Respecfully the 17 wasnt the best, the 18 was. dual gpus, big screen, beefy power brick and heavy. i had one second hand myself with the i7-4910 and 880ms sadly it died on me before i could swap 980ms into it. its no biggie cause i ended up getting a great deal on a laptop with a 2070 in it for real cheap.
I rebuild/refurbish these laptops as a little side hobby and it's fun to see other people still using them. They were the last of the truly upgradeable Alienware laptops. They can even take a Quadro RTX 3000.
I have one that I bought recently. Screen turns on with some dim kind of lines and square shapes then goes black. Does not work with hdmi. I replaced the ram and I’m about to replace cmos battery and new thermal paste. Any recommendations?
I ended up going with the ASUS Rog Strix 17incher in October of 2014. My unit was equipped with 12 gigs of ram and the GTX 860m Maxwell GPU. This gaming Laptop is still a beast and I use it as my mobile Vacation/travel system when away. Rock solid and surprisingly fast to this day. I can't believe it's been 8 years since I bought new!? Great Laptop when Laptops were built like tanks. Thanks Psivewri for the review!
They werent built like tanks,not at all bro. I remember one of my laptops got its ram broken due to simple fast tapping and had to take it to the repair shop.Nowadays they are more solid.Steam deck for example(still laptop)
@@Tattooed_goldenretriever I guess it was luck? I did have my issues and skepticism in the beginning with Nvidia driver issues. I remembered a rough early start. A Year later upgraded to Window 10 Pro/SSD Boot/16 Gigs of ram. It's been rock solid since after a little while with Win 10. My Laptop sits next to me on a small table with a cooling Pad underneath. I only really move it when on the road/Vacation. Original battery still holding up great.
I used one of these with for a while and stuck in a 4930mx and put in an MSI 1070 MXM. With some other mods and some custom heatsinks, it performed quite well. The only limitation was the max of around 118-122 watts the MXM slot could provide for the GPU.
Damn, seeing this is.. something. I have an m17x R4 and 17 R1 laying around. They were the main laptops before I gave everyone appropriate 2021/2022 laptops. Loved their modularity, it made me a lot more confident at dismantling laptops entirely. Albeit these computers aren't being used much anymore, I've planned on getting rid of the MXM GPUs and keep them as backup/server machines with a little touch of novelty.
One of the best things about this particular model is how if you wire a PS3/console to the HDMI it doubles as a handy on the go monitor with really good sound, I loved mine until the mobo went belly up and cooked both my GPU and itself, awesome video dude!!
THIS. This feature along with the upgradeable nature of both the CPU and GPU is the reason why this laptop still kicks ass. We will see nothing like it ever again unfortunately.
My rule for gaming laptops: they are fine AS LONG as you dont expect to play the latest games. Usually theyre better for games that came out 3 - 5 years ago. Of course for small indie games they're fine.
I still use a very similar laptop to this, a late 2015-17R3 with a 4k display, 970M, i7 and 16gigs of ram. Its served me well for 7 years, and by God it'll serve me many more. Its archaic, gets hot asf, and weighs half a ton, yet it's still strong enough to do what I need it to do, truly a fantastic machine.
my uncle had bought this around when it came out and i grew up playing this, he passed in 2018 and got passed down to me and played it practically every day, sadly it stopped working, probably fixable but it's great to see that this laptop is still a good option for today
@@sawyerstiltz7343 if you try to turn it on it'll stay on the blue screen with the loading circle and then it'll go black for a second and do that infinitely
I was trying to stop mine from constantly restarting a couple months back. Maybe the gpu fan shutting off may have been my problem. I'll have to give that fan curve program a shot to see if it'll fix my problem.
Yeah I’m sure it’s because ur gpu fan is stopping and it’s getting too hot and is restarting for safety. Try to clean the fan or something. Had that problem with my pc
I use a cooling stand with mine yo help keep it running cool. they do have pretty good cooling but playing a high demanding game they do run hot. I haven't needed to overclock mine yet for any games.if you can keep them cool it might prolong the life of your laptop.I haven't had any issues yet with mine. I wouldn't use it at all for games if a fan isn't working you could cook it.
I actually had the 14" version of this machine, not as high specced though (4th gen i5, GTX 750M, 8GB DDR3 & shipped 750GB WD Black), and it was a TANK (I have let the magic smoke out, twice, and it still works) and ran better than newer machines in some environments due to the massive amounts of cooling.
