Search the Community

Well a thread on another forum questioned people why they are AW fanatics which prompted a reply from me. Then I thought, "hey why not create a thread where AW owners can give feedback as to why they love Alienware notebooks?!" so here it is! Give us your reason as to why you love Alienware and keep coming back for more...here's mine: Let me chime in on why Alienware is by far the best notebook gaming brand in the universe: Next business day service (I'll expand on this more below) Excellent build quality Top of the line cooling (will discuss this further) Bios Overclocking (M17x + M18x) Design Appeal Extras (e.g. alienfx, wireless hdmi, msata drive, hdmi in) NBD Service As far as NBD service I'll give you an example of how Dell recently helped me out: My palm rest's touchpad was malfunctioning, I e-mailed one of the several excellent AW reps that are available on the T|I forums, told him my problem and the next day my new palm rest was waiting for me at home. Few days later, I noticed my media panel lights were having issues and again, Dell overnighted a new media panel cover. However, it turns out the panel was perfectly fine, the ribbon cable was the culprit, so again I e-mailed the Dell rep and the next day a replacement ribbon cable was there and my system is good as new. That's one story, another is that I previously had AMD 6990M Xfire in my M18x and was extremely frustrated with the AMD drivers. I pinged a Dell rep. about it and 2 weeks later had a brand new M18x + 580M SLI delivered to my doorstep WITH a return label to send back the other system. I have a challenge for everyone out there: Find me a gaming notebook maker that can match this level of service. I can back up my claims with screenshots of the work orders so if you claim you got the same service from another gaming notebook maker, back it up. I'm sure there's tons of other Alienware users that have similar stories as mine. Cooling As I mentioned, Alienware has exceedingly good cooling design built into their notebooks. While some other brand notebook owners are seeing high temperatures on their GPUs and resorting to modding their systems, Alienware owners don't have to bother. As another personal anecdote, I have a 4 GB 680M in my system and can run it at 1200+ core and 2500+ mhz memory and the hottest it gets is 84C at 100% utilization and that's in super hot Phoenix, AZ weather! As with any brand, Alienware also has its down sides and the biggest one is their GPU throttling scheme. With their recent 680M release, they have an algorithm built in that throttles the GPU after a certain power/temp threshold is crossed and thus overclocking is limited with the Dell 680M. IMO this sort of aggressive throttling is unnecessary given the excellent cooling built into their systems. But with everything taken into account, I'd still pick an Alienware system over any of its competitors.