Sharadeos

I would like to share a very recent encounter with a failing hard drive. The drive was being unresponsive for 30 seconds or so, then it would resume whatever it was doing. Some files were then removed which freed up space and made it seem stable again. If you see a symptom like this, quickly backup all your data before its too late.

The reason I went for an Alienware is because of the warranty. I have had a lot of in-home repair services done with Dell/Alienware products and that is a big factor to why I stick with them.

You can try, but he most likely scenario would be your laptop not booting. If that happens, It will default back to 1600MHz as it reboots.

With current driver releases from both sides, I have to lean towards Nvidia this time around. I was able to use the AMD 7970m for quite a while. It is a great performer especially with current release titles but falls short on older/less supported games. AMDs GCN architecture needs more driver support in order to be a better recommendation compared with Nvidias current card. You will see severely erratic performance on AMDs side as the GPU sometimes does not fully load on certain games. They are working on some of those issues especially when they release the 13.2 driver but its still a long road. I am now using a Nvidia 680m and its almost flawless except for some issues surrounding the 310.90 driver. This is all based on their current flagship cards and does not reflect future flagship cards.

Have you tried to set the clocks down to 1600? There could be a compatibility issue with Alienware M17x R2/R3 laptops running 8gb 1866 sodimms.