I have the little sister to this (the 2016 model) with an i7-6700HQ and 970M GPU. Using it right now to type this. We upped the RAM to the max 32 GB and swapped the 7200 RPM 1 TB HDD for a 1 TB SSD. I don't game HARD, but I find it handles EA titles like Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and The Sims 4 on Ultra-high settings with no issues. Only probs this really has is the keyboard is shot, so I use a Logitech G Pro TKL and I think one USB port is acting shoddy.
I came here with no expectations since my current main laptop (4720HQ/960M) is actually 8 years old, so I just wanted to see how you treated the subject of 8 years old computing technology.
Recently switched from an alienware laptop with a 970m to a 3080 5950x pc. My laptop has done me well for 4 years straight and couldn't be more grateful for it's wonderful performance.
As someone who had picked up a Clevo sporting a 1050 Ti Mobile for a similar price, I gotta say that the $400 pricing is definitely not a bad find. Took me a similar amount to max out the upgrades though (shame that mine is embedded onboard and not MXM).
Mobile Haswell processors are still great, and the graphics card can still be upgraded quite a bit. Would be a venerable machine with 32GB of ram, a large SSD(Or two), an I7-4810MQ and at least a 980M.
@@siyzerix With modified Nvidia drivers installed and the appropriate upgraded heatsinks, you can install up to a Nvidia P4000 graphics card, which gets similar performance to a GTX 1070. Obviously not everyone is going to do this, but it still makes the machine usable at decent frame rates even by today's standards; if you're not trying to run everything on max settings for the newest titles, that is. Not to mention, this was the last laptop with the capability of using an HDMI Input port, effectively allowing you to use it as a portable monitor for an external game system or anything else, such as an Apple TV. No idea why they removed this feature.
Great video and great classic laptop. A little correction here the best alienware at the time was the ALIENWARE 18 or AW18 R3 with 18 inches and dual graphics... and the entire laptop components were completely upgradeable.... I still have mine both the 15, 17 and the 18 plus the vintage M 18X R2 and all of those laptops can be upgraded up to the RTX graphics and going back to the gtx 500 series.... which is no longer existent today even from alienware themselves or might I say dell ... they no longer want you to upgrade. They just want you to buy a new system every year even the area 51m was garbage only locked in one generation of components... while being sold as upgradeable....
I bought this laptop with GTX860 2GB in 2014, for Kerbal Space Program. I upgraded the GPU to a MXM GTX 1060 6GB (also the power adapter) in 2017. It is a very reliable and stable machine, and it is used for computing tasks for the SETI@home project when I was out. But it is very heavy.
I had mine since 2018 and now its 2023. This laptop is about 5 years old. It can play any games that is in my steam library but not the modern games like marvel spiderman, Horizon etc... Fifa 22 works great on here still. This is what I use to play with my friend sometimes when he has a day off. It extremely heavy and hard to carry on your back. I am planning on selling mine later on in the future for a much better performance with the Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card in the market.
I own this laptop, but with the 765m option instead of the 880m. Still runs well but the 9 year old 1tb HDD is failing. The rubber coating on this laptop has turned into goop and the whole thing (except the metal top) is a huge fingerprint magnet. Great vid as always!
@@mss2981 It already has an mSATA boot SSD, the 1TB HDD is a game drive. And, no. SSDs are not required for games (atleast not yet...). Besides, a 1TB HDD is way cheaper than a 1TB SATA SSD
@@theforerunnerreclaimer Actually, an ssd does speed things up in game load times and some textures in general terms. The difference in performance with SSD is noticeable across the board.
@@theforerunnerreclaimer Really more so the increase of performance ouside of gaming is worth it alone with a ssd :) And makes a older machine feel alot more snappier :)
I have one of these and its a beast of a machine for the time and actually pretty good even now.. Excellent build quality, reliable as hell. Thing hasnt skipped a beat in years. If you only have $500 and can get one for this price then its well worth it compared to the cheap laptops of today but as you said a modern GAMING laptop will whoop its ass.
Man I love seeing these older gaming laptops, I don't know why but there is something about those beefy laptops filled to the brim with everything you could possibly need. An SSD and a HDD AAAND a CD drive with 4 sticks of ram while still being able to cool itself properly, that's impressive.
Watching this guy's videos make me want to clean out my trusty Legion Y720. But I get nervous that I might short circuit some parts and kill my laptop altogether...
