Alienware 18 WIN 10

I have an alienware 18 with sli 780 and i7-4930MX, but it is running on Windows 8.1 and I have not upgraded to Windows 10, I'm afraid it will not work because of the rumors that when upgrading it has 8 bits and does not start.
Is it safe to update it?

 

Windows 8.1 will continue to be supported for another several years. Unless there is a specific reason for you wanting Windows 10, don't attempt to fix what is not broken.

 

Ehh..What is "8 bits"?
It's your choice, Windows 10 will work great on any systems as long as you have an SSD and more than 8GB of RAM.
Even Core 2 Duo works great,a 10+ years old lineups of CPU.Only drivers are the blockade.

 

I kept my Alienware 18 on Windows 8.1 because of the issues with the samsung display panels bricking under Windows 10. But I think that was because of EVGA Precision X and not Windows 10 or nVidia display drivers, per se. Still, I am cautious.

 

As @Aroc said, if you don't use EVGA Precision X, you should be safe.

Honestly you have an SLI setup (SLI and DX12 don't play nicely) and actually both of your GPUs aren't DX12 compatible to begin with, so I don't see why would you want to move to W10.

 

Thanks, brother. I learn something new everyday. I did not know this. Now I do. I thank for for sharing this knowledge in this thread so we can all learn.

What I have (SW18 SLI) seems to be an evolutionary dead-end of sorts. It's still a fun toy and serves dual purpose as a workstation, don't get me wrong.

 

Well,not so much.
Support for SLI is either gone or at a very low priority for games and software designers because there's only small amount of people use them so...

 

My 18 is still on 8.1 for the sole purpose of keeping me in control of Windows udates. It runs flawlessly and while I have thought about updating once or twice, there is no reason. There are too many negatives that come with Windows 10 to risk screwing up what to this day looks and runs like a brand new machine.

 

Not to mention Redmonds Retards has been slipping in telemetry feces into the updates that there were supposed to be "security-focused" or "feature-focused".
Update:They even do so in Windows 7 and 8.1.

 

Mr.K-1994, you're not wrong. Though what I meant by evolutionary dead-end of sorts is that the GPU upgrade path particular to the AW18 Viking. The upgrade to GTX 980m SLI has problems (if I can believe the posts here) with fan not spinning up on the 2nd card without manual control. The 18.4 Samsung panel is LVDS instead of DisplayPort like a modern display panel. There is no upgrade to GTX 1060 SLI or GTX 1070 SLI. Though now, I understand that single GPU upgrades to 10-series are possible in many cases. But once I had learned that, I had already bought a new machine. Plus the 18.4 inch Samsung display panel has issues with utilities like EVGA Precision X bricking the panels on Windows 10 upgrades.

That's what I was thinking of when I in humor called the AW18 an evolutionary dead-end. Though others might disagree with me

Actually, I've had good luck with SLI scaling well performance-wise in the game titles I play (Hitman, Hitman Absolution, and Assetto Corsa, etc.). Having posted that, given the NVIDIA products (980m, 1080, 1180, etc) since the 880m I think I'll forgo SLI since paying for TWO $1,000 gfx cards hits the wallet a little TOO hard come upgrade time, lol. And now a single card -- like the 1070 -- is more that fine for my needs and budget.

 

Your machine with one GPU, eg: GTX 880M will do fin for a couple more years since it's on par with the GTX 1050 or more.
SLI is dead.Even NVIDIA abandon their creation and so does games companies.
By the way,will you keep the AW around?
I remembered that you have to follow this guidelines for the upgrade to work,though I am not sure it's your AW model:
http://www.eurocom.com/ec/upgrade(2,266,0)Alienware_18_R3
Please respond!

 

I don't know. I still like SLI and quite a few games I play support it. COD series, Battlefield, they are just a couple of big name series that up to now still support it. There are tons more and I honestly think I only have 5-10 games that don't support it. Even some of them you can force SLI using profiles from other games. I've done that with Anno 2205 and going from 45-60 frames when maxed out to 75-90 frames when using SLI makes a huge difference. Sure seems worth it to me.

I think I've gotten really lucky with my 18. My 980m's run great and scale well together, I have zero problems with the fan profile and never have throttling as they rarely go above 82C, when they do they'll max out at 85C (that's when the jet engines kick on) , and have never seen 90C even when on max performance. I have been planning on getting a desktop recently and decided to wait for the new GPU's before pulling the trigger. But regardless of how powerful the new ones are, I still plan on getting dual cards and running SLI whenever possible.

 

You did link the correct Alienware model from Eurocom. Actually, the Alienware 18 has TWO MXM slots for dual graphics card, and mine are BOTH populated. So it has two not one GPU.

