware: Intel® High-Definition Audio (24-bit, 192Khz) with surround sound
Keypad: Alienware® Exclusively Designed Keypad with Numeric Pad - English
Wireless Network Card: Internal Intel® Wireless 4965 a/b/g/Draft-N Mini-Card
Warranty: AlienCare 3-Year Free Phone 24/7 and Collect & Return
AlienContact: Added Bonus with any AlienSupport Selection
AlienContact - Remote Alienware Support
Alienware Extras: Alienware® Mesh Cap
Alienware Extras: Alienware® Owner Identification Card - Included!
Alienware Extras: Custom Alienware® Mousepad
Alienware Extras: Area-51® m17x Panel Overlay
Alienware Extras: Area-51® m17x Smooth Mylar Touchpad
Alienware Extras: Area-51® m17x Protective Cloth Sleeve
Alienware Extras: Alienware® Personalised Nameplate
Avatar: Alienhead 3D
Window Style: Default Vista Window Style
Mouse Pointers: Standard Mouse Pointers
Power Plan: Balanced
Automatic Updates: Automatic Updates On
Time Zones: (GMT + 00.00) Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London

 

5k i guess?still congrats,enjoy the waiting!

 

RAID 0 SSD is totally unnecessary. That being said, enjoy your beast.

Really breaks my heart when i see people ordering Santa Rosa now that there are so many Montevina / Geforce 98xx based systems out there, but I can't say I blame you. I didn't want a Sager either

 

holy crap! expensive system, but very nice. I think the sagers are ugly, personally. I'm usually all about performance underneath a nondescript covering, but I just love the alienware cases.

 

Jimmo,

Welcome to the forums and congratulations on your purchase!

 

Congragulations, that's powerful stuff right there. The difference from Monteniva is barely noticeable anyway, same for the 9 series. They're slightly better, yes, but not huge upgrade, especially the 9 series. So, don't even worry about that. You got a beast right there.

 

holy **** **** that is a beast! you must have money burnin holes in ur pockets 24/7!!!!

 

Thanks folks! I had only posted a couple of times previously but I really appreciated others sharing their opinions, comments and reviews - so I thought the least I could do was contribute the same, which I shall once I get my grubby paws on the thing

Yeah, the 2 SSD's may be a little gratuitous but I have a soft spot for them - possibly between my ears? hehe.

And yes, I am treating myself somewhat but it's coming out of my business account, which makes it far more cost effective. I will be putting it under some load (not just gaming but with a whole music/composition stack). I've burnt through two well specified ferrari's already...although they didn't help matters by cooking themselves in the process. The current Ferrari 5000 is on its last legs now...I guess that's what happens with nigh on 24x7 usage.

 

Yeah a classmate had a Ferrari, carried that thing everywhere. Are you going to put Vista 64 on your new baby?

 

I may do, yeah - assuming it can boot from the smartbay, I'll probably try installing it on that first.

 

Congrats Jimmo,
Had a chance to check a friend's loaded Sagar NP9262 that has the quad core CPU and 9800 GTX GPU cards in SLI. It is fast, plays games very well but i am more than happy with my M17X.

 

since when can you have SLI'd 9800m-gtx's on the np9262?

 

My friend has connections is all i can say.

 

i call B.S. imho, the 9800m-gtx thermal envelope and power requirements (maybe even size?) prohibit SLI'ing it in a notebook.

but hey, prove me wrong with a screenshot.

 

lol... interesting... I'm with whizzo on this.

 

Congratulations and welcome to the club (",)

I know you'll enjoy using your m17x, I know i do lol

OB

 

hey OB, have you been able to fix the DVD playback issues?

 

Yeah, I rang Alienare and they are sending me the Blu-Ray version of Power DVD... Seems the DVD version is shipped as standard lol

OB

 

Just go to any Sager reseller and the option is there for 9800 GTX's in SLI.

http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np9262...-built-clevo-d901c-p-2273.html?wconfigure=yes

 

i stand corrected. bloody expensive though...

 

Righto - I'm in phase 3. I did ask them to let me know when the cheque arrived, just so I could be sure it got there ok (snail mail isn't as reliable as it once was). They didn't.

Let's see how it progresses from there - will I get the ping-pong between phases or will it all go smoothly? Will keep you posted...

 

Now in phase 4, "pre-production".

Sorry for the trivial post, I'm using this to keep a record

 

No problem. Some of us are interested. As long as you know the phase page isn't completely accurate, it's all good.