I have a m17x r3 that I built from parts for about $900 USD with a i7 2820qm, a GeForce GTX 560m, 16GBs (4x 4GB) of 1600MHz RAM, a 2TB 5400RPM HDD and windows 7 professional, it's heavy with almost everything installed (it's only missing the battery) and I use it on my lap, the m17x r3 is a good upgrade from my old laptop which is a linux PC now with LMDE 5 64 bit the only problem with that is debian does not support PPAs so I can't install the fixed nvidia 340 legacy driver that works on the 5.10 kernel and nouveau crashes cinnamon all the time.
I plan on baking my MXM card, its seems to be having issues only when running 3D excelerated applications, otherwise the whole unit is no good as i7 HD graphics have been disabled on my machine.
I have one just like yours in the video. After years of normal use it is suddenly overheating. Reinstall everything from scratch, upgraded to win 10, cleaned fans, replaced thermal paste and thermal pads, but nothing, used hwinfo64 for custom fans but nothing, it is still overheating under heavy usage. It freeze, makes funny sounds, sometimes it restart. I would like to keep it because i'm a big fan of stereoscopic 3D (this laptop has a 3D screen an integrated 3D emitter) but i don't know what i can do. Any suggestion?
On my one Alienware 18, I fixed it's heating issue with an Opolar fan from Amazon that u can butt up against the rear vents; THIS worked like a charm even when the pc repair shop basically gave up and advised me to just run the 18 on it's integrated gpu. I REFUSED to accept that recommendation; figured I would give this fan a go&since then,I've bought 3 of these fans just as backups.
a gpu upgrade to an gtx 980m would bring it more up to date. The nice thing is, it is an MXM-Module. But these are hard to get. I think Eurocom sells MXM-GPUs. But a used one would be cheaper.
Hi, I did upgrade mine o the 980m after my graphics card died, took me a long time to get a driver that worked, then Nvidia did a driver update and overnight my graphics card was dead, have tried everything to fix it, but no joy, :(
Getting an 980m is easy, it is getting one new old stock is an issue never mind at an ok cost as both the 970m and 980m are somewhat high failure rate cards due to the mosfets baking to death. Some versions of the 1060 are an good option and same goes for the 1070 be it with some effort. RTX 3000 is known to work well with these machines and I personally use an mxm version of the rx 580 because it was cheap and very easy to install.
Hi thank you I believe the 2017 or 2019 may be better, that is for 15R model or is the 17" better? I don't do games I would be using it CAD and design only, am I better off with a 17" or 15" one? Please let me know.
For anyone having mouse pad issues and the cpu fan running loud, try uninstalling the Synaptic Touchpad Driver or software. Once I removed that the mousepad was back in action and the fan stopped running so loud. No idea why tho.
I have a 17R3 that was accidentally put in storage 6 weeks after I got it-thought it was stolen. Found it in mid December 2023 it’s in new condition the battery even had enough charge to boot
Turns out it will, with only a bit of stuttering at the beginning of heavy/quick movement cutscenes. It’s not that bad and only happens about every few hours and my sister who isn’t into gaming didn’t even notice the stutter. I’m now trying to figure out if it will run Cyberpunk 2077 with alright graphics. I had played when it first came out and it ran beautifully, but I can’t remember the quality of the graphics. I know it will run the DLC as well, but I don’t know how prettily. Trying to figure it out though so I can decide whether to get the dlc on pc or Xbox.
I missed my old laptop with it's 12.5mm ODD that I swapped for a HDD caddy with a 12.5mm 1.5GB HDD pulled from a external HDD bought a Radio Shack, those were the good old days of basic modding. I just finished repasting my 2021 GL65 Leopard, 1st time removing a HS with that many chips to cool and it felt look I could lift a chip. Half the paste easily crumbled to powered and I'm pretty sure I used 1/2 a tube of MX-4 for everything. I did forget to do a complete fan and fin cleaning but the mesh intakes, like what you have, do a great job keeping junk out. I still want to under volt it to get lower temps. Nice to see lots of storage options on laptops. Mine shipped with a 1 m.2 NVME and 1 2.5mm SATA bays, but there was a 2nd unpopulated m.2 bay MSI left off. Luckily the BIOS supported 2 m.2 so I ordered the connector and support components and soldered them on. Now I have separate drive for the OS and my game while leaving the 2.5 disk for bulk media.
Ahhh yes ^_^ I have this very same AW17 ^_^ it was a hand me down from my cousin and I occasionally use it for light tasks nowadays. I used to play MMOs on it years back and AAA games, Witcher, etc. I still really enjoy messing with it and it makes for a neat conversation piece with people who don't think that I own a laptop haha! ^_^ great review and a reminder to me that I should also clean mine out as well!
