Alienware M14x R2 Graphics Card
Evolve in tandem: The Alienware Graphics Amplifier was designed with the future in mind. Easily upgrade your graphics cards with this accessible design – with support for full-length, double-wide, PCI-Express x16 graphics cards – so you can take advantage of the graphics performance increase without having to upgrade your entire system. Re: M14x R2 only detecting integrated graphics? Thanks for the info. I ran the diag and it showed no errors and it also did not show my Videa Card in that test process.
In regards to all further interfaces and information about them, we want to reiterate our reference to our. Communications In Alienware's online configurator, we had a choice of Intel's Centrino Wireless-N 2230 (as in our test model) or the Qualcomm / Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N 1202. Both adapters are MIMO capable (2x2) and allow overall data rates of up to 300 MBit/s.
A better torsional stability of the display lid remains on our wish list, but that is criticism at a highly particular level. The precise and smooth display hinges are notable as well. Thanks to the heavy base unit, opening the lid with one hand is no problem. The gummed surfaces and materials used for the exterior are above reproach as well and the M14x continues to retain its 'very good' overall rating. Even though the Schenker notebooks and, which use the Clevo bare bones package, are in no way bad in this regard there is still a noticeable difference in quality. It should be noted that this difference in quality also comes with a noticeable difference in price. As the case remains unchanged, the connectors similarly remain unchanged.
Originally posted by:kk. Only problem i ♥♥♥♥ed it up and now i cant use it Assuming, you meant you somehow fried the 650m, You can always set a eGPU, Which is a actual desktop graphics card.
The most important software installed on the notebook is the 'Command Center'. A stylish interface allows the user to configure the lighting of the case, the energy saving options, and the touchpad. Delivery Package The extras included in the M14x delivery package will satisfy buyers. The battery and the power adapter are placed next to the multi-lingual manual, and a few DVDs: one recovery DVD, a driver and tools DVD, two resources DVDs and a DVD for Roxio Creator Starter.
You should get 30-40 fps on medium for bf3 beta.
This is the most definitive post I have ever seen about M14x R2, other than on techinferno and notebookcheck forums. I have a few questions. So will I be able to achieve the same with 3630QM, which I have on my M14x R2? Or should I opt for an upgrade to 3840QM or 3920XM? I am getting a deal at $150 for one. Also all of the above CPUs seem to support upto 1600MHz as per details on Intels's Ark website including the 3630QM, so by tinkering a little I may achieve frequencies past 1600Mhz, right? (Also getting a good deal for two 8GB sticks, same like your HyperX Impact but 1866Mhz CL9.).
Another issue which is less intense and more common is that caching setups learn overtime and you wont see gains immediately especially on newly installed software. For those who want to replace the mechanical SATA drive with a regular SSD and install windows onto it I recommend changing the SATA control method in the BIOS to AHCI and creating a bootable USB with GPT for UEFI compatibility. This will free up all the space for you to utilise and offer peak HDD performance while ensuring that the additional protection afforded by a UEFI BIOS against boot sector attacks is preserved. Now onto the meaningful part of the hardware namely the GPU and CPU.
Product does not come with warranty unless stated otherwise in product description. • Used - Acceptable: This means that the product shows clear signs of use, cosmetic defect, and may be missing minor accessories and manual, but remain in working condition. Product does not come with warranty unless stated otherwise in product description. Functionality issues beyond signs of use should be disclosed in product description.
In addition, the latest version of Bluetooth (Bluetooth 4.0) is on board. Arguments to spend an extra 20 Euro ($25 USD) for the Qualcomm adapter consist of the support of 802.11a for 5 GHz networks, as well as firmware optimizations to provide online gamers with faster pings to reduce lag. An integrated 3G or 4G radio is not available for the M14x. The notebook's webcam has the usual 1.3 Megapixel resolution and accordingly delivers middling picture quality. Sharpness and noise of this sensor could be better.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 This fun Battlefield: Bad Company sequel needs a high-end graphics card to run smoothly at maximum settings. We ran the game with high details, 4x anti-aliasing, 8x anisotropic filtering, and a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. The end result was a mere 22 fps (Intro movie of the single player campaign - boat sequence). The M14x can run the game somewhat fluidly with high details, a resolution of 1366 x 768 and 4x anisotropic filtering. The GeForce GT 555M beats the Radeon HD 6750M a third time (41 to 39 fps).