 

Ha, whizzo. The dual 9800GTX's, plus the rest of the system equally spec'd would cost the same as his because of Alienware's huge price hikes.

 

I'd say cancel the order and take your business to a company who cares about its customers.

Read my repair log (either on this page or the next) and you will see how AW truly treats its customers. My suggestion is to cancel before you're disappointed.

Also, if you're doing music and video and that stuff. Maybe you should go with 1SSD (for OS and stuff) and another hard drive for movies / music / etc that doesn't really need that quick of a HD.

Personally I think you're making a mistake from buying from a company who has held my laptop for so long and hasn't even fixed it properly even though it was under their VIP service.

That is a very fast laptop, but I suggest you re-work your decision and go for another laptop because you are making a huge mistake.

Take your business to dell. I am not kidding about this either. Dell will come out to your house to repair your laptop and literally take the whole thing apart. For example, they replaced the LCD screen, bezel, palm pad, and motherboard all at MY HOUSE in a VERY TIMELY manner. On the other hand, the only time I was offered AW on-site they said a week to two weeks to find someone.

Go with the M1730 and get service that is actually good. Hell if you get your dell and you decide you don't like it after 30 days or you find a defect, you can get %100 of your money back. With AW even if there is a HUGE problem they will try to fix it and make you pay the %15 no matter what.

Just my 2c but take it under consideration. Don't think AW cares about you. They've grown from a company for the gamers to a company for themselves to fill their pockets.

 

since Stone recommanding other laptops, I'll like to point out the OCZ whitebook would be a great choice also.

 

I WOULD recommend it but it's quality is unknown so I can't recommend it personally. Also I am not familiar with any of the resellers.

 

can't be worse than m9750, can it?

Oh xoticPC is selling it, don't we all love xoticPC?

 

Oh now I see it. Nice. They hid it from the main page 0_0

 

here are some pics of it, looked so packed, I am quite worry about the heat.

http://www.guruofgaming.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=2294&start=15

 

:laugh: You want him to take his business to the company that owns AW. That's funny!

But serioiusly Stone, allow him this moment. He has ordered and waiting on his NB. Allow him the opportunity to enjoy this. His NB just may come to him fine. Don't ruin the experience for him. Allow AW to do that, if they choose to.

 

Thanks to Stone for the additional perspective - it is always worrying to hear about peoples' bad experiences. Mind you, it's good that folks shout out about this stuff. On the other hand, when I was looking around I could find complaints about pretty much all the notebook suppliers in the UK.

I'm surprised AW service would be so poor compared to Dell - aren't they owned by Dell?

 

woah benji, RAID SSDs! and 2 8800GTXs! One hell of a beast

 

Dell owns AW but they remain separate. They both keep their own policies and basically AW remains its own company, Dell just has the ultimate decision if it comes to that.

 

Yes, but Dell's rep isn't all that great either. I don't know about AW but there are several websites about people who hate Dell with a passion. Just trolling away about how Dell is crap.

Stay there long enough, you'll hate Dell too. Then you'll become a troll!

 

As an aside, I've not had a problem with Dell so far...I've had a few machines of them, including 3 laptops, all have been fine. One was a high spec machine which had accidental damage warranty etc. which included accidental water damage (i.e. from spills and so on).

The laptop was destroyed in the 2004 tsunami (I was hanging on to a water tower with my baby daughter) and when I got back, I asked Dell if their water damage policy included tsunamis...they sent me a new replacement.

 

Wasted your money on that extra 2gb of memory. This thing is only gonna support 2gb.

 

put 64bit OS on it then

 

Well, 3-point-mumble GB for a 32 bit OS. I may stick a 64-bit OS on another drive.

 

Good luck. They don't (or didnt) support x64 a few weeks ago when I had my m17x. No drivers. I tried to install my factory version, but I could not get it to boot up the Vista 64 DVD. Tried three different DVD, no luck.

Hopefully they have changed this, but that is why mine went back.

 

Still in phase 4 - pre-production

Sent email on the 24th asking if there was any delay getting parts.

Got a "standard reply" that ignored my question and simply stated...

All I wanted to know was if there is any delay getting parts. I'll wait until Oct 2nd, then get on the phone.

 

Called AW. They're waiting on the 200GB smartbay drive, due in next week + one more week for the build, so delivery estimated to be two weeks away.

