Dell M1710 vs Alienware m9700 - Page 2

This guy is speaking the truth.... STAY AWAY FROM ALIENWARE!! THEIR SUPPORT IS REDICULOUS!!!
Everyone I know with alienware has complained about the heat issues they have... I mean what do you expect? raid 0 in a laptop creates a good amount of heat.. and IF something goes wrong... GOOD LUCK!!!!! I know when I call dell and something is wrong, im not a bit worried because I know I will be taken care of

Melli, I'm still agreeing with you. I've NEVER seen a 50% or higher increase in even high resolution gaming due to the SLI or Crossfire. And why X1900's and Crossfire was even brought into the convo is pretty pointless since we're only talking about Nvidia cards and Single vs SLI.

The 7900GS SLI config will use extra low stable clocks to ensure stability of both cards. If the cards go out of sync due to one lacking equal samples of GPU and memory to the other card - then everything screws. Everyone that's played with SLI has experienced that.

This is why they say to pretty much stay away from overclocking in SLI, unless you've got the money to keep dropping on cards. With Single Card configs you can overclock without having to worry about 2 cards have identical values in memory, GPU, voltage, etc.

When it comes to notebooks... unless they come out with 7900GTX 512meg SLI, don't expect much more performance than a Single 7900GTX 512meg. Everyone pretty much accepts that 7900's are reworked 7800's with higher memory. They are more efficient, and use the smaller production process (90nm vs 130nm??), and produce less heat. But without any real increase in ability... what can you expect over the 7800GTX 256meg cards other than the increased memory.

I really find 7900GS SLI notebooks to be a gimmick until they pull out some big guns and drop a couple of these 7900GTX 512megs into a laptop and use only the best samples - so they can run them both at stock clocks.

Personal i bought the dell due to the fact it a little more compact who the hell wants a laptop that weights 16. hell is 16 pounds still considered a laptop. No alienware for me 16lb zs 8lbs for the dell.....a Dell please?

I pretty much agree with JaxChris *correct spelling*. I have several reasons at this point to stay away from the fully loaded AW notebooks.

1. Heat issues.
2. Sli heat issues
3. Raid 0 heat issues
4. Weight

If I wanted Sli, Raid 0 and such, I'd build my own desktop. I'm after portability, lower heat in a notebook, reliability and good support. Support has raised questions from customers with Dell and AW. There's always someone unhappy. That's the way it is with huge corporations.

Until the DX10 and Vista is released, folks would probably best be served with a single GPU, single hard drive and a decent CPU in a notebook configuration. If someone just has to have a desktop configuration in a notebook, well so be it. I'm happy with my performance and a good price. There's a lot I can do with $4000.00.

Sorry if I took the thread in another direction. These threads seem to be points of unsuccessful debate and full of opinions. This just happens to be my take.

Should you have enough money to spend, and enough strength to move it the alienware, m alx should be good, dual gtx's!

I dont understand why the m1710 is cheaper for us in Canada. Of course our dollar is at .91 for 1$US I think it's the best rate since 1978.

But the us dollar is still a little bit higher and you get bad price.
weird... isnt dell supposed to be an american company

Jaxchris

So you never seen a Single GPU jump from 25 to 37 or 50 to 75 in dual video cards? I noticed a difference immediately in gaming and benchmarks. Like I said you have to have an extremely powerful processor to push dual video cards and the correct video settings like 6x AA, 16 AF. Then you should see a 50% increase. Remember you add the ability to do 14xAA from 6xAA in crossfire and 32AA in SLI. So performance is not the only improvement but video quality as well. I've played fear, cod2, bf2 and quake4 and noticed an improvement on all of them. I only used crossfire since nvidia does not support intel mobos/chipsets. Anyone have the special Nvidia drivers to enable SLI in Intel chipsets? But from reading reviews SLI is better than Crossfire.

I think the RAID capabilities in Alienware is a definate plus. I'm not concerned about the heat issues because you can always get a notebook cooler. Remember the Bottleneck in PC's is always the Hard drive. So the Raid 0 should kick ass. On my XPS M170 it takes 3-4 min to load a map in BF2 even with 2Gigs of memory. I bet the Raid 0 would improve this by a minute or so.

Since Dell now owns Alienware, I bet Dell will teach them a thing or two in customer service and support. So Alienware should improve in those areas.

Now if the Alienware had the option to get the Intel T2600 than I would
definately get the Alienware over the Dell.

