New to Alienware 18

Morning all. i just traded my xbox one for an Alienware 18 with the following specs: i7-4710hq, 16gb Ram, dual 860m SLI configuration. seeing as i didnt play my xbox one for months now, it seemed like a winning trade. its been a while since i've been in the know about CPUs and GPUs. my last built cpu tower included a 3770k & 780ti. Can anyone chime in on my configuration of this laptop as well as the upgrade-ability and what the current day worth of this laptop is? thanks in advance.

 

Well - 860M SLI is akin to what a 1060 can deliver so I'd pin the laptop at around 600-900$ depending on the condition.

 

And depending on the location. If he is in an EU country I would say the machine would be around at least 1000 eur if it was in good condition. Dunno much about US pricing though.

 

1000 EU is very generous. 1060 laptops start at 1200 EU brand new with 2 years of warranty in Eastern Europe

 

Not that I enjoy raining on parades but.... a single 860M with a serious overclock is only good for about 4500 GPU Firestrike (3500 or so factory clocks) whereas a GTX 1060 is pushing 13k GPU Firestrike out-of-the-box and at least 14k with an overclock:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/860m-is-a-beast.751352/

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_1060_review,29.html

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/geforce_gtx_1060_review,29.html

Given the 10% loss or so in SLI scaling, 4500 x2 - 10% is around 8k GPU, a little over half of the power of an overclocked GTX 1060.

So OP can't assume that the value of an 860M SLI equipped notebook is around ballpark of a 1060 equipped one. The Pascal refresh really upset the mobile GPU market, if you had mobile GPU's and were contemplating parting with them it should have happened before the refresh.

And to add clarification here, there is no distinction, other than board-size, between the 1060 in a laptop and the 1060 as reviewed by Guru3d above, they've completely done away with the M identifier because they are the same card, same goes for the the rest of the Pascal cards.

You can get a GTX 1060 equipped notebook, at least in the U.S, for around $1200 and GTX 1050 Ti Dell notebooks are going for around $800.

To add to all of this, the PC gaming community is starting to feel burned by NGreedia and their abysmal SLI support as of late, so anything even muttering SLI is going to immediately cause said hardware to depreciate by 200% (sarcasm). A single GTX 1060 equipped notebook for $1200 is not going to care if the recent title, say Titanfall 2 or Resident Evil 7, has SLI support (they don't, Titanfall 2 going on 6 months now, no support is likely forthcoming) it will offer 13k GPU performance on tap out-of-the-box, not 3500 GPU and 4500 GPU with an eye bleeding overclock. Thats the difference between nearly unplayable at 1080p and "hey I can max everything out and still get 60 FPS!".

As I said, it's going to be really hard to sell that unit, youre best off giving it to a friend who might appreciate it. I reckon the actual market value to be around the $200-300 range.

 

Well, my old stock 860M was pushing about 4100 in Fire Strike (Y50) and a friend has shown me his 860M almost getting 5000 so it's not as bad. Also, it depends on the 1060 - some are configured to be low-power thus running as low as 12000. So yeah - lots of variables.

 

There are two revisions of the 860M. One is kepler, the other is maxwell.

 

I know but I've never actually seen the Kepler one used in laptops - most of them were Maxwell.

 

Alienware 17 and 18 used the kepler 860m