Alienware m15 R2

I am not a fan of m15 R1 design.

Btw, I wonder what are the advantages of inverted motherboard? It even makes the repair more challenging for technicians when they try to repair your laptop. Even the thin and light Apple Macbook Pros motherboards are non-inverted type.

 

This is Disgusting as well... And of course Dell offer the same for m17 r2. Yeah, every penny saved the better. But not for you. Solder on old hardware on latest and greatest of Dell's 2019 models gaming laptops is damn nice @Ultra Male Does Dell do this for their other models as well? I don't think so.

 

To each his own of course, but I find the R1 design just great. The keyboard is excellent and the pad works very well. In contrast, had a chance to try the keyboard on the latest Macbook Pro: a complete disaster.

 

Yes I like legend design as well over m15 r1, no waste space especially on display areas, because it’s what we’re facing every day, remember when I had Blade 14 damn bezel is always annoying me.
Probably for better cooling like on some desktop inverted mobo, correct me if I’m wrong though. Can’t wait to see real users gaming temperature to proof Umar’s Dauntless game play cpu temperature on YouTube was true.

Yes no wasting space as well on mobo dept all soldered lol

 

Well, we just have to expect this sort of thing from the Dell digi-monkeys. It seems pretty clear they don't have a clue what's good and right. If they do, the alternative is sinister because it involves intentional misbehavior rather than errors arising from ignorance. But, either way, the outcome is the same for the customer.

 

I wouldn't discount sinister motives here. The soldered RAM is a blatant money grab attempt, and the inverted motherboard could well be aimed at putting off enthusiast "troublemakers" who might think of opening the machine to repaste and whatnot.

Hopefully all this backfires, but looking at the state of the world I wouldn't discount the power of the uninformed customer either.

 

Inverted motherboards helpnto prevent keyboard decks from heating up that much but are indeed for repasting. But the aw15r1 was worse for example where you had to remove the whole palmrest and screenlid+hinges for a repaste.

 

I suspect the inversion helps heat control. Remember it doesn't make on site repairs any easier and Dell would be thoughtful about adding to that cost. Soldered wifi… that makes me seriously look at another vendor. Maybe that's an attempt to "steer" people into the 51m? Every business notebook typically uses Intel wifi, but also all of them have wifi in the M2 because different businesses follow different standards. Sorry I won't go on about it. We all know the soldered things was a slip too far. Razer and Asus can manage quite thin notebooks without having to solder everything down. And Apple gets a ton of grief over their policies on this front. If they did this in the business side they'd be handing business to Lenovo and HP.

 

If they seriously wanted to deal with heat, they could simply stop using toothpaste as TIM, and improve heatsink and assembly quality, at a time where certain competitors are even starting to use LM!

 

Look at this. When bad wasn't enough. Dell continue screw up their new Alienware models. As we know... No SODIMM slots and no WIFI slot. Now also with weaker Power adapter for the brand new models with 2060/2070. Maybe Alienware's Dell's engineers think if they welded on soldered ram chips and soldered wifi card on the MB, this means their brand new models need less power?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/c8wmpc/180w_for_new_m15_r2_rtx_2070maxq/essf7b6/

 

Once the digital diarrhea begins it is difficult to stop. But, it seems that some enjoy that malady.

They only produce broken rubbish now. And, people are willing to pay money for it. Go figure.

What I find utterly stupefying is that the decimal point was accidentally moved one digit too far to the right and there are still people willing to pay for it. Cray cray.

 

They are definitely trying to go full Apple, but without MacOS, Apple Stores (local same day support in major cities at least), and with a bunch of other direct competitors actually offering superior products (discounting AGA which is their only USP). Sad indeed.

 

This seems like a really bad joke. 6k for what? What we could do with 6k on at least two systems...jesus. This is the point where all head management should have been fired. But we know how the world works.

