socal87

Wait, you bought a gaming laptop and are actually trying to use it as a laptop? Irony. Lulz. My AW17 has rarely been on battery power.

I have a mid 2013 AW 17 and I lovehate it. Build quality is excellent - it's hefty, but this was meant to be a desktop replacement and I don't use it in normal laptop fashion anyway. Connectivity isn't the best, but for my purposes, it's more than sufficient. Cooling is superb. The screen is amazing. The keyboard, even, is quality as far as laptops go. I would buy this again in a heartbeat - except I would probably have spent the extra $500 on the GTX780m. Or maybe got the 18 with 2 GPUs in SLI. That, in addition to not taking advantage of the warranty for some minor issues, are my only regrets. Sager isn't bad, but they're basically rebranded Clevos. I don't have much experience with them, but it would seem that the quality does depend on who you buy them from. They're still more or less standardized and upgradeable, whereas the current generation of Alienware laptops now have BGA CPUs and GPUs - so if you don't already have one, and you want a laptop you can upgrade (other than the available Graphics Amplifier) DO NOT BUY A BRAND NEW ALIENWARE.

There have been problems with the 180 watt PSU being insufficient for full performance. There was also a BIOS update released to this effect.

The proprietary connector (and cable) carry 4 PCIe lanes as well as USB for the enclosure. Also, the new systems are no longer using MXM cards...the CPU and GPU are BGA packages, soldered to the motherboard. I spent a pretty penny on my m17 r5, and i would just as soon spend it on a custom DIY desktop rig.

I have a mid 2013 17 with the i7 4700. Using XTU, I've been able to get quite a bit of OC out of the RAM without any issues...but it seems as though the CPU does NOT want to overclock at all. Any change in the reference clock, no matter how small, causes a freeze and shutdown. Ideas?