This MASSIVE Alienware Laptop Was WILDLY EXPENSIVE
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
- I bought an old monster Alienware Laptop with DUAL GPUs.
Get some AWESOME Dawid T-shirts, Mouse pads and more here: dawiddoesmerch...
Play some Minecraft on the Dawid Does Minecraft server courtesy of our friends at Linode!
Dawid Does Minecraft Name: Mctenthiddy, server IP: mc.tenthiddy.com
It works on Java version 1.19.3
Support the channel on Patreon: / dawiddoestechstuff
Follow me on whichever Social media you don't hate
Discord: / discord
Twitch: / dawiddoestechstuff
Twitch bits on TH-cam: / @dawiddoestwitchstuff1128
If it is upgradable in any way with better parts, a part two upgrading this beast would make for a great video
I second this
Not sure about the support for those on BIOS level, but technicaly socketed Broadwells and MXM RTX 2000s exist. If they are not supported, it would become an expensive brick though
Seriously, I'd love to see someone just go Frankenstein on this thing and try to pimp my old laptop to see if it could run at modern standards.
Agreed!
I *definitely* want to see if he can bang a couple of 10 series MXM cards in there!
I thought this was going to be a video about the new 18" Alienware with the 4090 in it. This was somehow better, though.
The new one is a downgrade in terms of build quality and upgrades, everythingis soldered except the ram and ssds, the bugs is not unlocked,.... and it is also only 18 inches not 18.4 inches on the old one, don't get me started on the sound and speakers... the old one shown in the video obliterates everything to this day with its klipsch speakers and subwoofer even a MacBook pro stands no chance... I am currently working 9n a project to modernize mine with a custom motherboard and newer hardware..... it will be a fun adventure
@@razor-reaper I'm impressed with how dedicated and passionate you are to this laptop, I saw your other comment saying you put Quadro RTX 5000 MXMs in it and was impressed. Laptops nowadays aren't built like they used to be, I wish mine had an MXM gpu. I've got an MSI GS66 Stealth with an i7 10750h and an RTX 2070 MaxQ (shunt modded, of course) and was planning on swapping the 1080p 240hz display to 1440p 165hz. There is one panel on panelook that matches all the same signal types as my original display so hopefully the swap should be straight forward assuming there is no bios limitation. Good luck on your project!
@@razor-reaper I mean speakers haven't improved much. The new one has the standard 16:10 screen that are currently famous among laptop screens. That's why it's 18 inch instead of 18.4 inch since it's not a 16:9 screen. But unless you really want to do a change of build every 3-5 years, I think that product is more than a great upgrade. If you want upgradability, the older Area 51m might be up your alley.
It looks like there was an issue with the second GPU with battle field. The utilization was like 10-15% where GPU 1 was at 99%. Maybe that’s why there wasn’t an increase in performance.
"4090" FTFY
I bought one these new. It has SLI 860m. It was put away after I built a newer desktop. Covid hit and my nephew borrowed it for school. Years passed and he has new laptop and desktop. During Thanksgiving I inquired about it. They dug it out of a closet. I just finished doing a fresh Win 10 install and games/clients. I'm surprised it's handling GTA V and Farcry 4 as well as it does. I'm going to load it with kids games and have a little gaming/youtube kids station for my oldest kid. I absolutely forgot how massive it is. They even had the big alienware backpack I had it in. Great video!
That’s a great idea!
to be fair, 20-40% FPS increase with a second GPU in SLi is about what you got back then. I had 2 780Tis from this generation and I remember playing Shadow of Mordor and going from 40-50FPS on high settings to about 60-70 when SLi was enabled. The real limitation youre probably hitting is the amount of VRAM.
and that's with games that support it sadly🤣🤣🤣
I was surprised at his gains, because when my fried ran twin GTS8600 on SLi it was closer to 10% on his racing games.
@@raven4k998 Assassins Creed 3 supported it and it more or less halved my FPS. It was so wildly unpredictable if it was going to work from game to game that even before it died off I went back to a single powerful gpu and never looked back.
Overclocking results will be doubled as well
thats it. the vram. on the video there were two more available slots on the vram..... maybe its is possible?
3:21 I have to correct you on this. That is NOT a firewire port. That is actually a Mini DisplayPort. Even the symbol suggest that too.