Fun fact, i watch this video from my thermal throttling dell latitude that a while ago i used your screen cleaning method with the lens cleaner and to be honest, it always makes the screen look like new
not sure how is over there but l most old gtx 980 laptops or 1070 laptop go for more money than newer rtx laptops, literally impossible to find something like you did for less than 500 euros here , it's crazy
could you try upgrading the gpu? I heard that there is an mxm 1070 that should fit in, im considering it with my alienware since my gpu died, but im not sure if its worth it
This was my laptop in college, came with a 770m. It was cheaper than a MacBook Pro 15 inch if you could believe it. An absolute dream but it was noisy as hell pissing off my roommate & heavy as shit to lug around to class
I am still using an Alienware 17r5 with an 8750h and a gtx 1070 that i got more than 5 years ago. it had been a great PC but i am due for an upgrade. I am getting a laptop with an 11800h and 3080, that should give me another 5 years.
Lucky, I got mine of fb market place for only 280 cad, it has a i7 4700MQ and a gtx 770M with 8gb of ram, still hoping I can someday find a nice MXM gpu for a good price to upgrade my 17 r1, i did eventually find some spare ram so its my main gaming beast, still going proud, even if it cant run the highest settings on games
Hello sorry to reach out, im planning to buy used Dell g7(2018) with i5 gen 8 and gtx 1050, does these old gaming laptops hold up for years? Planning to use on college
why do you think the thermal paste needs to be liquid? It just has to bridge the gap which it does perfectly if you would not finger around in the system.
Check out the awesome TCL C-Series range here: bit.ly/3wolAEk
nice
you monster you didn't clean off all the paste on the gpu
@@realcartoongirl that stuff on the edges doesn't matter at all. It's really hard and I'd risk ripping off the small capacitors.
Respecfully the 17 wasnt the best, the 18 was. dual gpus, big screen, beefy power brick and heavy. i had one second hand myself with the i7-4910 and 880ms sadly it died on me before i could swap 980ms into it. its no biggie cause i ended up getting a great deal on a laptop with a 2070 in it for real cheap.
can you tell me what is that car game pls l subcribe to you
I rebuild/refurbish these laptops as a little side hobby and it's fun to see other people still using them. They were the last of the truly upgradeable Alienware laptops. They can even take a Quadro RTX 3000.
great hobby dude
Based hobby
I have one that I bought recently. Screen turns on with some dim kind of lines and square shapes then goes black. Does not work with hdmi. I replaced the ram and I’m about to replace cmos battery and new thermal paste. Any recommendations?
@@RandomThingReviews Did you ever figure out what was wrong?
@@nkarim4979 at this point I’m convinced the gpu is bad. So I’m waiting to find another one with a bad screen and a good motherboard, gpu, cpu to swap
I ended up going with the ASUS Rog Strix 17incher in October of 2014. My unit was equipped with 12 gigs of ram and the GTX 860m Maxwell GPU. This gaming Laptop is still a beast and I use it as my mobile Vacation/travel system when away. Rock solid and surprisingly fast to this day. I can't believe it's been 8 years since I bought new!? Great Laptop when Laptops were built like tanks. Thanks Psivewri for the review!
They werent built like tanks,not at all bro.
I remember one of my laptops got its ram broken due to simple fast tapping and had to take it to the repair shop.Nowadays they are more solid.Steam deck for example(still laptop)
how have you kept it going for that long? my hope is to keep my brand new gaming laptop for at least 5 years to go through uni
@@Tattooed_goldenretriever I guess it was luck? I did have my issues and skepticism in the beginning with Nvidia driver issues. I remembered a rough early start. A Year later upgraded to Window 10 Pro/SSD Boot/16 Gigs of ram. It's been rock solid since after a little while with Win 10. My Laptop sits next to me on a small table with a cooling Pad underneath. I only really move it when on the road/Vacation. Original battery still holding up great.
Can it runs RDD2 or Battlefield 5?
I used one of these with for a while and stuck in a 4930mx and put in an MSI 1070 MXM. With some other mods and some custom heatsinks, it performed quite well. The only limitation was the max of around 118-122 watts the MXM slot could provide for the GPU.
I currently have a 980m in my old one. I was thinking of upgrading to a 1070 but didnt seem worth it for the price.
interesting
@@WweBreezybre the 1080 is the best I think.
