What does alienware do to their systems

Actually the 9860 and 7700 along with several others are all made by Clevo. They main difference would be optical drive choices,ram, and it looks like sager may offer SATA drives and ATA100 instead of just ATA100 drives. The bios are the same except sager and AW have the own logos.

Additional: As far as being tuned better then the other clones, the AW system isn't. Everything is stock no fine tuning in the video drivers or anywhere else. No bios tuning as the bios is about as plain as you can get on sager and AW. AW even skimps on proper thermal protection on the CPU and GPU with skimpy thermal pads where Sager uses thermal paste a much better cooling solution.

I believe they use different manufacturer drives, but I may be mistaken. I have 2 NEC 6500 drives in mine. OF course that really doesnt matter as you can change them to whatever you would like.

The nec drive is dirty cheap now.

Actually, not to start the debate again but Clevo dont make the 7700 or any of the other laptops with the same design and spec. I know Clevo manufacture lappies but i believe the D900T that Clevo sell is actually made elsewhere. Do some searches in google and you can find the company.

And just for the record i've owned Clevo, Sager and AW models of the same laptop and the AW was far superior! The Clevo and Sager both lost their paint shine quickly and seemed to damage more easily. Also the screen on the Clevo was pants in comparison. All in all the AW seemed far more 'tuned' than the others and performed better for longer.

I mean you see these track cars that do stupid speeds, but on the outside they look exactly the same as cheaper production cars that do half the speed. That applies here i feel! Just cause the chassis is the same and most of the parts are similar i think thats just a cost cutting measure for AW. Its easier and cheaper for them to buy a cheap laptop from korea and strip it down and build it to a better standard than it is for them to source the same parts from all over the place and then put it together in a chassis from somewhere else! If you start with something you know is a bad ass machine you can easily take it and make it a monster.

That said, if your in it for performance alone its not worth jumping to the AW price! Stick with your Sager and look like every other laptop user in the world. However, i enjoy showing everyone that i have a bad ass hunk of machine and i get far more people coming over going 'dude that rocks' that i ever did with my clevo or my toshiba or whatever! I love owning a laptop that compared to the other brands is very very rare!

xxx

Not really, I haven't noticed any system truly tuned beyond anything anyone else has done.

I would have to agree about this. I was under the impression that Alienware systems were tuned and optimized for performance. Now I have no complaints about the hardware, it is exactly what I expected and for the most part top of the line. But the software was something else. Windows wasn’t even up to date, much less optimized for performance. The only other software I had factory installed was Nero 6 and there were 4 patches available for that, they weren’t installed either. Both of these things make the Respawn disk I bought kind of worthless. As far as I can see the performance tuning consists of getting the fastest and most compatible hardware and the latest stable drivers.
The only company I know of that optimizes their systems more than this Voodoo, but I’m not sure that it increases performance enough to justify the cost. Before I bought my 7700 I looked at all the Clevo based systems available in the states. The Voodoo version was $1600 US more than the 7700 configured basically the same. The Voodoo had a couple of more features, but nowhere near $1600 more. As a matter of fact the Alienware was the least expensive of the Clevo clones I found.

the voodoo possesses black magic powers, voodoo dolls sold seperately.

no some resellers use better ram or hdd's.....in a test over the same model/different distributors hypersonic got the best benchmark scores. Nothing outstanding, and definetely not worth the extra 4-600 more

Not exactly the two things Alienware is known for, but a fine machine nonethless.