I wondered why there was a FW on a laptop that late, because FW was Core2Duo era - lol -.
i saw that too, its def a mini DP
Yeah I was gonna say the same thing. Although to be fair, I worked on a Sager Clevo laptop with a 3rd gen i7 and a GTX 675MX card that still had a 1394 mini port on it. That was probably the last year anyone included those ancient ports.
@@SidneyCritic my desktop motherboard has a firewire from about the same time
Wanted to say the same thing it is a mini display port.... which with a good splitter dongle you can attach 3 4k displays assuming you have dual high end gpus inside with at least 8gb vram each or even better wit quadros.... a perfect scenario for productivity
That SSD-slot at 5:11 is for an mSATA-SSD. Fourth gen Intel (aka Haswell) was the first plattform supporting the NVMe protocoll, but it was not very common in laptops yet.
I bought a Dell XPS 8500 desktop with an on board msata SSD at a thrift store over the weekend. I didn't realize msata made it to desktops.
@@davemiller262 You practically never saw it on DIY boards but it was a thing in OEM machines. The reason being that ssd were faster to install in a manufacturing facility than 2.5" drives. Less screws and cables made them way faster to install.
mSATA was origionally only made for early Ultrabook and other Thin-and-light notebook for which 2.5"-SSDs were simply to bulky. My Samsung Ultrabook used one of them.
I have a Gigabyte BRIX with the a8-5557m - it uses mSATA as well. Great form factor at the time for miniaturization, and it helped keep the thing cool without a 2.5in drive clogging up the airflow.
@@davemiller262 I purchased a new in box, Dell XPS-8700 from Fry's about a decade ago. It came with a brand-new OS installed -- Windows 8. It didn't come with the mSATA SSD installed. So, when mSATA SATA 2 drives became dirt cheap, I bought a new old stock 80GB Intel mSATA drive from eBay. It was in in the machine until a couple of weeks ago when I replaced it with a 1TB, SATA 3 drive from Kingston. (They had the drives on sale.) The 80GB drive was just too small to handle the cache/temporary files from a new video app and was put into an enclosure to make a portable drive.
I use mSata on my Dell Vostro 3560. It's a very good Samsung Evo 860.
Not gonna lie this thing design and upgradability is nothing short of amazing... wish they still made laptops like this one nowdays... would really like to see a second video were you try to upgrade it 😃💪
well for a laptop yes it is amazing
Framework are working on it
Dual GTX 1050Ti in MXM form factor with the same SLI bridge is a distinct possibility and wouldn't break the bank. The CPU could also be upgraded with a top-tier 4th Generation. I would love to see this too.
Framework is the best you can get today, and they've been doing a good job. Their next generation prototype has my juices flowing.
Except if you ever owned one of these (and I did), you would know how bad they were. The cooling issues were crazy & the thottling would get just nasty. And lets not talk about the issues with the power supply
You may have to see about getting the new Framework gaming laptop and see how that performs.
Those Frameworks laptops do remind me a lot of laptops 20 years ago. If it gets a wide adoption rate it could become a standard again of being able to upgrade your laptops.
@@JobeStroud its a common trend i've noticed recently, adopting old trends in tech as modern. folding phones being another example.
Framework 🤢🤮 overrated
@@olsirmonkey folding phones Are not popular at all, that’s why everyone is failing like Motorola version of the flip, even samsung can’t sell its flip phones
Only boomers want that garbage iPhones better
Samsungs are so garbage you can buy a flip 4 for $700 can’t say the same for a iPhone 13-14 which hasn’t really lost its value like Samsung🤢🤮
@@Replyingtoclowns why do you think that? I am not saying that their designs and prices are perfect. But even if the only thing we get out of this is convincing the other PC manufacturers to bring back mor modular PCs I think that is a good thing
5:29 Facts. I love how easy it is to open a laptop before. Now, tons of screws and you have to pry the lid.
Would LOVE to see this laptop upgraded to the max, just to see what difference that could potentially make.