@@ted.8631 Sorry g dfe
Edit: Somehow I commented this while mowing my lawn and I kinda want to just leave it
GPU bottlenecks be like
for the money that's a damn good laptop
Damn, seeing this is.. something. I have an m17x R4 and 17 R1 laying around. They were the main laptops before I gave everyone appropriate 2021/2022 laptops. Loved their modularity, it made me a lot more confident at dismantling laptops entirely.
Albeit these computers aren't being used much anymore, I've planned on getting rid of the MXM GPUs and keep them as backup/server machines with a little touch of novelty.
if you don't want them you can sell them to me: v
One of the best things about this particular model is how if you wire a PS3/console to the HDMI it doubles as a handy on the go monitor with really good sound, I loved mine until the mobo went belly up and cooked both my GPU and itself, awesome video dude!!
THIS. This feature along with the upgradeable nature of both the CPU and GPU is the reason why this laptop still kicks ass. We will see nothing like it ever again unfortunately.
My rule for gaming laptops: they are fine AS LONG as you dont expect to play the latest games. Usually theyre better for games that came out 3 - 5 years ago. Of course for small indie games they're fine.
I still use a very similar laptop to this, a late 2015-17R3 with a 4k display, 970M, i7 and 16gigs of ram. Its served me well for 7 years, and by God it'll serve me many more. Its archaic, gets hot asf, and weighs half a ton, yet it's still strong enough to do what I need it to do, truly a fantastic machine.
my uncle had bought this around when it came out and i grew up playing this, he passed in 2018 and got passed down to me and played it practically every day, sadly it stopped working, probably fixable but it's great to see that this laptop is still a good option for today
What is the laptop doing?
@@sawyerstiltz7343 if you try to turn it on it'll stay on the blue screen with the loading circle and then it'll go black for a second and do that infinitely
@@Wile._E_Shitterman Reinstall the Windows Installation. The Laptop is fine, but the Operating System is corrupt.
This was my first gaming laptop and I still use it after upgrading some parts. It basically functions as a desktop for me
I have an Alienware 18, had it for 2 years, it's still a beast today!
I was trying to stop mine from constantly restarting a couple months back. Maybe the gpu fan shutting off may have been my problem. I'll have to give that fan curve program a shot to see if it'll fix my problem.
Definitely worth a shot. I was pretty stuck until I realised I needed to do that :)
Yeah I’m sure it’s because ur gpu fan is stopping and it’s getting too hot and is restarting for safety. Try to clean the fan or something. Had that problem with my pc
I use a cooling stand with mine yo help keep it running cool. they do have pretty good cooling but playing a high demanding game they do run hot. I haven't needed to overclock mine yet for any games.if you can keep them cool it might prolong the life of your laptop.I haven't had any issues yet with mine. I wouldn't use it at all for games if a fan isn't working you could cook it.
So can I ask, do you have this laptop and what OS... Win 10? Because I have this exact laptop
@@hsvmonarocv8136 win 10
I remember wanting one of these. Their desktops at the time had the same light/material design
I actually had the 14" version of this machine, not as high specced though (4th gen i5, GTX 750M, 8GB DDR3 & shipped 750GB WD Black), and it was a TANK (I have let the magic smoke out, twice, and it still works) and ran better than newer machines in some environments due to the massive amounts of cooling.
Finally a new videos after weeks!
I have always wanted one of those when it was released.
Nice Keychron Q8! Just pi ked one up myself and love the Aloce layout 😃
Great video Psivewri! You're like the only tech youtuber i watch
I have the little sister to this (the 2016 model) with an i7-6700HQ and 970M GPU. Using it right now to type this. We upped the RAM to the max 32 GB and swapped the 7200 RPM 1 TB HDD for a 1 TB SSD. I don't game HARD, but I find it handles EA titles like Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and The Sims 4 on Ultra-high settings with no issues.
Only probs this really has is the keyboard is shot, so I use a Logitech G Pro TKL and I think one USB port is acting shoddy.
I have an x17 with a 17 R4 still laying around for backup. My Alienwares never break, they just get a little slower than what I like. I love them.
0:28 I love that TV!📺🤯
Crazy how this laptop is still acceptable 8 1/2 years later. It can play some older games quite fine.
I came here with no expectations since my current main laptop (4720HQ/960M) is actually 8 years old, so I just wanted to see how you treated the subject of 8 years old computing technology.
would like to see some mkb related contents from you, psiverwri. especially that you own a keychron q8 @ 6:30. Would love to see you modding that keeb
You're making me wanna put some love into my 17 R3 (6700HQ/970m). Might have to pick up some of that eucalyptus oil
Recently switched from an alienware laptop with a 970m to a 3080 5950x pc. My laptop has done me well for 4 years straight and couldn't be more grateful for it's wonderful performance.
