Am I an idiot or..

I'm configuring a new M18 on Dell's website and I cannot find the option to change the color ANYWHERE.............summary shows silver anodized aluminum. Is this the only option available or am I just too stupid to figure out their website?

 

no it its not there.. also whats not there is cpu and gfx options on any thing under the second to highest tier..

 

Wait, they offer different colors still? I assumed they only offered silver now.

 

no different color options, no media keys, no alien head power button, no name plates, lesser capacity battery. welcome to the new 18.

 

to top it up:

no more PCI-Express slot
no more E-SATA/USB COMBO port
no more 3.0 megaPixel Webcam - 2.0 megaPixel webcam instead
no more S/P DIF port
MINUS -1 SATA HDD/SSD drive port (1*mSATA + 2*SATA3 * ODD SATA)
also hard to tell if their new design dual pipe GPU heatsinks will cool better than previous gen 3pipe GPU heatsinks.. alot of price cut corners manoeuvres

It seems like they still have name plate but different to one before, its now one horizontally orientated

 

Good to know I'm not the moron I was starting to think I was..................and seeing the lack of features compared to my R2 I think I'll pass on this generation of AW and will just upgrade to 780's when they become available at a price just short of the average first born child.

 

I didnt know there was a 3pipe GPU heatsink. Do you know the product number for this? I am and always have been using the double pipe HS for GPU.

 

lol, no way



All M18X always ran 3-pipe GPU heatsinks no matter if it was 75W or 100W TDP just different design from each other but always 3 PIPE HS per GPU, CPU has different storey, 1pipe/2pipe/3pipe etc

 

Yep, the new models suck, and are ugly. It screams penny pinching. Your better off upgrading to the 880ms. This year's performance bump isn't really worth it, but next year with the die shrink it will be a 100 percent performance increase

Sent from my SPH-L900 using Tapatalk 2

 

ah my bad. i was confusing it with the cpu heatsink. Because i bought my m18x back in the day from outlet and it came with a single pipe cpu heatsink that i quite recently upgraded to triple pipe

 

Thanks Dan,

I actually like the looks of the new design, especially the aluminum vs plastic finish............would prefer black aluminum though as opposed to the MAC silver but that's minor. I just have no desire to lose the other features that, while I don't use them now here in Assghanistan, I will use when I get home for good.

 

No alien head power button?? Damn that was one of my favourite things in the alienware

 

Does anyone have good pictures of the new cooling system?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m18x/721353-m18x-r3-motherboard-close-up-new-post.html

 

I have an r2 with a single pipe heatsink but I ordered a triple some weeks ago and on the way. How much did your temps decrease?

 

I have tried it with m18x R1 i7-2860QM OEM CPU, temps dropped maybe 5-10c on idle, but not more, and on load it was just little less than before with 1pipe heatsink, but what was noticeable slower temperature jump to top and more steady cooling

 

Cool, the fatter heatpipes will have better contact area and should perform better than 3 smaller ones.

 

^^ practice talks the facts - 2Pipe CPU heatsink looses for 3Pipe CPU heatsink in m18X. 2pipe pipes are fatter bigger in more better contact with heatsink and fins - if you may say , but 3pipe heatsink 3 pipes somehow outperform 2Pipe heatsink how is that?

 

That might be down to material choices inside the pipes.

 

I imagine that AW would not put worse-performing heatsinks in a system with hotter GPUs than last year.

 

true , time will show when the 780m's get mature, fully unlocked with vbios mods at max OC cards can cope with

 

Yeah, the testing will be the proof of the pudding Will be interesting what an OCed haswell and SLI 780M with unlocked bios will get.