We have one, my wife had till recently used it as her WoW machine. We upped the GPUs to 2x 980M and the CPU to an i7-4940MX. 32gig fo memory, removed the blu-ray addded more storage and it now has a 128gig boot drive with a 3Tb raid. This beast flies !!!! It is quiet (for waht it has under the hood) The ony reason we replaced it for the Alienware A51s was Nvidia and Microsoft stopped support for the SLI and when you update the drivers it is a pain in the bum hacking SLI back into it as it breaks the next time ther eis a driver update. If however you want a Take anywhere (with a pickup truck) retro gaming, emulation , cool looking laptop this is peek gaming. Sadly our is now sitting in the corner of the spare parts room along side her Toshiba Quosmi gaming machine from the before times, awaiting sale (im holding off doing this cos I love it too much) . Oh and all told the machine cost us £4500 in total when fully upgraded so £6,445.92 today or $8,030.88 !!!!!!!!!! WAnna buy it ? comes with 2 extra 880m GPUs ;)
I have the duel 780m version of this, incredible machine. Bought the alienware backpack(the only bag it would fit in) so I could bring to and from work, ended up having to reinforce the straps because it was too heavy and they started to tear off
did you have to go see the chiropractor afterwards?
jk
I remember the pre-Dell Alienware, those systems were pretty awesome if you could afford them. Spoiler: you probably couldn't afford one
From overpriced awesomeness to overpriced garbage. Corporate really ruins everything...
Yeah, pre Dell Alienware was actually some awesome stuff. Crazy and cool cases too.
Their stuff today is just plastic on an office PC with an alien head logo.
@@volvo09 Don't forget the proprietary motherboard!
They only still do good monitors, but dHell killed Alienware spirit...
@@pascaldifolco4611 yeah the monitors seem to get lots of good reviews
Dawid, I'd really love to see a video of you upgrading the MXM graphics card(s) in this old beast and see what it can do with something significantly newer. The NVIDIA Quadro P4000 mobile seems to be quite an upgrade, while costing not nearly as much as a Quadro P5200. Additionally, seeing the CPU upgraded to a 4940MX would be mildly interesting (as the CPU in this laptop was already upgraded to the 4700MQ). I'm not sure what RAM comes in the laptop, but perhaps upgrading that as well could be interesting.
All together, it would show upgradability is important and how large the difference in performance can be with said upgrades. Just a cool idea.
Edit: also, did anyone see that little subwoofer at 5:42? 10:13 shows the laptop had Klipsch speakers, which must be pretty impressive! I'd love to hear those laptop speakers!
For the MXM ff, I believe that I have seen a few 2070's around on Ebay. Maybe worth a video?
I'd recommend dual 8GB GTX 980M cards for it. If you tried anything newer it either doesn't support SLI or the MXM board components (like the VRMs and mosfets) won't line up with the original heatsinks.
The klipsch speakers still obliterate everything available in modern laptops hands down.... they were just that good 👍 and about the GPU upgrade I believe the wattage per GPU on this one is about 150 watts but the laptop is limited to 100 watts per module and the mxm quadro rtx 5000 is 100 watts max which perfectly fits within the limits of the 100wats gpu heatsinks....
MXM RTX cards from HP and a few obscure venders are known to work aside from needing to mod the drivers. The HP mxm cards do require some heatsink modding but beyond that they work pretty well and have been demonstrated to work without much of a fuss.
There is 1 thing im missing with in your old hardware videos - overclocking. Im pretty sure you can make those 765m's run significantly higher clocks with this kind of cooling. I managed to get extra 20% of performance just by overclocking 7600 in my retro gaming laptop.
Correction it's a Alienware 18 not the m18x. The m18x is older but way cooler in my opinion with no power limitation, you could attach dual 330w PSU pushing 660w into it overclock the heck out of it.
The Alienware 18 won't draw more than 330w it is hardlimited.
Finally bro, I have been waiting for you to do a video on these laptops, I have a similar Alienware laptop from years ago and I think it's suffering from the over heating. Thanks so much for the video content buddy , really appreciate it 😊
Looking forward to Dawid learning about GTX 1080 SLI laptops, that would be a very cool video!
Absolute GEM of the video, thats some good clean fun right there, I hope you make part 2 video where you upgrade everything as much as posible (balls to the wall, i belive is the expression)
13:30 worth noting SLI isnt really working in this specific case. 2nd GPU is only running at 135mhz and drawing less than 10w
But i guess it makes sense as SLI was probably already dead and buried by the time BF V released
Also Vram limited
i have this exact same laptop but without the SLI configuration! the 765m has around the same performance of a gt 1030 nowadays. this one is really well taken care of, the sides and the top housing of mine are turning into goo.. temps are supprisingly good after a quick thermal paste replacement! great vid as always
DAM THIS WAS EXPENSIVE WHEN LAUNCHED! And here we are thinking today's GPU prices were crazy
Yeah a soldered on P.O.S PC of today beats a $4k desktop replacement laptop from ten years ago. BTW given that most users (not you and I but most) don't replace their components and in fact destroy (battery or keyboard) their laptops within five years, it "makes sense" for manufacturers to solder everything.