If that thing costs $3000 out of the store it better last forever
Thank you for your video, so what actually did you do to fix the fan turning off ? I have the same issue in my alienware.
As someone who had picked up a Clevo sporting a 1050 Ti Mobile for a similar price, I gotta say that the $400 pricing is definitely not a bad find.
Took me a similar amount to max out the upgrades though (shame that mine is embedded onboard and not MXM).
i love tcl tvs i have a tcl roku 43” 4k uhd tv and i love it also great vid always love ur content
Mobile Haswell processors are still great, and the graphics card can still be upgraded quite a bit. Would be a venerable machine with 32GB of ram, a large SSD(Or two), an I7-4810MQ and at least a 980M.
The gtx 980m is quite poor these days. Especially considering 1060 laptops and gtx 1650 laptops beat it.
@@siyzerix With modified Nvidia drivers installed and the appropriate upgraded heatsinks, you can install up to a Nvidia P4000 graphics card, which gets similar performance to a GTX 1070. Obviously not everyone is going to do this, but it still makes the machine usable at decent frame rates even by today's standards; if you're not trying to run everything on max settings for the newest titles, that is.
Not to mention, this was the last laptop with the capability of using an HDMI Input port, effectively allowing you to use it as a portable monitor for an external game system or anything else, such as an Apple TV. No idea why they removed this feature.
You are literally my fave TH-cam! Keep up the great work
Looks pretty nice 😊😊
got that keychron q8 i see, have you changed the switches to some nicer ones?
I have been eyeing some old laptops on eBay so this is interesting
I have same laptop Alienware. Looks amazing even after years of usage.
I had this exact laptop with the same specs. It was quite a beast.
I remembered my friend still using this laptop as his editing machine up until 2020
i wanted to buy a used one for engineering classes, now i want to convert one into a sleeper specifically for gamer
Great video and great classic laptop. A little correction here the best alienware at the time was the ALIENWARE 18 or AW18 R3 with 18 inches and dual graphics... and the entire laptop components were completely upgradeable.... I still have mine both the 15, 17 and the 18 plus the vintage M 18X R2 and all of those laptops can be upgraded up to the RTX graphics and going back to the gtx 500 series.... which is no longer existent today even from alienware themselves or might I say dell ... they no longer want you to upgrade. They just want you to buy a new system every year even the area 51m was garbage only locked in one generation of components... while being sold as upgradeable....
I bought this laptop with GTX860 2GB in 2014, for Kerbal Space Program. I upgraded the GPU to a MXM GTX 1060 6GB (also the power adapter) in 2017. It is a very reliable and stable machine, and it is used for computing tasks for the SETI@home project when I was out. But it is very heavy.
Wow! Very sleek looking laptop. Nice vid!
This is the best TH-cam channel, ever! Great video! Thanks!! 👍🤠
I had mine since 2018 and now its 2023. This laptop is about 5 years old. It can play any games that is in my steam library but not the modern games like marvel spiderman, Horizon etc... Fifa 22 works great on here still. This is what I use to play with my friend sometimes when he has a day off. It extremely heavy and hard to carry on your back. I am planning on selling mine later on in the future for a much better performance with the Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card in the market.
I own this laptop, but with the 765m option instead of the 880m. Still runs well but the 9 year old 1tb HDD is failing. The rubber coating on this laptop has turned into goop and the whole thing (except the metal top) is a huge fingerprint magnet. Great vid as always!
get ssd..
@@mss2981 It already has an mSATA boot SSD, the 1TB HDD is a game drive. And, no. SSDs are not required for games (atleast not yet...). Besides, a 1TB HDD is way cheaper than a 1TB SATA SSD
@@theforerunnerreclaimer Actually, an ssd does speed things up in game load times and some textures in general terms. The difference in performance with SSD is noticeable across the board.
@@mss2981 Is a 3-5% performance boost worth 30-50% cost increase?
@@theforerunnerreclaimer Really more so the increase of performance ouside of gaming is worth it alone with a ssd :) And makes a older machine feel alot more snappier :)
I have one of these and its a beast of a machine for the time and actually pretty good even now.. Excellent build quality, reliable as hell. Thing hasnt skipped a beat in years.
If you only have $500 and can get one for this price then its well worth it compared to the cheap laptops of today but as you said a modern GAMING laptop will whoop its ass.
