New Alienware 13

[AthlonXP]

With my 15% off military and $225 in gift cards I was able to snag one for $1500 after tax and express shipping. Right now they must have all the parts available as the website is showing 3-5 business days.

 

[vxspiritxv]

No coil whine here ether.
Used some arctic silver adhesive and put 3.5 20x20x0.5 (www.ebay.com/itm/201130829724) copper shims on the Samsung 950, no more throttling.
I didn't do it to the Toshiba, its under warranty after all.

Well my laptop went tits up last sunday. Failed the 1.0.3 bios update, screen went black at second progress bar around 33% in, and never recovered. I was unable to source the correct filename for a usb flash recovery, called dell, they sent someone out the next day and replaced my motherboard! This one came with 1.0.1 and updated to 1.0.3 without any issue at all.

 

[AthlonXP]

Was very surprised on Wednesday to get shipping notification. Ordered the laptop on the 2nd and had it in my hands a week later. Everything is working great with it and the battery life seems longer then what I have read on reviews. Also I undervolted the cpu a little and repasted both the CPU and GPU. It looks like they are now going to using Samsung PM961 SSD's now as the 256GB SSD I got was this. I ended up putting my larger NVME M.2 SSD and a standard 1TB M.2 SSD in instead.

 

[Vader]

I wanted to give an update to what I did to tackle some of the cooling issues. This weekend, errr..I "didn't" take it apart and removed all factory thermal paste from CPU/GPU and HeatSinks, the application was horrendus, bare spots on some areas..just horrendous for this type of laptop and the $$$. I replaced with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut which helped tremendously. Then I used the Intel Xtreme Tuning Utility to undervolt the Kaby Lake 7700k. This dropped my temps another 4-5 Degrees on average on load. Now I idle in the upper 40's as opposed to the mid 50's and at load never gets into the high 80's like it did previously.

I'm feel much better and again, have to say that it's a shame that we have to do this to a Gaming Laptop and at this price point.

Graphics Amp will arrive today and i'll update you on how I make out with that. For now, I only have a GTX1070 and we'll see how that goes, if not acceptable for BF1 @1440p then i'll be getting a 1080 Ti when prices get more reasonable.