Alienware's CRAZY upgradeable laptop
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,851 words · ~9 min read
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this video from ces is brought to you by dbrand their prism screen protectors and
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grip cases protect your phone that's pretty much all there is to it check
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them out at the link in the video description so let me put it this way this is the
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alienware area 51m and in the words of
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our alienware rep which if he wasn't such a nice guy who's very credible i
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would find very hard to believe yes Linus it has a full
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core i9 9900k processor in it i went
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really because everything that i know about size and
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heat and how much you need to get rid of
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how much of it a 9900k would produce would indicate that that sort of thing
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would be basically impossible and that's even ignoring the rest of the completely
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over the top specs of this thing so it can be equipped with up to a an rtx 2080
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ti graphics card with six gigs of gddr6 memory that's gdr6 right yes it's got
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what i'm assuming dual NVMe boot drives
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and raid zero do you have a two and a half inch expansion drive in here surely
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not the two and a half inch drive in here uh okay it's it's got a 1080p 144 hertz
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panel which might not be that impressive today but it's thin bezel and there's a
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plan for later this year to upgrade it to 240 hertz
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and they've done all of this within like
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i would say a fairly slim desktop replacement form factor
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but it gets even crazier
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because while desktop replacements are kind of a
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replacement for the performance of a desktop they have never been a replacement for
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the upgrade ability of a desktop and that is where they really surprised me
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they're actually going to allow me to open this so i need my tool kit
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where'd it go got it
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and they're going to let us crack it open to see how they have achieved upgradable
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graphics on this machine actually we're going to
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move over here so couple things jump out at us right
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away that's a 90 watt hour battery so in spite of the size we are still getting
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right up against the limit to what you are allowed to put in a laptop in order
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for it to be able to be carried on an airplane there's that two and a half
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inch drive bay that we talked about before they
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somehow managed to put four dimm slots on the bloody thing even though with 32
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gig dimms upcoming that's not even entirely necessary we've got m.2
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expansion slot right here number one and then i don't see number two here's an
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m.2.5 something label i don't know what that's to do with but uh
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i guess we'll find the other one a little bit later and
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we've got cooling fans i think we're gonna have to go deeper so del says i
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actually won't need help with that because they've provided a handy dandy
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little key here for all the screws that i need in order to remove this um what
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is this called again rip cage the rib cage okay cool so we need
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14 l8s here we go
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one ah
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two ah
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okay so now we're pulling off this back
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shroud here that covers up the rear i o as well as these incredibly beefy
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looking heat sinks so you can see they've got support for their external
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graphics not that there's anything much more powerful than what's already in
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here external display Ethernet dual
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power inputs because hey that's a thing um let's go ahead and remove some more
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screws get that rib cage off
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there we go so we're disconnecting the battery now this is an important first
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step
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so we just pulled uh this appears to be
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what the display output for the built-in display i don't know i'm kind
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of guessing at this point but we're actually getting very close to being
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able to get a better look at where we're going
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with this here okay so these wi-fi antennas do i need
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to pop these off yeah it looks like i might be able to hold on a second it
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might be able to furnish it
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this one though this one's got to go
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shoop hard drive okay
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this one we're good this one i'm getting caught but it's on
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this i think we're good on that this guy's gotta go webcam
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oh we're getting close i can feel it uh oh this hard drive cable management
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actually has to come out there we go
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oh these wi-fi antennas we may end up
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needing to remove those but not a hundred percent sure yet
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i think that's all that's holding us in right now yep okay
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now there goes the cable management for that
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sorry guys if it helps at all i feel really really
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bad no i don't that was a lie
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there's lies damned lies and then there's what i just said
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and there it is so this right here thank you
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so this right here is the secret sauce so here is and this
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is not a standard desktop socket did you guys
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create this socket standard this is a standard socket under here it
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looks so low profile
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you're sure right this
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take it off i mean it should be the standard just dropping no no no yeah the the the lga standard
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yes but this retention mechanism this is not standard
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it's a veritable bounty of exciting tech things so first of all i don't know what
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i was expecting well i do know what i was expecting because we've seen desktop
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processors in laptops before and typically
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they have just used the same mounting mechanism as desktop motherboards
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because it's a lot of work to engineer your own and dell actually uh the folks
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that i'm talking to here don't actually know if they made their own
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mounting mechanism but i can tell you right now that that is not a standard
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one and so that would lead me to believe that it is
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entirely possible that they have actually created
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their their own hold down for it here now the lga itself so that's the little
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socket that the CPU sits into that is standard so theoretically there is
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nothing that would prevent someone from buying a lower end processor out of the
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gate and then actually upgrading it down the road a service that dell plans to
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provide either themselves like you'll have to pay extra obviously but where
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they come to your house and install it for you or as a kit that you can
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actually do by yourself this is a really different way of thinking about laptops
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you coming out baby yeah you are
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you want to yeah i got it
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all right here we go
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i was totally wrong so it's just this ARM that's been changed i guess they
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just wanted to save a little space here so that is a standard desktop socket and
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check this out so all these thermal pads around here those are for the vrm
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because as you can imagine cramming the right kind of power delivery for
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this is a like Intel has 95 watt processors and then they have 95 watt
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processors cramming the kind of power delivery you need for a proper desktop
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CPU into something like this is not trivial and of course you're going to
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need all of that cooled by the same heat pipes beefy fans and beefy heatsinks
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that you have for the CPU itself but this
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this right here is the proverbial money shot because i think that most people
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over the next few years are not really going to need to upgrade a core i9 9900k
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for gaming but graphics cards those keep
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moving and that's where you're going to see you know a 30 or 40 uplift and
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performance generation over generation that is as long as NVIDIA has their way
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and this is the piece that dell says they would like
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obviously bad stuff can happen the spec could change to such a degree that it's
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impossible but that they would like to be user upgradable in the future now if
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you're familiar with notebook graphics you will already know that this is not
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an mxm module so that was the previous standard for upgradable or modular
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graphics and laptops but NVIDIA in their
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infinite wisdom is trying to kill it or not trying to kill it they have killed
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it so dell actually leaned on the engineering prowess of their precision
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team to just go well if you're not going to support the
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standard then damn it i guess we'll do it ourselves so the idea here is that
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you could remove this with a couple of screws and not only you remove this
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right here and not only would you be able to change the performance you could
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even change the outputs on this thing so you could support future display
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standards like HDMI 2.1 for example
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pretty flippin cool now all that's left is to um
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leave you guys to put this back together because i've got another appointment thank you guys thanks
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and also to tell you guys about our sponsor dbrand so dbrand is sponsoring
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our trip here to ces 2019 their grip case is as you can imagine very grippy
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it's Linus proof because otherwise realistically they wouldn't let me endorse it and it's got their super
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clicky buttons as well as their trademark customizability so you got
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your precision cut true texture 3m vinyl skins and pretty much any color you
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could want the other big thing this year is they're prism screen protectors
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they've got an applicator so it goes on super easily you get a perfect fit every
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time and the impact resistance of this thing is quite frankly
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it's you have to see it to believe it you put this thing on you hammer a nail
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into a piece of wood with the face of your phone you take off the prism you've
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got a dented ass prism but you've got a pristine screen
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it's pretty much unreal you can check them both out at the link in the video description
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so thanks for watching guys we are on our way to the next suite here at ces
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