hanberges

I am using currently a mSATA LITEON 256G (Dell ALienware OEM) drive as my boot disk on my Alienware 18, and even tough I'd rather have chose another mSATA brand myself (Intel or Samsung), I am quite happy with it so far; I have also a more traditional 2"5 Samsung 840 pro 256G SSD installed, and for day to day use, there are no visible differences with the mSATA. Sure, if you run several benchmarks against the two drives, the Samsung will probably get better results, but SSD is much faster than mechanical drives anyway; Another reason why I choose mSATA is flexibility of usage for remaining 2"5 bays within your laptop.

Splinter Cell conviction (like SC: Double agent, based on the same modified Unreal engine), is quite CPU bound and performs poorly on dual cores CPUs; Even with quadcore CPUs you have sometime to manually change CPU affinity in task manager in order to balance load among all availables cores; Like many Ubisoft games, playing with Vsync settings and Monitor refresh rate could also help.

I had several headsets in the past (Steelseries, Logitech, Razer...) , and I'm currently using the Sennheiser PC 360 - it's a bit expensive, but the sound quality is really great, even compared to much more expensive Hifi headsets; Plus, the mic automatically switchs off when pulled up, which is very useful for online gaming!

I purchased the Alienware 18 with 780M sli and a 4800MQ CPU and it's working just fine; If you do not plan to OC your CPU, you should definitely put the money difference in SSD drive; I personally chose the 256G SSD mSATA option for boot drive, and even if it's only LiteOn OEM (at least when my laptop was assembled), I had no issues at all from performance or stability perspective - for sure I would rather had chose an intel or samsung mSATA SSD myself, but it would have been a little more expensive.

Have you tried to update your OCZ Vertex 4 firmware to the last version, and you MSI laptop bios also? I had this issue once (non AHCI) support with a Samsung 830 on an ASUS MB, and I had to upgrade both firmware to make it work.

Hi my name is Hanberges from France; I've been building desktop gaming rigs for quite some time, and I recently had to switch to one gaming laptop to replace my previous desktop tower - mainly for footprint and noise reasons... at least according to my wife:) I purchased a new Alienware 18 with a SLI of two 780m, and after having looked on several forums in order to get more in-depth technical info, there were so many links pointing to Tech Inferno that I decided to join !