 

I have a feeling they (gaming laptop producers) will all eventually start using LM or at least high end paste as well as be forced to improve heatsink consistency. We'll see if they get the hint, but that and undervolting are the #1 and #2 suggestions for system improvement around here and it won't be long before the hint (Asus using LM) that it can be a competitive advantage to your product.

 

This has been the case for a while and Dell hasn't changed one bit in the right direction, quite the opposite in fact.

 

+$6000 usd ? Is it made of Gold? But as we all should know... All that glitters is not gold

All that glisters is not gold—

Often have you heard that told.
Many a man his life hath sold
But my outside to behold.
Gilded tombs do worms enfold.
Had you been as wise as bold,
Young in limbs, in judgment old,
Your answer had not been inscrolled
Fare you well. Your suit is cold—
Cold, indeed, and labor lost.

Use LM won't necessarily means better cooling. Just a cheaper way than put the money on better heatsink, pipes, fans and grills. Wrong way doing things! The cheap and lazy way.

 

I ordered myself the new r2 primarily for the purpose of software development with the added bonus that I may get to game on it. After reading all the comments on here, I’m very on the fence as to whether or not I’ll keep it. I’ve always used MacBook Pro for work and was already hesitant because windows is such a pain in the ass for what I do.. i guess it’s no big deal since I have that 30 day window.

 

Software development? I'm surprised you were not concerned by the limited soldered RAM.

 

16GB of ram is fine. Wouldn't mind 32, of course, but Intellij will run with no issues with that amount of ram. I'm more concerned with the number of cores and SSD. Reserving anywhere from 2 to 4GB of ram for the JVM is more than enough. I'm compiling a very large maven project.

 

What?!? i'm i reading right? >6000 USD?! what on earth are they thinking at dell? there must be some mistake, right?

 

If you're loading it up with the maximum available storage, then yeah.. although I honestly don't know why anyone wants or needs such large drives on a portable gaming machine, tbh. My configuration was $3799. Still looking at sticking with a newer Macbook Pro though since they also have the 9980HK. We'll see how this thing performs when I get it on July 31st.

 

Sure, IntelliJ is frugal on memory, but it's more of a question of how much memory the actual software being developed requires, including any databases etc, the latter will benefit from more RAM assuming non-trivial amount of data. Having more RAM also increases system I/O performance by virtue of caching. At $150 for 32GB of HyperX RAM 25% faster than the cheap one Dell pushes at 300% premium) it's a no brainer unless you are stuck with soldered RAM.

I copied the link posted by @Mr Fox - looks like he included 5Y service for 1K lol, and there is a large amount of SSD but still a massive ripoff.

The reasons why I wouldn't buy a Macbook Pro:

* Massively overpriced
* Broadly evidenced bad cooling and therefore constant throttling
* Ridiculously bad keyboard
* Weak AMD GPUs
* Closed design

Yes, MacOS is nice but one can run Linux on Dell laptops if Windows is a showstopper.

 

I'm not running the software on my machine; I'm strictly developing. I write hypervisor software and that's going on some very, very, very high end machines. There's no way to test it on a laptop or commodity desktop.

 

Sounds strange TBH, but while we are on the topic of VMs more memory would also benefit people running VMs, Docker containers etc.

 

Not arguing against the value of having more memory. In my case, 16GB is fine. There are plenty of development, gaming, etc use cases that would benefit from an additional 16GB. In my case, it's not strange at all. It's impossible for me to run the software I'm writing on my machine. There are unit tests I can run, obviously, but the actual hypervisors on our network (cloud company) need many special provisions including network substrate, permissions, etc that are just not going to be available to a developer's laptop. We write unit tests and we run integ tests on actual host machines.

 

Ah, you confused me with the "can't run this on non-commodity desktops". Sounded like there were non-commodity desktops that might do the job, which would beg the question why not a high-end laptop.

Kind of cool the company buys people $4k gaming laptops for work, or lets them develop presumably proprietary software on private laptops!

