How's the cooling on the Alienware 14?

I probably need to bite the bullet on another Alienware, but am torn between the 14 and 17. I prefer everything about the 17 of course, from the better GPU to the bigger screen, but it ends up basically $1000 to go from a Geforce 765 to a 780. Worth it in many respects, but still it's a lot of money.

I'm wondering how the cooling is on the 14. My M17x-R4 has fantastic cooling, which is one of the things I love about it, but I've heard that the M14x a couple of generations ago didn't cool that well, and sounds like it has a more "normal" cooling system with a single fan and the like. Plus I assume you can still disable Optimus on the 17, but not the 14. (Also I'm not a fan of putting a 1080p screen on a 14" notebook, though hopefully DPI settings more or less fix that, as it looks like 8 goes up to 200% scaling...I'm not a huge fan of scaling, and it can cause issues with some programs, AND you have to manually disable then reboot if you're connecting to a larger display, but at least it's something.

Anyway just wondering about cooling and any other thoughts about the two systems.

 

why make assumptions?
you definitely CAN disable optimus
and the cooling is very good (cpu: less than 80C gpu: less than 65C when gaming)
do you mean 1080p screen makes everything small?
come on you can't expect icons and stuff looks exactly the same size as on your 17 inch laptop

base on your assumptions....i think i can assume you already made your choice deep in your mind....go for the 17

 

Good thinking, it does seem like the 17 would fulfill your needs better than the 14 would.

 

You could never disable optimus before on the 14. That's good news.

I'm concerned about the cooling as the previous generation's didn't have the same relative cooling as the 17 and 18 models. Two generations ago in particular it was problematic.

Sounds like this is much better though!

The only reason I'd get the 14 over the 17 is cost. The 17 is basically 2x as powerful, but adds another $1000ish because you can't add Blu Ray to the base model, inexplicably.

 

Alienware 14 has amazing cooling I think it's max temp is set to 67 Degrees! I've never seen it go above

 

And no throttling either?

Sounds like hopefully they nailed it! I do love that Alienware attempts to keep their hardware from running too hot. Makes stuff last longer

Honestly another issue I have with the 14 is psychological. I've got an M17-R4 with a Geforce 680, so it's tough to get anything less than the 780 for my second system!

Juts wish they let you add Blu Ray to the base system like they used to...

 

Again then it's your preference then Remember it also depends on your resolution, 1080p is nearly double that of 768p, which means the video card works twice as hard If your going to go with 1080p then yes you'll definitely take a pretty big loss, but if yours going to go with 768p then you prob will not notice a difference.

It did feel like it throttled at one point, my CS was lagging and changing but after testing it some more (and activating windows), there didn't seem to be anymore throttling. I'll keep testing it.

When I did the Unigine Test, I can confirm that it DID throttle down during some of the transition (when the screen faded to set the next scene) but it would clock itself back up when it was actually doing the scene.

I'll do more tests when there aren't any midterms.