They are crazy prices today. This would cost 6-7k now a days there is 2 graphics cards on it if they didn't discontinue making more than one in a computer anymore not even desktops use two Gpu's anymore in a prebuilt
It has to be expensive. It weighs so much and thick that probably the Roman soldiers can use this laptop as a shield in combat.
High end laptops aren't cheaper now. I'm typing this response on a $4,699 MSI laptop.
@@imtoxicAF custom builds don’t use sli either
This was a great vid, Dawid! I have an old System 76 Bonobo Extreme gaming "desktop replacement" with a GTX 680 with option to add another one for SLI. It's just as easy to strip down (I have to make time to replace the old paste and pads) as the Alienware unit you showcased. I only use it as a back up PC when the other one is in use. Fun times!
always a good day when Dawid uploads some more crazy tech shenanigans lol
Now, now, don't you go baffling Dawid with science or technical detail! It'll only end in tears.
I had the 14in base model of this Alienware laptop generation. It was my daily driver in high school. What a throwback!
That port you called firewire is actually Mini Displayport!
Also- you have to upgrade this as far as you can now....
Great video! We all want to see you upgrading the MXM gpus btw
I have one of these... P18e the motherboard went out but I still have it and it's just like my Clevo P370EM it is one of my favorite comps, mine currently has a pair of GTX 980m 8gbs, and then an i7-3840qm, one nice feature about this aside from the built in RGB is that you can use the HDMI as a passthrough for anything you want to hookup to it, such as a PS3 or whatever you may have as a HDMI device, and as someone else pointed out it had a mini display port
I have this laptop. Still works today. It's a beast. I upgraded the GPU's from dual 780m's to dual 980m's in SLI. The processor can be upgraded to but I already had the highest spec available for it with the 4940mx. This was back when AW used to make amazing laptops. I also have the previous model of this the AW M18x R2 with also upgraded CPand GPU's.
Any suggestions for sites or channels or forums for this? I have a 17r - something (it's upstairs and I'm lazy) that my son has used all these years and just now replaced with a desktop. So I'm inheriting it. I need to clean it up and replace the coin battery, he's been F-12ing it. I don't even know where the battery is on this sucker and I hope it doesn't require flipping over the motherboard.
David, the SSD Slot is for M.Sata SSD's. Not many OEM or motherboard manufactures adopted that type of slot.
I would love to see the GPUs be upgraded in a future video… just a wild idea
Used to work for Dell, working on these laptops was nice and easy and changing parts didn't need special tools VERY nice wor work on !! Wish newer laptops were nice to work on !!
The 2 bench reps were mighty impressive. I hope one day to attain your levels of strength.
Hahahaha POWERRRR
What we didn't see was rep #3 where the power BRICK slides off and mashed Dawid in the groin
@@markfriesen1435 Precisely what I was waiting (and maybe, secretly hoping) for.
and remember, it is a massive laptop with a gravitational field
I had one of these as a kid and i remember pulling it out in class along with the literal brick sized power brick. It was so much fun but i also remember not being able to find any bag to fit it in 😂
Would love to see you try to upgrade both gpus! That'd be an awesome video. I'd pay for a patreon for that!
I had the alienware 14 of this same generation and i actually liked it a lot. It ran cool and quiet and performed very well for the hardware it had!
I got a laptop, the HP Zbook 15 that has the same cpu, 24gb of ram and a k1100m, the upgradability, including socketable cpus is amazing.
Edit: I have the 4800mq cpu.
Bro stole my laptop 😢
I have the i7-4800MQ with 12GB RAM and a GT 730M in my ThinkPad T440p
the 2015 alienware were great.
I have an m17x r3 and I can upgrade it to an 8 gb graphics card that's incredible
you could theoretically install an RX5700 XT MXM GPU in there, which that thing is no slouch. This alienware should have been the beginning of what future laptops should have geared towards. Instead we get shovelware chromebooks and throwaway soldered garbage fires.
Haven't seen one of those on eBay at all and almost daily search for years. Instead I've been daily using an mxm rx580 8gb.
