pretty much given up on mobile gaming, mainly due to heat issues and parts upgradeability

my old laptop was sitting on my desk 99% of its 2+ years life with me, before I decided to sell it off and get the X51 instead. somewhat still portable though. can be easily carried to the living room and plug into the TV

I was comparing with my old Acer laptop hehe. Core i7-2670QM and GeForce GT630M running in a laptop not designed for gaming, for sure temperature goes high

my X51 is the mid-range model currently offered by Dell, running on Core i5-4460 & Radeon R9 270. if I ordered it a couple of weeks earlier I would have got the GeForce GTX 760Ti running in my mini rig

oh. yeah acer laptops are better for common usage, not extreme use. i still have a very very old acer laptop lying around. surprisingly it is still alive and kicking (but in slo mo usually )

by the way, currently running linux mint in an r4. it's not bad. i can even disable touchpad

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hi guys,is this machine worth RM5.5k?
already 2 years old.Alienware M17xR4,I7-3820,256gb ssd,32gb msata raid 0 cache 1TB HDD 7200 rpm
GTX680M gpu ,Intel AC 7260 dual band 2.4, 5 ghz wifi card.

yeah. spending wisely is the best we can learn and do

there is no such updates for w8.1.

try to connect the ext.hdd to a usb 2.0 hub then connect that hub to the port of r4. this is the trick i used if a usb 3.0 ext.storage is not detected.

i know. i want that speed too. the worst part is that it's kind of random. to me slower speed is still better than nothing productive to be done.

you're lucky to have r4. it's even more obvious for newer haswell machines

hehe that's why intel classified its usb 3.0 bugs as nuisance (the last time i checked there were still many of them unfixed in the errata)

i am not sure if your problem is related to intel chip, or just hardware or driver issues.

wo. at last?! look at this. is this for real? however, can a usb 3.0 do the job well? (i thought thunderbolt port is more promising :/)

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/msi-gamin...well,27606.html

thank you for reminding me that. That just inspired me of a switchable cooling method for laptop combining ares 2 and ares 3.

Thanks man, nice explaination. Ok avoid samsun evo 840.

480gb i believe will be out of my budget for now. Might go for 256 gb instead. Currently desktop using 500gb. Usually allocate about 250gb to download. The other for games and os. So i think 255 should be enough

Since there is the msata slot. I was planning to leave the os there but if i take ssd, i think ssd better than msata ssd? Then os in SSD? Then what about msata if so? Oh my lol

The thermal compound i think i will try get shop or someone else to do for me. thanks for the recommendation. Will take some time to read up on those

no problem

uh? using ssd for download? normally we don't do that.

usually ssd is used to house OS, apps, and games because the strength of a ssd is much faster load time. (more reads, less writes) and it's expensive. hdd, on the other hand, can handle rigorous writes, like downloading stuff. and it is low-cost with large storage space. also, as always, hdd speed is still much faster than our internet download speed. so it makes more sense to use hdd for download and storage purposes, while spare limited space in ssd to store more apps and games.

for m17x r4, msata slot and dvdrom port are sata2 (250MB/s max), while hdd sata port is sata3 (600MB/s) so yeah sata ssd is faster than msata ssd (not because of ssd, but the speed limitation due to different sata versions)

still, 250MB/s is not that bad. you still can run OS from msata ssd.

Hahahaha! Yes! Its finally here! 980m is really worth the upgrade if we look at reviews the power efficiency might be the real cure for laptops to run those specs lol!

For desktops, imo its better to wait for ti.

try coollaboratory liquid ultra. my 3820qm and 3840qm almost reached 100c before this (98 to 99c; long hours of bf4). it's been weeks after CLU application, it never get pass 86c under loads at hot room temperature. (yeah. a brutal 12 to 13c drop, literally)

for gpu, the triple pipe heatsink does magic. with just mx-4 the gpu can stay below 80c at all times. impressive
haha nice

have fun with that r4. it's a good machine i must say; plenty of rooms for improvement.

M17x R4 is all with triple heatpipe.

Only the new Alienware 17 come with 2 heatpipe (GTX 860M/GTX 770M) and triple heatpipe (GTX 780M/GTX 880M)...

i still use 1.00.19 released since 2013. (from dell support page)

imo that's more like hardware, not driver issue.

Try reduce the volume. Maybe that helps. Alternatively get a spare speaker from taobao lol!

Hey after you mentioned about new audio drivers, i did a search. Actually there are updates from windows updates but somehow m17x r4 and m18x r2 didn't get updated because of missing hardware entries for these machines.

Someone at nbr did mods but I haven't tried them out yet.