Tried to purchase 17 R4 from Dell, worst sales experience ever

I thought the horror stories I've heard of dealing with Dell were few and far apart, until I tried to purchase an Alienware 17 R4 from Dell Outlets UK.

I purchased the system online from Dell Outlets UK with a 15% off offer. A nice system (i7-7820K and 1080GTX) to replace my old Alienware x17m R3 (originally bought off someone on Ebay in a straight forward transaction).

So the Dell sale goes through and they take a big chunk of my money (£1855). I get a delivery date of 4 days after the original purchase, great. Then it all started to go wrong. The delivery date is revised three times leading to an ETA of three weeks later.

I emailed and called Dell order support to only be told that the laptop is in their department in Hungry, and they have been trying to get in contact with them, but they are not replying to their requests for information (gone rogue?). I ask them if they seriously can't just pick up the phone and call them. The customer service person informs me they don't have a telephone (in Hungry) to contact. This is for real. Next thing I see is the order is removed from my account for a day and then reappears the next day.

I contact support again to find out what is going on (again). Finally they get back to me to inform me the laptop I bought is not available for purchase. Basically they took my money for just over 3 weeks while not having the laptop to sale in the first place, or even bother informing me of their error.

To add insult to injury, today I was offered an inferior spec'ed replacement 17 R4 for the same price as the original by someone who thinks they are the same, or that I wouldn't notice the difference. That's right a GTX 1070 instead of GTX 1080, and a i7-7700HQ instead of a i7-7820K. I refused the offer and ask them for a same spec'd system or my money back promptly.

This is without exception the worst sales experience I've ever had, including non-company sellers on ebay. I seriously can't understand how a company manages to survive when they can't even sell their own products competently. I'm wondering if I should get a Clevo instead rather than having to deal with this unbelievably bad sales and customer experience again.

 

I would file a dispute with your bank and get your money back. Amazon is selling the 1080 model now for a comparable price.

 

Trust me if they don't offer the same spec system for the same price I will get a refund. If they take their time giving my money back I will initiate a credit card chargeback with my credit card company. It is a pretty open and shut case really, I paid money for a product they did not have and took my money anyway.

If it was a sincere mistake then you would think they would offer a comparable system as an apology for screwing up and making me wait over 3 weeks and not an insulting downgrade from the original specs for the same money. Shameful behaviour.

 

Yikes, any update on this? I JUST (two days ago) ordered pretty much the exact same laptop (7820k and 1080 with 16 GB 2444 Mhz RAM) and am really hoping I do not run into the same issue. I paid extra for the express delivery but still shows an ETA of June 16-20.

 

dell refund usually takes over a month, some members even experienced over 2 month

 

Well just to update on my end, I received my R4 yesterday, so took about 6 days total. Very happy with it so far.

 

Let us see the current temp. on that machine under full load for hours ofc.

 

I haven't had a chance to fully benchmark temps but have been using an emulator for over 6 hours today and these were my temps. Note that emulators are CPU heavy verses GPU so this is by no means a good reference other than CPU heat dissipation efficiency. Clocks were at 4.2 GHz with high speed fan enabled in the bios. I did run assassins creed syndicate for 2 hours under the same clock conditions and reached a high temp of 80 C.
I definitely plan on adding LM (Conductonaut) to the R4 as I've had a lot of success with it on my Dell XPS 17 L702x, but wont have time for that until next week, so this will have to do for now.

 

impressive !!! enjoy it

 

Amazing. Your temps reflect an ideal PC. That metal treatment will reduce it 50C for CPus and 60C for GPU on full load.

 

Thanks. Is it stock or did you repaste?

 

Definitely stock as OP said. Very good, no great temps out of the box.