CPU would bottleneck it hard.
all to scale measurements are best done with loot lord plushie as reference. good video :)
3:26 that looks like a mini display port not firewire.
Yup.
He's not very smart
Daily drove the 17" version of this for about three and a half years. Thing is built like a battleship. Dropped it off of the pavement and the only thing I had to do was go in and reseat the GPU and I was good to go for another year and a half.
Ended up retiring it due to not needing a laptop at my new job, but it has been collecting dust(And needing a repair).
That being said, I wish you showed off the HDMI-In feature these two laptops, and nearly no others, had. Such an interesting feature(And honestly one I wish more PC manufacturers used, though AFAIK only Dell can as they bought the patent off of Clevo.). I've used it a few times and it is genuinely useful, turning the laptop's relatively nice screen into a spare monitor.
Release the unedited rant footage!
1:44 watching those lifts ……. Was soooo waiting 👀🍿with baited breath to see that power brick slide down and hit poor Dawid in the “eagle eggs”🥚🥚👀 causing him to whimper back home to mama 😅😂🤣😅😂🤣
Would be fun to see you upgrading it however you can, maybe getting a better CPU or MXM GPU, would be neat to see how far you can take this laptop!
Do what I love to do when I get an older laptop like this. Get all the best parts you can to upgrade it to the maximum setup it can handle. Hopefully they are cheap now instead of what they cost brand new.
Did it survive your vivisection? While they're not as popular as they should be there are MXM GPUs out there in RTX 20 series and GTX 10 series and I for one would be curious to see if you could force an upgrade to a modern laptop GPU
Framework is planning on launching a laptop with an upgradable cpu and gpu late 2023. Not the same as mxm though. I assume it’s going to be more midrange options to start
@@Spork0 I did see that, the only question is to frameworks connector (or rather pinout since the connector existed already) being adopted as a standard and whether or not it would have even needed it if not for the death of MXM. That's the thing I hate most about the concept of a "desktop replacement" really is that they mostly are stuck in the configuration ordered to start, framework's effort to turn that around is appreciated.
Sadly it wouldn't work, usually these laptops that supported MXM gpu's only ever accepted cards from the same generation, and in the "best" case scenario they'd take one generation later if the cards were roughly similar in architecture. So in this case I'd image something from the 8** line (which was a thing for laptops, if I recall) would maybe work, otherwise you'd want to go for a 780m.
Found a 1070 mxm on Amazon😬
This and the 17 in equivalent take 1070 mobile mxms no problem. Not sure about SLI with those. And its dependent on which screen you have and your knowledge on altering drivers to make it work. I have a maxed out 17 inch with a 980m in it currently.
I agree. Taking apart my new MSI GF63 Thin to upgrade to a dual channel 16GB kit and add a 2.5" SSD and I had about 10 million screws and needed the jaws of life to get the back off.
Anybody else notice the dent to the laptop in the glam shot? Refurb? Yikes!
I definitely did also !!!
I mean it was mentioned in the video...
Lots of appreciation for your videos man. Keep up the great work.
Upgrade the two GPU to the best you can! And try to upgrade a cpu if the motherboard allow and of course update the bios first!
Would be a great video!!!
I had the smaller 17.3 inch and a little newer version from 2014. No SLI. Mine had HDMI in/out !!! still works.
When Dawid was bench pressing that laptop that power brick was getting really close to sliding off and likely ending his family line.
I think that's the reason why it was not filmed, camcorder was put down to save the family line XD
Hey is the increase in system RGB luminosity only for new subscribers or what? I've been subbed for ages and my RGB is just as luminous as it always has been.
I love the set up on this thing! It'd be super cool if newer laptops were as modular and user friendly to work on!
If you don't make a video upgrading this laptop I swear I will unsubscribe
5:14 That SSD slot is mSATA, which was/is commonplace amongst laptops back in that era. It was a way of allowing a compact size SSD alongside regular 2.5in HDDs, since NVMe was not a thing then for SSDs.
Hi Dawid. Awesome video. Holy.. I haven''t seen mobile GPU SLI configuration ever. It's very good.
Awesome video! Havent even had enough time to finish it, but is Dawid, so its auto awesome!!
The port you called firewire is actually a mini displayport (you can tell by little dp logo) and that tiny ssd slot was for msata drive which was a predecessor of m.2 form factor.
