Brian

The screen is decent but when I switch back and forth between R2/R3 I see a pretty large difference between the two in the RGB LED's favor. If you check out notebokcheck's review of R3, you can see it's overall color gamut is noticeably less than rgb led and is even less than a Sony Vaio screen. It's close to a 13" MBP screen's color gamut so it's decent, definitely better than the crap Asus pushes out although that may change with the G74.

I did a 1024MB run with WPrime 1.55 today and while the mult was nearly at 26x the entire time and the CPU at 2600 mhz, the time to complete it was far below an optimized 920xm that's got the use of TS. Can those of you with 2720/2820 CPU's run wprime 1.55 1024MB with 8 threads and post your results here?

Check it out: Eurocom Racer: Why the Radeon HD 6970M Rocks - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News The 6970M puts up an awesome show and I bet he wasn't using the latest 11.4 driver preview. Meaning it has the potential to pull ahead of the 485M WHILE consuming 20W less during peak load! Major design win for AMD there. As an aside, Alienware M17x-R3 is clearly the best AMD 6970M equipped system on the market thanks to it's integrated gfx support which gives up to 4+ hours of battery life (the clevo barely managed >2 hrs).

I noticed the display has a blue shift and needs correction. I adjusted mine to 6100K and now the colors are a bit better. Anyone else notice that?

Those are some awesome specs. You will be very happy with the system.

Yeah it looks like he hit the lottery. That card of his can probably come close to matching 5870xfire with the right amount of cooling and overclock.

To be honest, I'm not even sure I'd buy an M18x apart for the purpose of doing a review for T|I. I've been wanting a light gaming notebook and the R3 seems to fit that bill nicely. It's not built as well as the R2 and lacks the RGB LED but apart from that, it's a very nice notebook that's well rounded.

Nice man, start selling them for a dollar each I'd be interested in one.

You will probably get most of your wish sans the 3 hard drives. But IMO we shouldn't have to sacrifice things like the RGB LED or even the multicolored alien head. I notice the missing color variation on the R3 alien head and it just looks...cheap. In fact since I received the R3, it's received minimal use because the R2 is my workhorse. However, I plan to put more time into the R3 starting today because I have to get ready to do a thorough review on it for T|I's main site. Welcome to the forum!

Those specs are probably very close to what the production M14x will have. I also have to take back what I said earlier about the 6970M being as fast as the 485M because I was basing it off ichime's card which is apparently an unlocked one with extra shaders. Nonetheless, with the 11.4 catalysts, the 6970M DOES close the gap considerably with the 485M.

Pretty cool idea, as a transparent sticker?

You will see a considerable improvement in performance with the R3 vs the XPS 1730. What makes you think it wouldn't be any better? Welcome to the T|I forum!

Hey rev, welcome to the forum! It is extremely odd that ichime's cad has more shaders, at first I was ready to dismiss it thinking it was an R2 bios glitch but then his scores are also faster than ours clock for clock. I doubt he did anything to unlock it, more than likely he just received a sample that was already that way. It must have slipped past AMD somehow when they sent it out. AMD typically lasers out bad shaders and bins them as a lower tiered product and they likely neglected to laser the one he has. Edit: Yup I was right, take a look here, the same thing happened with desktops: http://lensfire.blogspot.com/2010/10/can-you-unlock-hd-6850-to-1120-shaders.html AMD 6950-->AMD 6970 unlocking thread: http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=335318 Since those bios files are for desktops, it doesn't apply to us and since Speedy already tried to flash his card with ichime's bios (original one I'm assuming) then that means ours are already lasered and cannot be unlocked.

Plus if you decide to stop using the oil to cool the PC, you could use it on a couple girls wearing bikinis.

With the new 11.4 driver:

Here's a teaser benchmark from the M17x-R3. I'll be posting tons more in the official review that will be on Tech|Inferno in a week or so.

Hey inap! Welcome to the forums man! That score is awesome, it's approaching default 5870m crossfire scores and it beats 4870m Crossfire. Pretty amazing card. I got my R3 today, I haven't done anything with it yet but I plan to load up some benchmarks tonight and enable overclocking via rivatuner. After I do initial benchmarks, I'll do a tear down video + retention mod on the GPU. My initial impressions of the system are decent, it doesn't feel as cheap as I thought it would though its nowhere near as sturdy as the R2 either. Very quiet though.

After wrestling with bears and chopping down trees I'm sure Aaron is in perfect shape.

Nice work and thanks for taking the time to do this write up! +1 rep.

Notice all the warnings and finger pointing? And they constantly shit on their users by blaming them for bickering yet the M14x rumor thread had none of that. They just aren't owning up to the fact that they have other motives and now are feeling the pressure. Hopefully people don't fall for their bullshit yet again.

Welcome to T|I, WaR!

I don't think the CPU is dead or anything, you might just have to settle for stock TDP with it or slightly above it for stable speeds.

Order Date: 3/7/2011 Order Status: Shipped Departed FedEx location CITY OF INDUSTRY, CA Shipment Dates Ship date Mar 14, 2011 Estimated delivery Mar 16, 2011 M17x-R3 en route!

Good news - The M17x-R3 has shipped out and will be here on 3/16. The plan is to take photos + vids of the unboxing processing along with commentary and then to setup the machine for review. The review will take about 1 week to complete the first part. We're estimating a total of 3 articles that will span over 3-4 weeks.

Yeah looks like the same recycled info except they neglected to mention 6970M Xfire which will obviously be an option.