Alienware 15 R2 New Order - Questions on UHD 1080p Upscaling, 980M 8GB viability, and PCIE+SATA M.2

Hello again NBR! After a 5 year hiatus from this forum and from Alienware, 3.5 years with a retina macbook pro (2012) and the same desktop in my sig (new gpu and ram of course ) I've finally decided the time is here to upgrade and to throw down on an Alienware 15R2. The big pro's are Skylake and the price seems right for a maxxed out model, with the 12% alienware UK promo i'm paying 1930£ (190$ difference from usa price even with the obscene 300£ UHD Upgrade) for: 6820HK i7 / UHD Display / 16GB DDR4 Ram / 980M 8GB / 512GB PCIE + 1TB 7200RPM HDD and 1 year accidental warranty.

Considering this will replace my Core i7 920 [email protected] / 780 GTX Rig and Macbook Pro in one go, I think this should still be an overall upgrade even if the GPU is more of a sidegrade. A couple of questions for the group here

1.) UHD Display - Does 1080P or even 1440p scaling look pleasant on the 4k display?

My main criteria for spending the 300£ (ridiculous) upgrade was to avoid the 220 nits and poory reviewed FHD display - I'm trying to keep this thing for 3-4 years the same way my macbook pro retina continues to last. I listed out pros and cons of this vs the 1080p screen and it won out, namely due to the excellent color reviews i've seen and the igzo tech, and brightness. Question to those who are gaming on this unit in 1080p - Can you please give me an idea of how you find SCALING UP FROM 1080P on the 4K SCREEN LOOKS IN GAMES? Do you find it to be a compromise and is the typical blur unpleasant? I cannot for the life of me find many people talking about this online - how is your 4k screen looking when you play at 1080P? Or is it that anyone who seriously games took the 1080p 220 nits display and i've made a terrible mistake?

2.) The 980M 8gb- do you guys believe this card is actually end of life/ will be replaced soon?

I realise its been out for quite a while, for someone who hasn't had his head to the ground for a few years on notebook gpus - am I buying old tech with this laptop?

3.) Last question - M.2 SSDs - can you run a PCIE and SATA m.2 SSD concurrently?

Mine is coming with a PCI express M.2 - however i've ordered a new 850 EVO SATA M.2 500GB drive (100£ was too good to pass up) to occupy the second bay. Is it possible to run 1 PCI express m.2 and 1 SATA3 m.2 at the same time in this machine?

Thank you for your input on one or all of these questions, glad to see the community here is still going strong!

 

I'm playing Witcher 3 on 1080p Ultra settings and it's beautiful.
Don't know what blur you're talking about, I don't see any blur other than the in-game motion blur.

Apart from Windows 10 messing up a few things here and there, I am extremely happy that I got the 4K. Nothing would convince me to go back to 1080p now.

 

3. Yes. I cloned M.2 MX300 SATA to 950 Pro NVMe.

1. I do not know about gaming but 1080p content like movies look good on 4K screen.

Do not bother with 4K if you are using your laptop anything work related unless you want to spend 6 months trying to fix things. Scaling is fine, but half-baked. Many things will look abnormal (You need a microscope to see WMP12 buttons or Photoshop CS6 menus, many things will look broken in many places, fonts will look washed-out in Outlook or Thunderbird, almost no software will work properly without lots of fiddling/upgrading on high-DPI). I hated it and I ordered a 1080p since this crap was taking way way too much of my time without any tangible benefits. 1920x1080 resolution on 17" laptop is already very crisp and retina quality when viewed in normal viewing distance. 4K for work is just snakeoil.

And if you think you can set the resolution to 1920x1080 and be done thinking it is perfect 1/4 ratio like many suggest, you are wrong. Windows fonts will look blurry. I could not stand it and went back to 4K until native FHD laptop comes.

 

I don't know about CS6 but Illustrator CC, Photoshop CC and Office work perfectly on my UHD.

In fact the only dialogs in which fonts are blurred are the windows system ones like device manager. Of course, some third party applications also have blurred fonts.

But all menus and buttons are the right size. I'm not saying the blurry text isn't annoying, but that's where the problem ends and it's nothing like how you paint it to be. Just mentioning this for the benefit of everyone who is deciding between the two displays.

 

It is exactly how I painted out to be and even worse. Not everyone likes to be cashcows for Adobe's monthly cloud crap, so we use a bit older Photoshop. I spent a day with manifest files and whatnot for it. Even in CC, they put High-DPI support as experimental only in 2015! That being a creativity software costing thousands of dollars should give you a good indication of how other apps are. VLC player does not look proper, it's skins put the play bar in the middle of the screen! Anything and everything that has anything to do with skins/plugins/addons will be broken. Ms Office (Outlook especially) is not fine at all. HTML mails will display as narrow columns occupying 1/10th of the screen, scrolling endlessly pages and pages, including couple of words per line! Outlook fonts will look washed-out in navigation pane. Courier New which is the default font almost in everywhere requiring monospace in windows is not designed to scale like this, so it just looks washed out (start notepad if you want to test). Samsung Magician.... good luck reading anything on it on 4K!

