Considering buying Alienware laptop, any opinions or input?

ande0255

My Asus N56JR is running into some graphics driver issues when cranking high end games, so I am thinking about exchanging it to get an Alienware 17, and wondering if there's any weird caveats or considerations with the laptop build.

What is really attracting me is it is right in the starting range for laptops expandable to 32gb RAM is about $1.8k - $2 (comes with 16gb installed), is built to handle high end performance for graphics, and the supported native OS is Windows 7 64 bit (Hallelujah!).

My problem is that it just looks flashy or gimmicky, and though the specs look absolutely awesome, I'm wondering if anyone has had crappy experience like finding drivers / contacting support / glitchy lighting (the whole thing seems to illuminate different colors / burning out hardware due to it being so supercharged for gaming. It looks kind of too good to be true, but I'm not sure if the brand name or look may present some unseen issues.

If you made it through all that and have some input, thank you much!

Iristheangel

Back in the day, I would probably agree with you that Alienware was awesome but ever since Dell bought them, I've see a lot of QA issues. I think Sager tends to be pretty good but their America warranty support has some... err... issues. To say the least. ASUS ROG and MSI laptops are pretty good but they won't have a lot of battery power.

xnx

Alienwares are just over hyped and needlessly expensive machines

SephStorm

Its true unfortunately, but honestly, if I had money to burn i'd buy it just for those beautiful red lights...

You could look at getting one from ebay.

ande0255

That is too bad Dell acquiring them introduced the QA issues, I was kind of wondering about that when I saw it was a 'Dell Alienware 17'. My experience with Asus customer support has already been so poor, especially paying the return shipping for a product that came back still not working, I don't think I'd go with them again if I upgrade.

Anyone have any suggestions for a higher end laptop other than Alienware that is expandable up to 32gb of RAM? Again, dealing with their customer support has left such a bad taste in my mouth, I would really rather not put more money into their pockets.

Thanks for the responses peeps!

Deathmage

Find a gaming laptop that has well-placed cooling vents, a slightly raised platform and dual dedicated graphics cards. Yes the laptop will be heavy but keep a keen look for these qualities. There is so many so-called "Gaming laptops" on the market it's nuts when in-fact there not really pure gaming laptops.

Me personally I'd get this:

EON17-SLX Extreme Gaming Laptop | Details and Features | ORIGIN PC

(laptops with raised racks like this one are ideal since they are designed for gaming with the additional vents for cooling; nothing sucks more than getting a beastly gaming laptop that can't vent all that insane heat. You will have nothing put problems down the road...)

and then get this - since I'm a firm believer that online gaming is nothing without a Bigfoot Gaming Nic:

Amazon.com: Bigfoot Networks KillerN-1202 Notebook Wireless Card: Computers & Accessories

(heck even ask them if that can pop in the card for you) - I have a Bigfoot 2100 in my home-based Gaming PC and the card easily drops my lantecy by 20-30ms just by using the card vs Intel Gigabit nic's or Broadcom cards.

ande0255

Thanks for the detailed post, I'll be investigating that laptop as a replacement candidate! I changed around some drivers and my laptop has BSOD'd again for the last couple hours, so I'm stress testing it with game play and VM's to see if I csn reproduce the BSOD.

I saw the Alienware 18 in my local Microcenter had dual GPU's with only 8GB RAM total, and I it didn't specify if it coildbhold more, I could barely believe it.

JasonIT

I agree Alienware went down hill with the purchase by Dell/

I think the Razer laptops are pretty top shelf now days. (Razer - For Gamers. By Gamers. - Razer United States)

J