Man I love seeing these older gaming laptops, I don't know why but there is something about those beefy laptops filled to the brim with everything you could possibly need. An SSD and a HDD AAAND a CD drive with 4 sticks of ram while still being able to cool itself properly, that's impressive.
@Zaydan Naufal there are m.2 to sata adapters...not nvme, but they will be faster and easily stay at constant max sata 3 speeds of 550MB/s
I had the Alienware 14 from this generation. It was so solid and i kind of miss having it.
Still have mine going, bought new laptops, yet always return to the 14 for the build quality…
Watching this guy's videos make me want to clean out my trusty Legion Y720. But I get nervous that I might short circuit some parts and kill my laptop altogether...
Can you find a laptop that is capable of installing Windows NT 4.0. Please try to install Windows NT 4.0 on a laptop with a 4GB or 4.2GB hard drive.
alienware 18 sli 980m?
Great video full of interesting knowledge on the model. Great job!!!
I have a m17x r3 that I built from parts for about $900 USD with a i7 2820qm, a GeForce GTX 560m, 16GBs (4x 4GB) of 1600MHz RAM, a 2TB 5400RPM HDD and windows 7 professional, it's heavy with almost everything installed (it's only missing the battery) and I use it on my lap, the m17x r3 is a good upgrade from my old laptop which is a linux PC now with LMDE 5 64 bit the only problem with that is debian does not support PPAs so I can't install the fixed nvidia 340 legacy driver that works on the 5.10 kernel and nouveau crashes cinnamon all the time.
What kind of eucalyptus oil are you using to clean the rubberized surfaces?
I plan on baking my MXM card, its seems to be having issues only when running 3D excelerated applications, otherwise the whole unit is no good as i7 HD graphics have been disabled on my machine.
I have one just like yours in the video. After years of normal use it is suddenly overheating. Reinstall everything from scratch, upgraded to win 10, cleaned fans, replaced thermal paste and thermal pads, but nothing, used hwinfo64 for custom fans but nothing, it is still overheating under heavy usage. It freeze, makes funny sounds, sometimes it restart. I would like to keep it because i'm a big fan of stereoscopic 3D (this laptop has a 3D screen an integrated 3D emitter) but i don't know what i can do. Any suggestion?
On my one Alienware 18, I fixed it's heating issue with an Opolar fan from Amazon that u can butt up against the rear vents; THIS worked like a charm even when the pc repair shop basically gave up and advised me to just run the 18 on it's integrated gpu. I REFUSED to accept that recommendation; figured I would give this fan a go&since then,I've bought 3 of these fans just as backups.
Damn, our boy has the $$$ TCL sponsorships now?! Congrats Psivewri!
man these vids are comfy af!!!
i have the Alienware 17 R2 model from 2015, it was surprising to see the gpu is still supported by Nvidia this afternoon
a gpu upgrade to an gtx 980m would bring it more up to date. The nice thing is, it is an MXM-Module. But these are hard to get. I think Eurocom sells MXM-GPUs. But a used one would be cheaper.
Hi, I did upgrade mine o the 980m after my graphics card died, took me a long time to get a driver that worked, then Nvidia did a driver update and overnight my graphics card was dead, have tried everything to fix it, but no joy, :(
Getting an 980m is easy, it is getting one new old stock is an issue never mind at an ok cost as both the 970m and 980m are somewhat high failure rate cards due to the mosfets baking to death. Some versions of the 1060 are an good option and same goes for the 1070 be it with some effort. RTX 3000 is known to work well with these machines and I personally use an mxm version of the rx 580 because it was cheap and very easy to install.
Hi thank you I believe the 2017 or 2019 may be better, that is for 15R model or is the 17" better?
I don't do games I would be using it CAD and design only, am I better off with a 17" or 15" one? Please let me know.
i still have my 17 r2, love it
would you recommend this laptop in 2022 for light gaming like gta 5 or so?
it was my second laptop, when i entered high school, soo nostalgia for the past
For anyone having mouse pad issues and the cpu fan running loud, try uninstalling the Synaptic Touchpad Driver or software. Once I removed that the mousepad was back in action and the fan stopped running so loud. No idea why tho.
So this eucalyptus oil... is it the essential oil? What other oil can be used?
I have a 17R3 that was accidentally put in storage 6 weeks after I got it-thought it was stolen. Found it in mid December 2023 it’s in new condition the battery even had enough charge to boot
I dont know why but I love this Eucalyptus man.
I have it, still works.
i have one and still use it on steam from time to time
I don’t know much about pc gaming/upgrades, but I have this laptop. Would it run the Director’s cut of Death Stranding from steam?