Bios... have blind type password because box is so miniscule. Any admin tools running off of sticks like parted magic... Symentec Ghost 2015... well, I can go on forever.

I am not bringing up 6,000-6,100K colors that gives a yellow tint to everything. Sure it makes movies and games look, but it is not for work. I can't believe what a good white my $800 Acer Nitro has compared to this $4,000 overpriced bull.

I just played a 4K movie on my 4K monitor and 1080p acer, and side-by-side, I could not see a damn difference. Sure it will look good if this is your only laptop in your life and you rush to youtube for 4K costarica movies... which will stutter and pause every 10 secs due to enormous amounts of data that will need to be transferred over the net, but hey, it is 4K!

4K brings absolutely no benefit to me at all. Of course it might be the biggest and baddest for games, I wouldn't know. So your experience would be different than mine naturally. But this is my observation which even resulted in me trying to run it first in 1920x1080 resolution, hen failing due to blurriness, dumping the laptop and going for 1080p. So it should carry some weight for some non-gamers.

 

Here are some screenshots. Judge for yourself if there's any problems.

 

View attachment 129655

 

I like how you conveniently omitted out any kind of content and just flashing off the UI of Outlook.
So see for yourself how it is if you actually need to get any work done.
Anyway, I hijacked OP's thread. So apologizing and stopping here.

 

I didn't conveniently omit out anything, what do you think, I'm being paid by Dell?
From your screenshots it's apparent that you're using 100% scaling, why on earth would you do that? Use 250% and see the difference.
Also tell me what content you want to see on my screen, I'll post a screenshot with it. If you mean Outlook, I don't use it.

 

Alright guys.. It is clear there are issues with Windows 10 scaling which isn't what I was asking about. It was more around how the hardware scaling works 1080->4k in games, I'm actually not personally bothered by the small ui elements as I have perfect eyesight and I'm a bit of a pixel junky! From what I can tell they really screwed r2 users..Either deal with the 4k screen and proper colors and brightness or take a preferable resolution with washed out colors and low brightness. Washed out colors and low brightness are unacceptable, so hopefully the scaling from games running at 1080p on the 4k screen will be acceptable any pics you can take with your camera of this would really be appreciated!
Thanks for confirming the m.2 SSD slots can work one in pci and one in sata.

 

Some clicks:




Screenshots (they are compressed JPEGs so you might see some fuzziness - it's not there in actual)

 

Scaling is 200% on all those which translates into 1920x1080 effective. I think you are not reading me. Many things are screwed. Also why would I need to use 250% and bring it down to 1536x864 on a 17" screen and go back 10 years?

 

nick, it is not as if we have broken eyesight. I have 20/20 as well. But those UI elements are broken from a normal viewing distance. They would look fine if you put your head 10 cms from the screen though.

 

thanks for the pictures!! Looks good. After much deliberation I will leave the order intact and let it get delivered. It's finally in production so should see it by Friday / Monday.

 

so I have windows 10 installed on my retina macbook pro, and I've experienced these quirks there it isn't game breaking for me. I can't imagine it's much worse in the 4k screen Vs the retina display. 1080p is too low res for a 2016 machine.

 

Linus from linustechtips once said that UHD starts to make sense at around 30 inches, I'd love to work on adobe software on a 34" 4k ultrawide monitor with 100% scaling, on a laptop I can see it making sense if all my work was for printing but it doesn't. On Mac OS it makes sense because of the flawless scaling but on windows there are still drawbacks, there should be middle ground IMO.

 

Linus is a pimpsqueak.

And UHD is perfectly fine on a 15" notebook

 

I play my FPS games in 4K on my 17" R3 UHD and it is excellent. It's worth the upgrade...

Even if you don't play games in 4K, playing 1080p games on a 4K display still looks better in my opinion. - And no you don't need a 30inch display to have 4k make sense...that's just an opinion...

 

heh well in my case I ended up returning my UHD model and saving 900£ with a USA outlet order. In the end I couldn't bear the UHD panel. Playing games at 1080 for me was visibly blurry and the ui elements in windows 10 were spotty. I didn't have any 4k content either. Didn't seem worth

 

Hard to imagine as my UHD is excellent. As a designer / editor I work on 4k screens so I'm used to seeing quality.

Blurred games? I have yet to experience that.

You might have had a lemon. Coming across good panels is the luck of the draw with some models...

At the end of the day, whatever makes you happy.


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I'm guessing by blur they are referring to the blurriness in running non native resolutions on the screen. Could still look good but not *quite* as good. Waiting to receive mine next week so I can see what the hub bub is about.

 

Yes I had figured. My confusion was in that even a 1080p running something non native would produce the same results so I didn't think twice of discounting that fact. Thought it seemed obvious

Either way, the 4k UHD screen is excellent and preferred as it gives me the best of both Worlds.

Cheers to your AW in transit!

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