Which replacement unit would be better? 17R3 or AW 18?

[BDogg464]

So i have been in quite the long drawn out situation with alienware support. Let me first say, no matter what issues i've been having AW support has been very curtious, friendly and helpful. I know it always sucks having to deal with these situations (sending in for repair, having to go thru replacement units) but i have no complaints with the Staff.

 

So i'll try to make this short, after getting my original unit sent off and fixed several times, but not actually fixing the problems they sent me a sightly better replacement unit. Awesome, except the replacement unit has a couple issues of it's own. (dead pixels, sqeaky palm rest, bad battery)  I tried to get a new unit sent. Probably not going to happen. So i was told with the issues im having with the refurbished replacement. I should just get another "replacement for the replacement" when talking with the replacement specialist, I asked if getting a AW 18 with the dual 980m's was a possibility. They didn't say no, but we were waiting to see what happened with the new replacement request.

 

so my question is. Which do you guys think is better? Trying to get a properly working replacement of what i currently have? (2016-17R3-980m 8gb-6820hk cpu 4.1ghz-256gb M.2 sata-7200rpm 1TB HD-4K ips screen) or trying to get a refurbished (AW 18-Dual 980m sli-4940MX cpu 4.4ghz-512 mSata ssd-7200rpm 1TB HD-1080 wled truelife display)

Am i taking to far of a step backwards thinking about requesting the AW 18? Should i just stick with the 17R3 approach? Only reason i ask is it seems the AW 18 is just a more solid build, plus sli gpu's. Is there a major difference in the two cpu's? i know the msata is much slower then a M.2 sata, but not sure if i would really notice the 2 second difference boot time..

 

Thoughts anyone???

Edited July 15, 2016 by BDogg464

[sirana]

Honestly, if you could go with the dual GPUs that's a huge upgrade (worth it alone if you decide to sell the second GPU) . I'm pretty sure you won't notice a difference between those CPUs, unless you're rendering lots of stuff in an application that doesn't work with CUDA. As for the SSDs, look up some benchmarks and decide if the difference is noticeable, I'm not sure myself.