Avensky

To be honest, I didn't like alienware at first. Alienware as a brand is too expensive and too flashy. What really drove me toward buying my first alienware is the fact that they produce laptops that can compete with desktops; overlooking the size, weight, and power limitations that most laptop companies stick to they can provide powerful machines that provide to a niche market. If all you do is play facebook games and sims 3 alienware probably isn't for you. But you seek raw power you can play on the couch with, Alienware is one of the few companies that will provide this service to you.

So I just learned how to flash my graphics cards yesterday so I'm still new to overclocking.

I love this community and I'm happy to finally be a part of it, these are my benchmarks from yesterday

Works wonderfully. used this for AW18 780m sli benchmarks were so much higher

I like to use old hard drives and put them in cases. I bought the usb 3.0 versions but 2.0 is probably all you need.

Amazon.com: Sabrent USB 3.0 To 2.5-Inch Sata Aluminum Hard Drive Enclosure Case for 9.5mm, 12.5mm 2.5-Inch SATA-I, SATA-II, SATA-III HDD and SSD Black (EC-TB4P): Computers & Accessories

Samsung SSD 840 EVO 1TB

SAMSUNG SSD PM830 mSATA 64GB

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[FONT=arial]OMG! 780M are beasts! Dual 330W AC Adapter FTW!!!

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Now, I'm definitely going to have to do this with AC cooling and a higher CPU overclock this weekend. Amazing... even one runs as well as 7970M CrossFire :Banane22:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M SLI card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3920XM Processor Extreme Edition,Alienware M18xR2 - P16678 3DMarks	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M video card benchmark result - Intel Core i7-3920XM Processor Extreme Edition,Alienware M18xR2 - P10112 3Marks

@vs3074 maybe I should consider clean install since the laptop will come with basically no program in it (except factory default programs from AW). Does installing the mSata SSD require any BIOS setting or specific step? Some people have recommended me to use the 256GB mSata for OS boot AND caching. They told me to create 2 partition, 64 GB for the caching and the rest for the OS. Anyone know how to do this?

From what I understand splitting msata into two partition for both OS and Cache is not possible. Irst uses at the whole drive when used for cache. if you firgure a workaround use 60GB or less for cache, any more would be wasteful.

I recommend using msata as OS period, this laptop does not limit your ssd's performance what so ever.

Personally I did a clean install and put the OS on a 60gb msata drive. At first i was just testing the read/write speeds on the msata port and it was faiirly fast at about 400+ read/write. Runs about the same as an old 120 kingston hyperx 3k i used to have. For storage and games I use a 1TB samsung 840 evo ssd. I have all my libraries "hyperlinked" to my D drive as well as 32GB of pagefile set to D and 1-2GB on C. After playing with possible Settups for my hard drives I eventually put the 1TB ssd on the optical bay, the read/write speeds did not suffer what so ever from the port change, it still read/writes 500+ on crystaldisk. And Finally on the actual sata ports i have 2 1TB HHD's on raid 0 for very large Fraps recordings.

This laptops chipset, Intel HM87, seems to support sata III speeds on the smata and optical drive which is amazing imo

To answer your question, the laptop did have trouble recognizing some of my hard drives but was not a problem after installing all the drives. for some of them you have to switch from dual graphics cards to integrated via fn+f5.

I'm very interested on testing this on an Asus G73SW bst6, apparently no one has 100% confirmed that any gpu mods will work. This post seems very promising though, I'll have to think about it a bit more though.