But just know that there's nothing thin or light about the M14x – or gaming laptops in general, for that matter. Like previous Alienware laptops (as well as much of the gaming laptop competition these days), the M14x R2 comes equipped with customisable chassis and keyboard lighting. From within the laptop's lighting interface (the Alienware Command Centre), you can choose from 19 different backlight colours and apply them to nine different zones on the body, including four on the keyboard, the ring around the touchpad, and lights on either side of the front edge of the laptop. You can also customise how they change: For example, you can specify that they switch colours or blink on their own, or even signal when you receive new e-mail. To be sure, plenty of people would call these lighting possibilities gaudy – and it's definitely easy to achieve an impressively ugly concoction if you configure every zone to a different colour – but if you don't like the lights here, you can switch them off. Then again, the body lighting is a big part of what makes an Alienware laptop unique, and it's hard to argue with customisability when it comes to aesthetics.
Finally, we’ll also pit it against MSI's GT70 0NC, a slightly more modest £1,600 machine that also sports a 17in screen, and is powered by a Core i7-3610QM and a GeForce GTX 670M. Again, we didn't expect the M14x R2 to keep pace with those big machines, given its smaller size and £1,344 price in our configuration. But, as we'll see, it did pretty well in some areas, while falling well behind in others. Running PCMark Vantage, the M14x recorded a score of 11,399, blowing away last year's smaller M11x which achieved half of that (5,649). It also pretty much kept pace with the big 17in boys, well, certainly the GT70 which posted a score of 13,653, with the M17x hitting 15,152. Clearly, the M14x is up to the task when it comes to everyday productivity.
Just did my first stress test. Also not a scratch anywhere on the machine.
Nch express zip registration code. The product range mainly focuses on gaming laptops and desktops. Trademark is a slightly futuristic design with an alien logo. In addition, Alienware offers workstations for private and business customers. Alienware belongs to the mid-sized manufacturers of the notebook market.
We don't consider that to be a major failure, given the laptop's price and its compact nature, and if those things are more important to you than the highest detail settings, it's a fair sacrifice for portability. But we still wish Alienware had found a way to offer a more powerful graphics chip as an option. As it stands, there's no way to configure the M14x to be a true high-end gaming performer.
The strong brightness helps the display when used outside, but the very reflective plastic pane covering the entire display edge to edge prevented a better rating. Alienware could easily offer a coated, non-reflective glass display cover like Apple does in place of the cheap, reflective, scratch sensitive plastic pane they currently use.
In the case of our test model, though, they also pushed up the price by £345, to £1,344. That edged the machine into the price range of some larger 17-in offerings, such as Alienware's own M17x. For only £50 more than this M14x, you can pick up the equivalent spec on the M17x, but with a step up on the graphics card front (to the GTX 660M), and of course you also get that much bigger display. Chuck in another £60 on top of that, and you can have a full HD 17in screen, rather than 1,600 x 900.
Finally, one USB 2.0 port, one 9-in-1 cardreader and a SIM card slot are also located on the left side. On the right side, the notebook offers a Kensington Lock, a RJ-45 Gigabit-Lan port and two fast USB 3.0 ports. Finally the power output is placed on the back.
(+) The palmrests and touchpad are cooler than skin temperature with a maximum of 28.9 °C / 84 F and are therefore cool to the touch. (±) The average temperature of the palmrest area of similar devices was 29.1 °C / 84.4 F (+0.2 °C / 0.4 F). Speakers The sound quality of the M14x sets standards for other manufacturers. Alienware uses a 2.1 speaker system: two speakers above the keyboard and a subwoofer under the laptop. Such great sound is rare to find in the notebook class. The sound is balanced, loud, and natural.
The display does not encompass the AdobeRGB or the sRGB color space. Normal users will be able to ignore this deficit but professional picture and video editors will have to look for an alternative laptop. Processor: Intel Core i7-2630QM The strength of the installed CPU shows how dedicated Alienware is to great program performance. Dual-cores are not available for the model; the manufacturer forces buyers to choose an efficient quad-core CPU from Intel's latest line-up: the Sandy-Bridge generation. Our test model came with the which is a cheap model of the latest generation. While the usual clock speed of 2.0 GHz is rather poor, the processor can overclock up to 2.9 GHz (Turbo-Boost technology).
Bettadenu said: Thats weird because they told me you can but you would have the R1 Graphics card with it not the new GT650. So the mobo would be from the R2 but the specs would be the same. Yeah, i remember you saying that. But that does not make sense. That mobo would have to be specially made. Of course unless R1 and R2 use the exact same mobo but with different GPU.
Alienware M14x R2 Review
Alienware M14x R2 Graphics Card Driver
With gaming laptops, what's entry-level is relative, of course. The starting price for the M14x R2 is £999, shipping with an Intel Ivy Bridge Core i5 processor, a GeForce GT 650M graphics chip (based on Nvidia's latest graphics architecture, Kepler), 6GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard drive. As you'd expect from any Dell machine, however, the Alienware M14x R2 is customisable to the max. We looked at a review unit outfitted with a slew of upgrades: A faster Core i7 CPU, a 32GB mSATA solid-state drive (SSD) for faster boot times and game loads (paired with a larger 750GB hard drive), 8GB of RAM, and the same GT 650M graphics chip, but augmented with twice the dedicated memory (2GB). The laptop also had a screen upgrade that bumped up the resolution to 1,600 x 900, as opposed to the £999 model's rather ordinary 720p (1,366 x 768) panel. All those extras certainly mean a more powerful machine, and they illustrate the level of customisability available in the line. In the case of our test model, though, they also pushed up the price by £345, to £1,344.