I have SLI and I can assure you the average is not 50-100% gains. Some games have to be reworked to even take advantage of SLI; case in point CS:S. With SLI enabled I was getting 123fps@1600 by 1200 max. DISABLED i got 147fps. That is with a 7800gt. I had to rework the profile to use AFR2 rendering mode and then it jumped to 163fps. Doom3 DID in fact jump a good bit. That has been the biggest jump out of the games I played; Doom3, Far Cry, HL2, CS:S, DOD:S. I never tested GTA:SA or FEAR.

i also agree about the overall liabilities of such a laptop. I really feel there needs to be a balance in price, portability and performance. You really have to access your own needs. This M1710 CAN be upgraded, already is powerful, and is relatively portable. It is perfect for my CS:S/DOD:S fix at work or on the road at a coffee shop or something. My desktop is what I will be willing to have crazy power with (sli, raid0, etc).

why didn't you go with the new aurora m alx ? its has sli 7900 gtxs so it will kill the sli 7900 gs's. I mean it doesn't have 2 hd's but you cna still have a 100 7,200 hd and i think thats enough and you don't get the kickass paintjob.

I have not heard a single person complain about the heat on an m1710, alienware on the other I have heard a ton of complaints.

Everyone talks about the video cards but has anyone really discussed the architecture of the new Turion M?

Here is a preview of it

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets...spx?i=2374&p=2

It doesn't look like it can keep up with the centrino especially if it's still using DDR 400 Memory compared to the Intel Duo DDR2 667 memory.

Isn't DDR400 going to be obsolete soon? THe new AMD chipsets are going to use DDR2.

I would wait before jumping on the Turion Mobile bandwagon.

Plus Memron is around the corner.

LOL, thank you. I'm glad someone can spell. =)

And it's nice to see the educated public stepping in to agree.

Well you mentioned the architecture. In that respect you must examine the bus routing between the 2 platforms - the differences are enough to define them as seperate platforms. AMD has onboard memory controllers in all processors. This is a big advantage for them. And with everything being routed directly to the CPU, there isn't as big of a need for System Memory bandwidth on AMD systems as you would have on an Intel system. In regards to memory bandwidth efficiency... Intel is still in legacy status.

The Intel systems are finally getting better and don't even need the 667mhz FSB memory when you're running in dual channel. They run a quad pumped FSB as is, and dual channel makes the memory run at 8 times the actual bus speed (166 x 4 = 667FSB and 667Dual Channel = 1333mhz Memory bandwidth). The only time you'll really need more memory bandwidth than CPU FSB speed is when you have items sharing the system memory like integrated video cards or TurboCache/HyperMemory cards. Some other cards can be designed to access system memory on their own also - but only OEM parts will do stuff like this. Some Asus/Gigabyte parts (such as cheap TV tuners) can use system memory bandwidth to cache TV signal that it is encoding.

The Turion system has plenty of bandwidth in the dedicated graphics configs. Heat and power efficiency is where the Core Duo will beat the Turions.

MarekS are you serious or is you just stupid? The 1710 doesn't even get remotely near as hot as my old Sager. I'm guessing you never owned a SLI and x2 HDD in a laptop. The heat off SLI alone is going to be crazy hot. I wouldn't be surprised that it would be a requirement to have a laptop cooler to just even boot it up. When you say "Tomsharware or any other competent site" or did you mean Tomshardware? Because that is an oxymoron when you put Tomshardware and competent together. Tomshardware is a website that is biased and can't be trusted.

I hope your kidding when you spit off words like that. If not, then you are as incompetent as Tomshardware and need to stop listen to the local best buy employee tell you on the next HOT technology.

Dudes, there are some great prices for M1710's & M90's on the for sale forum, that makes them really competitive price wise.

Can't we all just get along

Don't forget that the Turions right now are single core, it'll be worth it when the X2 versions come out but that's down the road.

every1 saying heat issues LOL..first of all u dont haveto get raid 0...second of all 7900gs produces half the heat of a single 7900gtx..and u can turn off 1 vid card in the 9700..and also the 7900gs is cheaper if u incorporate themerom upgrade for 64bit...and also the 9700 will be more powerful graphics.....a 7900gs is about 10% better than a 7800gtx with half the heat.....dual 7800gtx vs. single 7900gtx...the sli 7800gtx wins

This laptop is a lot better than the Dell M1710: http://www.discountlaptops.com/index...&model_id=1363


You won't have to deal with bios flashing to overclock the video card and the system costs less fully equipped. The M1710 is overpriced for what it offers, it's not worth more than $2300 tops.