Dell had bought Alienware in 2006, it had the machines made by Clevo as a partner. Yes it dates long back, Then further down the road we had many extraordinary machines - M15x, M17x, M17x R2 the SLI one - First gen i7 machines, Beautiful design and full customization options from website. Later we had the Sandy Bridge platform, (excuse me if I missed the timeline of a few old machines) M18x SLI 580M one and M17x R3 they all had beautiful same design principles and exemplary build quality unmatched performance and full MXM machines with precise heatsinks across all, This had continued upto the M17x R4 and M18x R2 with Ivy - Meanwhile the Desktop market also had amazing lineup with ALX chassis and Aurora, Area 51 machines which were top at that time - This is what Golden Age of Computers, Alienware, Liberty consumer choice was.
Starting from 2013 things went downhill in all - First blow was Win8 and It's B$ UEFI starting with the post M18x R2 time - Alienware Haswell Era - Our machines which had the huge re design on every point - started with the removal of MgAlloy chassis to only middle frame, Lid being MgAlloy. Plastic Backplate with not so strong design, CPU and GPU fans with low CFM ratings, Battery removability gone need to remove the backplate, NVRAM BIOS (The Ultimate cancer infestation, CMOS reset wnt reset the BIOS need to use specific tricks, this is mentioned in the links above this post, Secure Flash locking the sBIOS modding unlike the Ivy Bridge Platform - Thanks to
@svl7, Prema, Johnksss. Svl7 is MIA now, He was a really good person I knew him since 260M days of my M15x was a real good guy now we only have Prema with us who does the mods for Clevo's, did them for 980Ms Svl7 did mods for vBIOSes until 980M starting with 460M I guess, We really miss him hope he's doing good) Gimped Fan tables, locked FAN RPMs in EC, No laser Etching personalized option, Removal of customization on website, AW18's motherboard hardpower cap vs M18x R2's no power cap,
Professional OCer Mr. Fox had 780M in SLI in his M18x R2 pulling from 600W using a dual power brick (This machine was superb with thermals, OC options, User control over HW total fantastic build, beast looking only match was Eurocom Panther 5 the X79 chipset machine which can run Xeons and Hexacore CPUs, She also got struck by the MXM dropping by Nvidia after Maxwell), He started with 580M SLI, 680M SLI, 7970M CF, 780MSLI - Unfortunately 980M SLI didn't work properly when OCing the CPU and GPU causing some EC communication across the board and throttling, Dell could fix that but they didn't care. AW18 was delayed indefinitely (end of 2015) the time when Maxwell was announced maybe the Dell was restructuring the strategy and wonder why the Haswell had redesign ? Also Dell had killed the XPS performance machines to the kiddo crap now.
The Dell announced going Private from Public in 2013 and thus all these restrictions, Might wonder why does this have relationship ? Yeah the thing was - A member here had a known contact and the reality was during the acquisition of Alienware in 2006 the deal was made, Dell will be funding the Alienware but slowly gain control over the Company and implement their own design standards, marketing strategies and principles, I didn't mention the Desktop market right ? (here's a few posts
One,
DT garbage, [read the thread also] from Cass-Ole a fellow enthusiast and amid lover of real beasts with hardcore looks). And now later 2013 the 14 Haswell machines came with HQ option - Intel BGA filth, started it was a shock to most of the people but by that time the dumbing of consumers took place, thanks to Facebook and kool-aid crap. Asus used to manufacture proprietary MXMs (ROGs with 460Ms) dunno what they were upto while the Desktop hw from them is superb, Since Dell departing from the PGA mobile CPUs to BGA hell Intel might have made all OEMs take the same direction, I bet this is what happened with Dell dropping the socketed machines from 2014 Intel could easily push the BGA abomination, MSI didn't even exist in this class at that time, Now here we are the BGA Genocide - All laptops shipping with that
Garbage Win10 and BGA crap., MSI being the crown but still offering stupid BGA CPUs while their nasty practices are famous in the MSI forum if you want here's a
little excerpt from that, Partially the users are also the cause of this being not thinking and addicted to the iCrap, no offense but the lack of choice makes me cringe and anger.
Nvidia dropped the ball on the MXM 3.0b reference designs thus we have this all weird MXMs from MSI and Clevo from
9xx Series they conducted an experiment of dropping M and introducing desktop class, It was a bait and we couldn't resist the performance and boom all jumped and they even kicked the old consumers using those 9xx desktop class machines P77xDM / 870DM machines from Clevo can't upgrade to Pascal due to redesign of the
Pascal GPUs, Though this time prema said clevo will push the same design. Only time will tell.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
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