Hi Dawid, I have one of these from a different generation (I'd have to check the specs, but case is slightly different in how you access the hardware, and battery is removable without opening the laptop up) if you're interested. One day when plugging in an HDMI cable I must have built up some static because when I went to do it, there was a spark from me to the ground on probably that HDMI connector, and laptop instantly shut down, never to power up again. I've never got round to opening it up again to have a look, could very well be something as simple as a fuse somewhere in there.
Battlefield 5 doesn't fully support SLI & requires a custom nvidia inspector SLI profile to work in SLI mode.
For upgradability, you can go up to SLI GTX 980M's or single GTX 1070 MXM.
CPU highest is i7 4910HQ.
I owned one of these m18x R1 edition with dual gtx 660s and it was awesome... upgraded the mxm gpus to 980s and it was still working up to last year as a basic gaming rig.
I had the baby version.. the m11x r1. I still have it up in my attic. It was TINY.. I paid $1,400 I think back in 2010. It was the smallest portable pc gaming system on the market at the time
This is the Alienware 18, not the M18. That was before this model. I had 3 of these, the last one was the top of the line i7-4940 and dual 980m GPU"s. It was the last true Alienware laptop, back when they went against the Trends and just created powerful beasts. Everything since then has just been the same laptop as everyone else with a different case around it. I loved these things.
i had the 17, just as hefty and i lugged that thing on the train to school in the city every day for 2 years, and i still use it for work to this day, i kinda got used to this compact tonne of brick in my bag and people are shocked at how heavy my bag is
I had one of these with the i7 4710MQ and 2 860m's in SLI. It was the best piece of hardware i've ever used, it was super quiet and well built, build quality wise, it's much better than anything alienware has today. The configuration with dual 980ms was impressive, it's performance in SLI is equivalent to a 1070. But getting SLI to function was always a pain in the ass, you needed an app that would "force" the sli profiles on games that weren't compatible to work and performance gains were sometimes low, but necessary if you wanted to play at decent framerate.
I miss that laptop
I got an Alienware 17R5 several years ago. I've upgraded it to over 6 TB of internal drive space. It has an 8GB 1080Ti built in. I got the Graphics Adapter for it and put in a 6GB 2060. I'd say that, other than ray tracing, both cards put out the same results, just swapping 2-3FPS depending on the game. Came with twin built-in coffee warmers. Often sounds like I live near an airport if I'm not wearing headphones.
I upgraded my dad's old Alienware M17xR2 to an i7 920xm and added another Radeon 5870. Was hell with those ribbon candles and I was pretty clueless at the time. Amazing upgradability even if the crossfire was only supported in a handful of games. Thing was so heavy. This was a nostalgic blast😂 Great stuff Dawid
Jupiter been really quiet when this dropped
Dawid - we need to get you a samurai sword so you can do these box openings with some dignity for a change.
I had a Sager/Clevo from this era that I was using daily until 2021. Upgraded the CPU to a 4940mx and replaced the weird 870m with a 970m and was playing AAA games just fine... until the motherboard finally burned out. I loved how easy everything was to upgrade/change.
When I was younger I saved up to get an alienware laptop almost identical to this one, it was some good times. I had gotten it brand new, and after about a month it began and stayed running quite hot. It eventually broke and I was to dumb at that age to figure out what was wrong with it, probably the battery in retrospect. It's weight was immense. The RGB keyboard was the first RGB PC thing I ever experienced though, and that was really cool to my younger brain. It was also the first time I ever experienced resolution above 800x600 and PC games beyond a zsnes emulator.
Man. This video really took me down that memory lane. Good times.
I keep rewatching Dawid videos and can't stop
1. These laptops largely suffer from the same surface coating breakdown as you would expect on a logitech peripheral. 2. SLI was essentially worthless EOL even when this was new, it really was not relevant since 5 or 6 series. 3. Firewire was also dead at this point as well. I would have considered one of these if they went to 8th gen, but I ended up going with a single card config Clevo P870TM, as SLI was definitely dead at 10 series, the 1080 I got is still competitive compared to modern stuff
I really like the music you use before you start testing anything very 80s after school special lol
Considering SLI is basically dead the two mxm slots kinda make me think that it'd be neat to get a high power and a low power efficiency card in the two slots!
And then configuring them to use the efficiency card for general use and the high power one for gaming.
