hi guys. 1 week+ X51 R2 owner here. seems like most of your guys here are on mobile platform

hopefully raymondtong94 can add in my name in owners list on the front page

This post has been edited by rihuhs: Jul 14 2014, 02:01 PM

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

hahaha heard that a lot but on contrary, Acer was my trusted brand since my student years back in 2005, in the Pentium M era. in my own experience there no problem at all after years of abuse, even my old Acer laptop still works until today aside from its faulty HDD. as for my later one, recently I just did some cleanup on the exhaust vent from the CPU/GPU heatpipes and it works like a charm again before selling it off to a friend.

maybe it's just that they're not really designed for extreme use, hence the poor design on the vents etc. other than that it works just fine. it was only me who needed an upgrade to fulfill my gaming needs

nice

I didn't bother to change anything in my HDD just yet, aside from splitting it to 2 partitions. yeah, for unknown reasons my X51 R2 comes with single C:\ partition only. thank god nowadays we can just simply shrink the volume and create another partition without having the OS to be reinstalled still planning to reformat everything and do a proper clean install, but gonna do that some time later

yeap. like out-of-box stock

looking forward for the SSD solution as well, since the X51 have an extra SATA port on the mobo (a total of 3 if not mistaken, 2 occupied by the HDD & optical drive, one unused) but I doubt all that would fit in the drive bay, unless I swapped the 3.5" HDD with a 2.5" one

I only opened up the case once cuz there's one time I noticed significant drop in fps while testing my rig with Crysis 2 on Hardcore settings @1080p. started with 50+ and dropped to less than 15fps in less than 5 minutes of playing, and I quickly exit the game and notice the GPU temperature was 102 degrees! let it to cool down for 10 minutes and the temperature was still around 95 degrees, and decided to shut it down. opened the case out of curiousity (thankfully no warranty sticker there) and found out that the PCIe auxillary power cable is brushing against the GPU cooler fan, sandwiched to the HDD. after a quick cable re-routing and putting everything back together, I started it up. this time when I tried Crysis 2 again, I got an average of 55fps and the temperature drops quickly, from 82 degrees to 72 degrees in less than a minute

that can wait. I don't find it to be that much of a problem with the standard 7200rpm 2TB Seagate Barracude HDD. aside from casual gaming, I'm just a regular user. not doing anything hardcore with it

yeah. I felt very lucky when I figured out the issue with the unusual temperature spike. thanks to countless X51 reviews/teardowns that I've gone through before finally decided to go ahead and get it

mine is the mid-range model, running on Core i5-4460, Radeon R9 270 2GB GDDR5, 8GB DDR3 RAM, and 2TB Seagate Barracuda HDD priced at RM3,888 direct from Dell

not sure on how it goes with Alienware but the nVidia Optimus technology should be able to change the graphics automatically, just like the example you have given with the MacBook Retina 15"

have you tried to look in the nVidia software for the settings?

I guess I am. besides, my X51 is more of a entertainment center rather than resouce-intensive workstation.

yeah. I'm that kind of person. I like to know what's going on inside as well, to understand better on how everything works and how they are related

thanks man

couldn't agree more

got mine a couple of months back. it says that the max waiting period is 14 days, but I got it within one week only

as for "further advice", I'm not sure what you really meant but I would recommend to get at least the mid-range model so that you can have the 330W PSU (the entry level is only 240W), the same as the higher-end one.

if you already gonna pick the higher end model, then no worries about the PSU I guess

I've asked a Dell sales rep the other day, he mentioned that the 330W PSU alone gonna cost RM600 to purchase separately

not really worth it in my opinion, better get at least the mid-range one

mind sharing which one you're gonna grab?

just had a look in Alienware Malaysia website, seems like they haven't updated the specs being offered yet since the last 2 months. back on the time when I bought mine, I was like only a week late and missed on the deal to get the Logitech gaming headset

sadly no. they didn't put that up as an option during purchase.

the 330W PSU is only available for the mid-range (Core i5, Radeon R9 270) and the higher-end (Core i7, GeForce GTX760Ti)

the entry level one (Core i5, GeForce GTX745) comes with the 240W PSU, which in my opinion gonna be problematic if you're gonna upgrade to a more power-hungry graphics later on

most 15-inchers usually have around 3-4 USB ports only

I doubt laptops nowadays have any PC Card slots

with more ports taken over by USB and most flash storage overshadowed by SD (and its derivatives), PCMCIA cards becomes obsolete

take it apart, scrape off the old paint, put on a fresh layer of custom paint

yup. simplest way is covering it up with carbon fiber sticker

fuh. awesome!

good stuff, good price lor