 

Heh, I wish, man. I was at AWS for a while, now I'm at Oracle. Same story at both companies. You get a laptop and you don't get a hardware refresh until end of that hardware life cycle. That means I'm stuck on a 2015 Macbook with a core i5-5570H for another 2 years. Developing on this thing is really, really slow. My plan was to just buy myself a laptop and use it for work. I've heard that it's more frowned upon than anything but I'm pretty sure I can take it to deskside and have them put an approved image on the laptop for me to use for work purposes. The money isn't a big deal at all, for me it's just having something that I can work on without so much lag. I'm used to the conveniences of OSX so I'm hoping using Windows won't suck bad enough because I wouldn't mind at least having a little gaming machine I can tinker around with every once in a while.

 

Yeah, Maven sucks in that it doesn't support incremental builds, so I can see why you are after an 8C/16T CPU, however, in my experience with a seemingly similar build scenario you may be underestimating the benefit you would see from using 32GB of memory, especially if you are extrapolating from 2C/4T. All those additional cores need memory. In fact I happened to upgrade memory from 16GB on three different machines in the last couple of years (including a 12C/24T dual Xeon one) and the difference was day and night in each case. More caching and no swapping.
Also, what if your requirements change? You will be stuck with $4k and 2kg worth of garbage.

Do yourself a favour and get a machine with properly upgradeable memory. At your budget you could even get an Area 51m if you can stomach 4kg and 17 inch. You would also help send Dell a message that this sort of cr@p internal design won't do.

 

BTW It's amazing Dell can actually fit 4 SODIMMs supporting up to 128GB and 97Whr battery in basically the same form factor:

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/sho...on/spd/precision-15-7540-laptop/xctop754015us

 

And the pricing too.. dramatically lower. Lol.

 

Indeed. TBH I would seriously look at that with 9980HK if I was shopping now. Can even get a fingerprint reader lol There are a few downsides like the lack of AGA, unknown thermal performance, and a slightly underwhelming GPU (seems to be in the 2060 ballpark), but overall a strong option for the pro customer. The 16GB RTX 5000 in the 17" variant looks badass though. I wonder what the TDPs on those GPUs are and what PSU they provide.

Edit: moreover these laptops have DGFF graphics cards rather than soldered GPUs...

 

@Mr. Fox ! Glad to see you are still around. You most likely do not remember me. I have not been around since a couple years after I bought my m18xR2. It is getting old and I am looking for a replacement. I was looking at the new ones. Man did dell shoot themselves in the foot or what. Clearly, the ones making then decisions on the product line have not got a clue, again. When will they learn. Build a solid product and DO Not Get GREEDY or Stupid. They are going to run the alienware line in to the ground, if they have not already.

In case they do not pull their heads out of there butts, what should I look at instead?

In the mean time I think my alienware options are the alienware 17, m17, area 51m. For overall performance and reliability what would you advise?

 

Is that actually the same chassis? Was it confirmed by Dell?

 

It's not very difficult to look up the dimensions on Dell website... It's not exactly the same. The Precision is about 0.2kg lighter while being 5cm deeper.

 

So, is it confirmed that, it doesn't have any free RAM slots?

[Wait...how? M15 R1 had big bezels. I am confused. What are you talking about.]

Edit: Sorry, I misunderstood a comment,

 

m15 R2 has no ram slots I asked DELL agent directly

 

Right, definitley soldered ram as reportet before.

On reddit /alienware you´ve got a bunch of threads for the new m15 r2 model

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/cgm8pz/m15_r2_yet_another_post_and_discussion/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/cgdlnh/i_just_received_my_alienware_m15_r2/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/cfxj8a/m15_r2_laptop_100c_on_idle_but_not_even_hot/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/cfh4rl/my_initial_thoughts_on_the_m15_r2_2080i9/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Alienware/comments/cfb54j/alienware_m15_2019_white_lunar_i9_rtx2080_maxq/

 

I was about to buy one but couldn't find any other ram configuration so I talked to one of the agents and was told that it was soldered not sure what they were thinking there