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Alienware 18 (R3) (Mid 2013)
Graphics: Upgradeable MXM 3.0b; 2x slots; supports SLI and CF; up to 100W per GPU

If the Fire Strike and Fire Strike Graphics scores are anything to go on, GTX 880m SLI scores (9,111 & 11,817 respectively) comparable to GTX 1060 (11,038.5 & 12,816 respectively), not the GTX 1050 (5,451 & 6,042 respectively), when SLI is working and SLI is scaling well. I often see +96% scaling with mine (Hitman, etc) or worst case +60% (Assetto Corsa).

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GPU, Fire Strike, Fire Strike Graphics
GTX 880m SLI, 9111, 11817
GTX 1050, 5451, 6042
GTX 1060, 11038.5, 12816

Spoiler: Reference links

https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-880M-SLI.109044.0.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1050-Notebook.178614.0.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-1060.167603.0.html

SLI is or at least was supported in a lot of games released in the last few years. That's enough for me right now. Although for me, this point is moot because I have a Eurocom Tornado F5 with a single GTX 1070 and I almost exclusively game on it. The whole Eurocom computer cost about what a GTX 980m SLI upgrade would have cost, and I got i7-7700 CPU out of the deal, plus a host of other niceties:

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+ modern M.2 storage slots
+ better Linux support
+ eDP display panel with aftermarket replacement options (120hz option, 4k option, etc)
+ faster DDR4-3000 memory support
+ double the max ram (64GB v. 32GB)
+ upgrade path to coffee lake processors
+ MSI BIOS and MSI vBIOS, for the potential for smoother upgrades, we'll see ....
+ turbo fan button
+ 330W AC Adapter
+ all in a chassis about half the weight of the AW18 (6 lbs v. 12 lbs)

To address your last question, will I keep the AW18 around? Probably I will. If nothing, with 2x1TB RAID0, 32GB RAM maxed out, and fast quad core i7, the AW18 makes a nice Hyper-V host or a nice VMware host for running a full lab of virtual machines. Though, for gaming, I tend to play games published between 1990 and 2005. REALLY old stuff. I got the Sierra On-Line games pack as well as a few others very inexpensively:

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Kings Quest Collection (DOS),
Police Quest Collection (DOS),
Gabriel Knight Collection (DOS),
Zork (DOS),
Phantasmagoria (DOS),
Star Craft (1997, DOS),
War Craft II: Tides of darkness (1995, DOS),
Doom (1993, DOS),
Doom 2 (1994, DOS),
Quake (1996, DOS),
Return to Castle Wolfensten (2001, Windows)
Life is Strange (2015, Windows),
99Vidas (2016, Windows)

I like playing these games on the 18.4 inch monitor on the AW18, even though they are all ancient games and hardly tax the system at all. The intimacy afforded by the 18.4 inch panel close up, it really gets me into these old games! I also have these games loaded on an old Dell Precision M6400 mobile workstation (17 inch, 2.8 GHx dual core, ancient 2008-era GPU) and my wife loves it for much the same reasons.

The AW18 is overkill compared with the Dell Precision for what I use it for. Should I keep it? Maybe not. Not because it's SLI. But because I still might be able to get a little money out it, then put that money into my desktop build.

Normally, I game with my Eurocom i7-7700k GTX 1070 attached to my living room TV, with a Roccat lapboard (mechanical keyboard) and a Razer mouse from my recliner chair or from the sofa when I am playing a modern game.

I looked at the NVIDIA site, and saw a big list of games out in the last few years that were SLI capable. I recognized a bunch of them and played quite a few of them.

SLI - GeForce Gaming, 31 pages of games

That's a lot of games. Enough that I stumbled across many on Steam by accident rather than seeking out SLI-capable titles.

To try understand your POV, as well as others on this forum who parot the same SLI is dead now line, I did a search.

Reddit | The state of SLI (on the games of 2017)
3D Center | SLI and Crossfire suitability of current game titles on a low level (2017)

only 1 out of 25 titles support SLI. To be honest, most of these titles do not interest me, and many I hadn't even heard of. The funny co-incidence is, the one title that does, it Prey, and it is SLI. Though to be fair, I have played Rime. However, I played it on the Playstation 4, since it was a short game and free with my Playstation Plus account.

Also to be fair, Far Cry 5 is SLI aware, but only on Windows 10 with a DX12 card, which the GTX 880m I understand is not. But fortunately I had the foresight to get a new laptop (2017), so I do not have to play FC5 on the AW18. For a couple years (2015-2017) the AW18 allowed me to play any game, new or old, with ultra setting and 60+ frame rates on 1080p panel (comparable to GTX 980m or GTX 1060). So the it has served its purpose. Now the Eurocom fulfills that role.

I will probably stay single GPU while I'm on 1080p. I may go SLI at 4K, if and when I go 4K for monitor, but so far I understand that takes GTX 1080 SLI or GTX 1080Ti or some sort of Titan. That also assumes that SLI is not dead. I'm not so certain we've proved that it's dead or not dead. Perhaps, it is both simultaneously dead and not dead and all we have to do is look into the box? Lucky for us, NVIDIA is releasing its new 11-series soon.

 

Do you still have that AW18?