Portable battery pack for 2016 Alienware 15 R2?

I'm looking for a portable battery pack that'll work with a 2016 Alienware 15 R2. Something that'll let me work unplugged for a bit longer than the built-in battery would. It doesn't have to let me game; if I want to game I'll just find myself an outlet to plug into.

Does anybody have any recommendations?

 

The battery is no good on those laptops ?? Then what the heck was the whole friggin purpose for them making them BGA junk to begin with ?!?

 

Why do you need it? 7 o r8 hours on half brightness is very do-able. But the battery is also too large to just power with another battery. It is actually one of the largest laptop batteries out there.

 

Nice spam/troll whatevs you have there.

 

The only ones I've seen (not fair maybe) were terrible.... been a few years though. I suspect they work better if used to charge while off or in sleep mode.

 

From what I understand, the battery in the AW15R2 is good ... for a gaming laptop. Which, in general, isn't saying much.

 

7 or 8 hours? I must be doing something wrong then. As I'm typing this, I'm working unplugged after it's been charging all night so it has a full charge. The screen is at 50%, and I'm Wi-Fi. The only thing I'm having it do right now is importing a fairly large virtual machine from VMware into VirtualBox.

According to the battery meter in the system tray I only have 2 hours and 47 minutes left :-/. Granted, the import is pinging the system drive rather hard. But it's on the SSD and not on the mechanical. This shouldn't be that big of a deal, but apparently it is. I'd hate to see how well the battery performs when I'm doing something more substantial.

 

VM's are quite taxing on the battery. No machine will give you more than that. I get 7 to 8 hours with just browsing, AlienFX turned off, brightness 50% and power saving mode enabled.

 

Alright, sorry. I was trolling slightly, I must apologise. I meant to imply, it is a reason why I personally do not like the newer Alienware's. They attempted to make them more portable, but did not do that great of a job on them. You want ultrathin powerful and portable, you get a Razor. Can't get better. I wouldn't ever own one, but I am just saying.

As for a new battery, you could potentially make a better one, yourself, if you can open the battery pack up and replace the cells with higher capacity.

 

Did you actually owned any of these products?

I did, the new Alienwares run cool (max 65c on the GPU and around 70~75c on CPU), have good build quality, have superb keyboards, good trackpad, can pack up to 3 drives, have a big battery etc and run fairly quiet for a gaming laptop. Do you know what those ultraportables such as the Razer Blade, Gigabyte P34W, Aorus X3,X5 etc do? They run hot, throttle, are loud, have less storage, poor keyboards, poor trackpads, small batteries that die out quickly due to heat etc.

The later Alienwares are sitting nice in the middle. Gave up the MXM upgrade path to become a bit more portable, but still have the cooling and performance. There are no 980m equipped portable laptops out there all others are in similar size brackets.

 

I've seen and played with the new Alienware's yes, but not owned. They are as cool as the components inside are powerful, which is to say neither. 65C sitting on your lap, is VERY hot. Want cool and thin and 1/3rd the price, try a Clevo N150RD for 750$ Haswell CPU, and 960M 2cm thick and STAYS COOL, less then 45C. With MANUAL options to control the fans with software OR OSD. Course for 200-300$ more you can have the N155RF1 with a 965M and a Skylake 6820K, and it will outperform most the Alienware's that are 1.5 X the cost and still run 10-15C cooler and be 25% thinner.


I don't know what to say, except Alienware charges a lot for a premium quality chassis, which have a very large return rate and defect rate. I've purchased 4 Alienware's directly in the last 4-5 years, but I've had over 2 dozen returns or RMA's or repairs. One of them CAUGHT FIRE while a DELL tech was remotely connected. I've had batteries explode, screens broken full of bad pixels, tons of soundcard issues, have had videocards dying on all but one of them within 6 months, at least 6 motherboards replaced on just the AW17, and about the same number on the M18X-R2, only 3-4 times on the M17X-R4, but then again I got it for cheap that one, only 3500$ almost half the price compared to the others....

Bought 4 Clevo laptops in the last 3 years. One return, because my wife uses the laptop allday everyday, and every 45 minutes she opens and closes it at least once, a hinge/screw broke off, and eventually al;l the hinges/screws broke on it. The thing was too tight, anyways got it replaced. Was 2 months before warranty ran out, so didn't pay anything. All 4 Clevo's cost less then the AW18 I had, combined. Even though one of the Clevo's has a 3920MX and 2 x 980M SLi.

I still have the Clevo's, my favorite being my Skylake's X6 from Eurocom, with G-Sync. No issues. Solid. 1/3rd-1/4 the price of an Alienware, more powerful by far, and parts and replacement are half the cost and soo much easier to get ahold of. No software issues with drivers, except a track pad issue consistent on some models with windows 10, but its affecting MSI, ASUS, Alienware too.

So, I have the ULTRA THIN portable, I have the mid tier portable and a top tier single GPU and the top of the top last years model of the biggest baddest clevo too. (X8, as opposed to say the X9 today). No issues. Weird, that every Alienware I had, I spent hundreds of hours with tech support fixing and replacing things. At one point they gave me a direct number to call and an account and would ship me the parts without a tech, so i could fix them myself. Dell stopped sending techs. They offered complete money back on some models, even after a year. One model, I got replaced 2 years later after 6 months of non-stop RMA/Repairs and returns.