Could be quite useful, but the sheer brick-ness and age of it probably make it more worth it to just get something newer with decent integrated graphics for that two card effect
didn't know Dawid was an AquaFps enjoyer. Even more respect to the man!
just when i thought TH-cam contents were getting monotonous, Dawid came to rescue. been enjoying your contents lately. You sir are genius and crazy, love your humour 🤣
I have a 2005 Alienware laptop that I use for windows XP gaming. It’s construction is very solid still.
I used to have one of them with GTX 880m. Beautiful beast, and as far as i remember i could easily play remake of Resident Evil 2 on medium/high with fairly stable 60 FPS. You could do a video with upgrade to GTX 980m cause 880m does not support DX12. Would love to watch this 😁
Wow, the teardown of this laptop is does very easily, a very rare thing in 2014 laptops.
i have the same laptop, got it for like 400aud with sli 770m in it and upgraded the gpus to two 980m's off aliexpress, also upgraded the wifi card to a wireless ax one off aliexpress and put a couple SP A55 ssd's in, one as a bluray drive replacement and two in the hdd slots running in raid0 through windows. Feel free to reach out if you want some more info on tweaking the absolute shit out of this beast.
A part 2 that consists of upgrading this to its max supported specs would be a great vid.
I remember purchasing this brand new from Dell with a 4930mx and 780m SLI. Over the years Dell offered it with the newer 4940mx and up to dual 980m SLI.
Unofficially, you could cram other various MXM cards in there up to MSI variant 1070 mobile cards and Quadros.
Now that you have it in your possession, it will be fun to see if you upgrade the CPU to a 4940mx (and maybe overclock it with XTU or Throttlestop) along with slapping 1 or 2 980m's in there (need the newer beefier heatsinks) and see what it can really do.
1:00 330W power supply, bloody hell!
Hey Dawid! Big fan! Anyway I have a Alienware 13 OG, no r1, r2... Love keeping the old systems going!
If you look at the GPU numbers in BF5, you'll notice that the 2 GPUs have VERY different utilization. It means Battlefield had no idea what to do with the SLI setup, which makes a certain amount of sense. BF5 came out in 2018. By that time, devs had mostly stopped optimizing for multi-gpu setups for the most part.
EDIT: You can get RTX 20 series GPUs in the MXM form factor. They are NOT cheap, since they are in quite short supply, but they exist.
I had an M18X from 2011. It came with dual 580m's. Ran BF3 quite well from what I recall. Solid metal lid. Had HDMI out AND HDMI IN so you could use the display for like game consoles if you wanted to. I'd run my Xbox 360 on it.
That SATA port you see there is actually for MSATA drives. They were predecessors of NVME drives, and used to offer slightly better performance than the SATA drives.
I actually owned one of these beasts, the GTX770M version. I never really used the SLI so I upgraded to a single GTX980M. I wish modern laptops were as upgradeable.
I had an the older Alienware m18 r2 with 2 7970m in crossfire with 16gb Ram 1tb hdd and was an amazing piece of tech. Unfortunately games were slowly moving away from SLI and Crossfire so in the end sold it. Still one of the best looking laptops out there.
I had the M17x r4 with a single MXM card. I upgraded the GPU myself, even switching from Radeon to NVIDIA. To my knowledge, the last gpus with MXM standard built were some 1060s and 1070s. I dont know if there are SLI versions of them though.
I have the 17in version and this was by far the best gen of Alienwares. The design looks amazing and even right now I am typing this, on it 10 years later.
Still love my Alienware 18 R3. Bought it new in 2013, fully loaded except for the CPU - 4900MQ vs the 4930MX that was the max available but a ridiculous price to upgrade. The fans don't ramp at first but they do if the system's a bit dusty. Mostly played Skyrim & Borderlands on it, but it looks like it might get another go with GTA V. Thanks Dawid!
Dawid has become my primary source for tech youtube these days
I miss those older systems that had more upgradeable parts than just RAM or storage. I still remember seeing the OG Alienware systems (pre-Dell) that had the same kind of swappable video cards, it blew my mind. Wish more manufacturers would make their systems more modular.
I used to always drool over these and the ROG Desktop replacement laptops. I never ended up affording one, but the dream was there.
I Remember back in like 2013 when my dad got one of these lmao, I was mad asf when he gave it to my brother and not me
Had one for years, never failed me. I only sold it recently to upgrade to newer hardware.
Whoever designed that laptop deserves a reward; I've never seen such a user-friendly design before.
I had one of those beasts! Got it on a awesome sale and worked out to be decently good value.