Turns out it will, with only a bit of stuttering at the beginning of heavy/quick movement cutscenes. It’s not that bad and only happens about every few hours and my sister who isn’t into gaming didn’t even notice the stutter.
I’m now trying to figure out if it will run Cyberpunk 2077 with alright graphics. I had played when it first came out and it ran beautifully, but I can’t remember the quality of the graphics. I know it will run the DLC as well, but I don’t know how prettily. Trying to figure it out though so I can decide whether to get the dlc on pc or Xbox.
I have the same laptop what settings did you put on the fans I’d like to know 🙏🏻
my very first gaming laptop, this thing was fucking awesome to have being a divorced child 🤣
Hello. How did you wipe the case and keyboard? They became like new
I missed my old laptop with it's 12.5mm ODD that I swapped for a HDD caddy with a 12.5mm 1.5GB HDD pulled from a external HDD bought a Radio Shack, those were the good old days of basic modding.
I just finished repasting my 2021 GL65 Leopard, 1st time removing a HS with that many chips to cool and it felt look I could lift a chip. Half the paste easily crumbled to powered and I'm pretty sure I used 1/2 a tube of MX-4 for everything. I did forget to do a complete fan and fin cleaning but the mesh intakes, like what you have, do a great job keeping junk out.
I still want to under volt it to get lower temps.
Nice to see lots of storage options on laptops. Mine shipped with a 1 m.2 NVME and 1 2.5mm SATA bays, but there was a 2nd unpopulated m.2 bay MSI left off. Luckily the BIOS supported 2 m.2 so I ordered the connector and support components and soldered them on. Now I have separate drive for the OS and my game while leaving the 2.5 disk for bulk media.
I still have my 17 R2 R3 R4 R5 ❤❤❤❤
Ahhh yes ^_^ I have this very same AW17 ^_^ it was a hand me down from my cousin and I occasionally use it for light tasks nowadays. I used to play MMOs on it years back and AAA games, Witcher, etc. I still really enjoy messing with it and it makes for a neat conversation piece with people who don't think that I own a laptop haha! ^_^ great review and a reminder to me that I should also clean mine out as well!
I love the machines you find. I wish I was more confident in changing the thermal paste on my laptop! Keep the videos coming!
Nice watch... Steeldive 1970 Seiko 6105 homage?
Fun fact, i watch this video from my thermal throttling dell latitude that a while ago i used your screen cleaning method with the lens cleaner and to be honest, it always makes the screen look like new
Just saved me a battery replacement thank you!
How does he know how much battery health is left at 3:56
3:13 How do I do this?
not sure how is over there but l most old gtx 980 laptops or 1070 laptop go for more money than newer rtx laptops, literally impossible to find something like you did for less than 500 euros here , it's crazy
what software did you run for the temperatures ?
Would you post a link for the eucalyptus oil that you were using?
7:21 psivewri also check his Twitter aswell during the game runs
could you try upgrading the gpu? I heard that there is an mxm 1070 that should fit in, im considering it with my alienware since my gpu died, but im not sure if its worth it
8GB vRAM in that thing is nuts since this thing came out 9 years ago, wow
Please tell me. How does your windows 10 work with this laptop?
Would be cool to see a device collection video
This was my laptop in college, came with a 770m. It was cheaper than a MacBook Pro 15 inch if you could believe it. An absolute dream but it was noisy as hell pissing off my roommate & heavy as shit to lug around to class
I am still using an Alienware 17r5 with an 8750h and a gtx 1070 that i got more than 5 years ago. it had been a great PC but i am due for an upgrade. I am getting a laptop with an 11800h and 3080, that should give me another 5 years.
Whats up with the hdmi port saying in and out?
It can be used for either mode
Lucky, I got mine of fb market place for only 280 cad, it has a i7 4700MQ and a gtx 770M with 8gb of ram, still hoping I can someday find a nice MXM gpu for a good price to upgrade my 17 r1, i did eventually find some spare ram so its my main gaming beast, still going proud, even if it cant run the highest settings on games
Hello sorry to reach out, im planning to buy used Dell g7(2018) with i5 gen 8 and gtx 1050, does these old gaming laptops hold up for years? Planning to use on college
Would make a good cheap gaming laptop today
nathan is quite a nice person to have on TH-cam community
Which thermal paste did you use
why do you think the thermal paste needs to be liquid? It just has to bridge the gap which it does perfectly if you would not finger around in the system.