The only thing I was able to do to make any of the Alienware's workable and good, was fix them myself, with parts I found myself. because they kept sending me refurbished and broken parts over and over. To shut me up about one incident in particular, they refunded me my money, AND let me keep the M17X-R4. Which I admit, I had since spoke highly of the machine, and fixed it up good, and even sold it after a year of using it without issues. They replaced the M18X-R2 with a AW17, which I sold, new, and the new guy (friend of mine) had RMA's for 1 year, which is a nightmare. The AW18 I had they replaced so many times, and once it caught fire they promised to send me a fully tested 100% guaranteed to work perfectly version just to close it after almost 6 months of me hitting social media sites and complaining. That AW18 rocked hard. I got 6500$ for it. The CPU I could clock at 4.0Ghz and beat anyones Scores when they were at 4.5GHz didn;t even need to overvolt it, it was like the best damn 4920XM that was ever made or something. Ridiculously good CPU. First and only timer in my life I seen a CPU that perfect. ANYWAYS -

Dell/Alienware's I've seen tested, are mostly all junk in my opinion. They used to be good. Then DELL bought them, and they have since sucked. They look nicer, the chassis seems better, but QA has gotten so bad, your almost guaranteed a broken one rather then a working one at this point. It is my opinion, there should be less then 1% issues. Not more then 50% issues. on all models sold. When you go through what most of us on the Alienware section have gone through in the last 5-6 years - you most likely will NEVER encourage DELL computers again, and instead HEAVILY warn people not to trust DELL.

They sell snake oil man. Highly priced expensive snake oil. But if you read what I wrote, can you imagine how often I couldn't sleep at night ? Can you imagine the stress on my relationships I had thanks to DELL ? I would do tech support at work for 8 hours, come home and be on the phone for 8 hours arguing and trying to get DELL to support the laptop I bought from them. This went on for months. I had saved up and gotten a lawyer. I almost had to Sue them, but I was going to have to take them to court over the consumers act that they broke. I had lost sooo much peace of mind, two years of my life wasted, with everyday issues because of Alienware laptops.

two friggin years of almost more time resolving issues then using the laptop, I had no free time to enjoy life, just a migraine, a headache and failing health thanks to the stress of owning a cheapass Aienware. This ******** that they made with graphics amplifier, this is very old tech. I have made one for 30$ on my M17X-R4, a mPCI-e to PCI-E adapter and PSU to power a graphics card. So long as its there when you boot the machine it loads and runs fine and uses whatever normal driver you would use on your graphics card. I ran a 780 Ti. Worked fine.


It's all just a stupid gimmick, with DELL. It's a shame they can not create better laptops with all that tech they have in the Alienware lineup, but they have very very very poor QA. They're employee's hate them, no one likes working for DELL. Thier corporate structure is garbage, its just a pyramid schema that feeds the bloated fatasses at the top.

Before buying an Alienware, I tell people : You could Buy a house and start a family, or you can buy an Alienware and find yourself alone and homeless one day. But live your life free. Don't say I didn't warn you when buying something from DELL/Alienware ruins your life.

 

Ofcourse a 960m equipped laptop with a 15inch chassis is a cool running machine. Its no performance to speak off. I didnt see the N155RF1 in the wild yet? ANd I highly doubt it will outperform most Alienwares because the most popular machiens are the 970M and 980M machines..........The chassis is made to handle those GPU's not a budget piss poor 965M. THat GPU is only fine for a small 13inch laptop.

You seem to have a lot of bad luck that I didnt have. But if they are that unreliable then they would have closed their business already.

I really dont like the buil don CLevo's and I have tested a few before purchasing because there arent many 970M and 980M equipped laptops in the 15inch bracket out there. They all have something that I dislike. The Clevo's had ****ty lids and poor battery life, the Gigabytes are poorly made overall, MSI's are nice but have poor battery life etc. The Alienware is a bit thicker the rest is what I wanted to have.

I still have the Clevo's, my favorite being my Skylake's X6 from Eurocom, with G-Sync. No issues. Solid. 1/3rd-1/4 the price of an Alienware, more powerful by far, and parts and replacement are half the cost and soo much easier to get ahold of. No software issues with drivers, except a track pad issue consistent on some models with windows 10, but its affecting MSI, ASUS, Alienware too.[/QUOTE]

Depends your location. The Skylake's X6 is expensive here and parts are fairly hard to come by. If your machien breaks down and there are no parts available. I hope you will get a replacement machine then instead of owning an expensive paper weight.

Really sounds you have extreme bad luck but if this would be the case for every customer out there, it wouldnt be possible that the company is still alive today.

You and me both dont have any numbers on a larger scale. We cant say that there are 50% issues or not on all machines sold.

That is one huge post But LIke I mentioend before it seems you are an exception within their entire customer base. This couldnt be the experience that all customers have or else **** would have blown up already for years. Sucks though that these are your experiences. But for me. I am happy with my machine and I couldnt find any good alternative even though I tried the past 4 years around 7 laptops fo rmonths.

 

I too have not had the bad Dell/AW experience described.

Both the M11x and the AW13 did/do just fine for me on battery.

 

here is a real thin Clevo, very thin, battery lasts ages. Cheaper then Alienware if you were to get the same thing though I don't think you would get G-Sync.
http://www.eurocom.com/ec/configure(2,342,0)ec

 

I owned that model for 4 weeks, its only a bit thinner, lasted only 3 hours on battery, the lid flexes, had backlight bleed. Also 3 fans instead of 2. More parts that can break. All other can cool these specs with 2.

 

That's what you get with bgabooks.

Buy a real laptop.

 

it has MUX switching, so it can completely turn off the 980M, and last much longer. The fans can be controlled with the OSD and software too, or by function key. But you can buy extra batteries easily for it. Its a VERY small battery,too, last decently long all things considered.