 

Keep us updated with the dates. Always interested. Also, I think cinek2 got his order rather fast, shipped before estimated delivery date and arrived on the estimated delivery date, haha. So, best of luck to you.

 

Called AW again - apparently the machine has gone into production today, ETA for delivery sometime late next week. Hooray - getting closer!

 

Wow, just got email notification that it's being shipped - that seems quick but I'm not complaining! Will advise on arrival about condition etc.

 

It's here! I need to explore properly so this is just my initial report based on inspection out of the box and first time power-up.

It came very well packed, which was appreciated. Need to be careful lifting the laptop out of the box as it's in a velvet-texture cover and this, combined with it's weight and the "drag" from the padding foam, means that it can slip in your grasp.

I gave the machine a complete examination once I'd removed the packing scratch covers. It seems generally very solid, with minimal flex in the screen and the main body looking nice and tightly together without any misalignment and fitting gaps. The finish is perfect, no scratches or dings.

A little ring-binder with the AW head logo contains brief notes and refers to a user manual which should be packaged alongside the unit - but I don't seem to have it and I've checked thoroughly.

The power supply is huge. No really, it's HUGE. It's literally the size of a housebrick and weighs as much as the EePC 1000H that I'm posting this from! The cable from the adaptor to the unit is as thick as the mains cable. Welcome back to the age of the "luggable"

Power up and initial boot into Vista went smoothly, with my inevitable clean up of the desktop to follow later. Interestingly it popped up a message to tell me that SLI was enabled (I'll work through the guide to double check this). No sign of light leakage around the screen.

It started up in 1280x768 which, given the physical screen, made it feel like I was wearing magnifying glasses on my eyes! This has immediately been set to 1920x1200 and oooh that does look nice.

At the moment, aside from the silly "pong" noises and jingles that Vista likes to make, it's almost completely silent - just the very faintest of fan noises (mind you, I haven't put any load on it yet and I'm using 2x128G SSDs).

Ok - that's it for now, I'll start giving it something to break a sweat on and update again later.

Cheers,
J.

 

pictures! i wanna see! wow 2x128SSDs..welcome to the AW family!

 

Righto - some things that aren't so good...

Minor nit - the lack of a manual button on the cd/dvd means you have to wait until the machine boots before Fn+Eject work.

Memory grumble - 4GB installed, a 32bit OS can only see 3.mumble but I'm only seeing 2GB within the OS...even accounting for all the memory used by the devices, that seems a bit low.

Vista is a *major* memory hog and the AlienFX don't help. Without running anything or changing the out-of-the-box config, 44% of my memory (that's the 2GB I can see of the 4GB installed) is eaten up. Getting rid of Vista's eye candy theme and going with a classic theme (thereby killing off that pesky dwm.exe) as well as the sidebar, alienfx and other cosmetic cruft took memory usage down to 25%. I still think 2GB out of 4GB is a bit low, I was expecting to get a usable ~3GB Looking at the nvidea system info, I can see that 1.2GB is gobbled up by video memory, which explains where the missing 1GB has gone!

It just cannot run the Crysis single player demo on high settings @ 1600x1200. It takes an age to get through the intro, then the screen goes white and we see the disk access light flickering to the sounds of a jungle...and that's it. I gave up after 10-15 minutes waiting to see if it would move on (and I went through this twice, with a restart in between, to be sure). Bludgeoning my way to task manager, memory usage is nudging 80%. Not very good for £4k! But then again, I'm not sure I trust the single player demo to be particularly good code. Even after clicking "select optimal settings", it was pretty lousy.

COD4, on the other hand, is a beauty to behold - all settings maxed out and it plays absolutely fine. ForceWare version is 174.82

More to follow later...(and @ karuru11, hopefully some pics at some point too)

Cheers,
J

 

The reason for your memory issue is that SLi allots a portion of your RAM as well, iirc, so you will see even less.

You may have to change some configurations due to SLi as far as Crysis goes, I'm not positive but you should be able to run high on that resolution without much problem at all. Try using the 178.15 drivers from laptopvideo2go.com. I've heard that it's a stable driver that also supports blu-ray.

 

Yeah I'll tackle the drivers shortly. I've found another wrinkle, which I haven't diagnosed yet and so can't point the finger - but pianoteq with asio won't see anything but the HDMI audio, whereas the exact same versions under XP on my Ferrari worked fine...I'll attack it some more tomorrow