Dark Smiley Systems Criterion

Hey guys, finally received my Whitebook. Because I already have something similar (Alienware M9750), I wasn't expected to be surprised, but I was wrong. It must be one of those new-car-smell things, but this thing looks pretty sweet in person...

Now for the nitty gritties

I'm going to transfer my RAID 0 array from my M9750 to this, I'll let you know if its successful (this may be useful for former owners of notebooks with drives in RAID 0 (Sager, Dell, Alienware, Gateway, etc.)

I also took out the GPU (the master 3870 card) and swapped it with the 7950 GTX from my Alienware and...

Both work; the 7950 GTX works on the OCZ Whitebook (but who cares), and the 3870 surprisingly works on the Alienware M9750. I'll be posting pictures of proof and 3dmark06 of the latter combination later in the Alienware forum.

Stand by for more info.

 

Congrats!
Guess you can take the "Pre-ordered" out of your sig and list it under Current !

 

Congrats man and thanks for the information! I'm also considering doing the same thing you are and trying out one 3870 in my m9750. Glad you tried it and it worked out for you. If it's not too much trouble, could you test the single 3870 in your m9750 and let me know what the temps are under stress with Furmark? Its a free utility you can download.

Lastly, please post pictures comparing the m9750 to the whitebook! I'm especially curious if it uses the same power supply or not. Thanks!

 

I have screenshots of everything except the GPU temperatures after I did the 3dmark. I forgot to take a screenshot and I don't want to re-swap and unscrew everything over again, so I'll just tell you what it was: 84 degrees C according to GPU-Z. However, I didn't apply the thermal compound properly because I was in a rush to try out my new machine

Edit: Also, I was unable to run two GPUs in the M9750 because the heatsink on the M9750 physically blocks the cable/bridge connector on the Master GPU card.

Also, the PSU for the Whitebook and the M9750 are different: Different connector and different voltages. So they are incompatible with eachother.

 

84C sounds a bit high. Other people reported lower temps, I`ll leave that up to the lack of the thermal compound for now...

 

Mark @ killernotebooks has stated that the gpu heatsink on the whitebook does not fully cover the ram chips on the 9x00 series of nvidia cards, so if that is also the case for the 7950, this could also be a problem

 

that good news. it shows that the ocz have a nice compatibility, I think 4870 will work in it.

If you do that maybe they will make some sort of a bios upgrade to insure that it can't be upgraded.

that's one of the things why thermal pads exist

 

More updates:

M9750 + 3870 screenshots can be seen here

And transferring my RAID 0 drives from the M9750 to the Whitebook was much easier than I thought it would be. It's basically plug and play, but make sure you put the 1st RAID hard drive in the 1st HD bay and the 2nd in the 2nd HD bay (the bays are labeled on the Whitebook). I didn't need to repair Vista....

But now I have to reactivate it because Microsoft are a bunch of cheap *******s.

 

So the 3870 works on the M9750. Cool stuff

 

Work, but I wouldn`t bet that they`d last in it.
Then again, the 7950GTXs have a 45W TDP...so who knows.

 

Update: got BOTH GPU cards working in the M9750. Click here if interested

 

VERY interesting :|

 

lol _-_-_-_

question, if we play this like hangman, will I fill in your name?

 

lol It's not _-_-_-_ it's __-_-_-__

 

I'll take an "a".

 

put me down for an "e"

 

I will request an "s".

 

Is it Shmutzee ?

 

Wow, this is getting quite a bit off-topic.

Ike, did you ever get your hands on a M9700 to test?

 

It's actually on its way (should be here by tuesday).

Putting this back on topic, what TV tuner would be the default had I order it with the system? It seems that I can't find the connector for the Avermedia A306, like the M9750 does.

 

Currently we don't offer any internal TV tuner with this model, only the Hauppauge! WinTV-HVR-950 USB TV tuner.

 

__-_-_-__ spells "tracinhos"

who makes the Alienware M9700 barebones?

 

Arima i think, the same maker of the whitebook shells if im not mistaken

 

I see. I asked this because the online manual interestingly enough used an example of an internal mini-PCI-e TV tuner as one of the mini-PCI-e devices while illustrating how to remove it.

I'll probably find maybe an A312 on the internet seeing as that doesn't require that connector I think.