That’s all well and good, but the machine’s gaming performance is limited by its sole-option Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics (albeit in either 1GB or 2GB variations). The laptop’s performance is good enough for high-end gaming today, but on some titles you'll have to dial back some settings or drop the resolution a bit. And with our review machine configuration weighing in at £1,344, we feel that the M14x R2's asking price is a bit steep for what’s inside the machine. Certainly compared to what you get with a slightly upgraded M17x, for only around a hundred quid more (namely, a better GT 660M graphics card, and a bigger, full HD resolution display).
Product does not come with warranty unless stated otherwise in product description. • Used - Good: This means that the product has been used, may show clear signs of use and may be missing minor accessories, but remain in good condition. Product does not come with warranty unless stated otherwise in product description. • Used - Acceptable: This means that the product shows clear signs of use, cosmetic defect, and may be missing minor accessories and manual, but remain in working condition.
The M11x was way behind on 5,425. Our Windows Media Encoder benchmark, where a 3 minute video is converted to DVD quality, saw the M14x right up there with the M17x and GT70 once again. It took 1 minute and 47 seconds, just a second slower than the GT70, and not far off the M17x’s time of 1 minute and 38 seconds. The M11x took over 5 minutes. Gaming performance As you saw on the previous page, the M14x R2 held its own during our productivity and CPU-centric tests.
We took a particularly intensive look at the performance of the notebook in Diablo 3, which we already introduced in a. On the M14x, we observed an average frame rate of 50-60 fps with maximum details and a 1600 x 900 resolution. The game remained stably above 40 fps in larger battles.
The already-tiny 64 GB SDD sacrifices 20 GB for the recovery partition and, as a result, has very few gigabytes of free space left after installation of the operating system. After a few months of growing temporary files and such, users are going to run into space problems. The installation of sizable software programs only further accelerates this problem. Games will have to be installed on the slower traditional HDD. This is particularly sad when thinking about the Samsung SSD PM830's excellent performance. The excellent 470 MB/s read speed and great 167 MB/s write speed in AS-SSD Benchmark is especially impressive for an mSATA drive.
If you have a problem please contact Alienware through proper phone support or social media for official support. • Please no selling in this sub-reddit!
The system is flawless in terms of sturdiness due to the consistently high quality of materials used. To further add to the appearance Alienware’s signature color changing LEDs flaunt their stuff on the outside of the lid, power button, track pad and a full sized keyboard. Additionally, customization options for the lights can be accessed quite conveniently from Alienware Command Center Software which comes pre-installed or can be downloaded from the Dell support website. This allows users to not only configure each individual lighting zone but also allows access to performance monitoring, keyboard macro key controls and game launch optimizations. At around 3.7Kg the device is definitely a desktop replacement rather than a slim portable notebook although is slimmer and lighter than most of its competitors and even its own previous iterations.
But then, neither Xbone nor PS4 are for high-end gaming. They're for the iPhone generation of social networking and media sharing. If you're having problems with BF3 then it's not the GPU. It's something you've done or haven't done. Install the latest nVidia drivers. Set the game to use the nVidia GPU instead of the Intel IGP.
Perhaps a bit late but even with a Egpu you won't get close to the real life performance of a GT650m, tried it with a GTX660 desktop gpu but it ran games a lot slower due to the limited bandwith of the pcie interface Well, 660Ti eGPU still blows away the 650M. It's hard to compete with a desktop GPU even if there is a bandwidth restriction. 650M: 660Ti: (old laptop even) --- Even with the performance gap, I'd still suggesting just upgrading the motherboard to the R2 one with the 650M.
2011 model - the R2 came out in 2012. The new ones have the 650M standard and 660M high-end. The 650M is not much of an improvement and definitely not worth the motherboard upgrade. The 660M offers a decent performance upgrade and the third-gen i7 that you will get with it will be very nice (as will the HD 4000 graphics).
We had the much quicker installed in our test model, a fast, high-end 2.6 GHz quad-core CPU. Turbo Boost 2.0 raises the clock rate for single-thread loads to 3.6 GHz and, coupled with the architecture's high per-MHz processing efficiency, provides sufficient performance for pretty much any situation. Features already familiar to us from the previous generation like Hyper-threading, AVX, and AES-NI are aboard again.