Help needed with M14X

[aravind_kamble]

Hi All,
My name is Aravind. I am not an owner of Alienware yet, but will be very soon. Need some help from you guys. I live in Bangalore, India. I am willing to buy M14X. I did some online search and landed on the site http://alienware.co.in
On the page there was a "Build Yours" link which took me to the Specs site where there is a list of hardware and software components. But I was not able to select any of them and see the total price. I could do this on site http://alienware.com which is US site. I built my M14X on US site and the total price came out to be around $2183 which is around Rs.1,16,000. Following are the components I selected,

- 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i73840QM(8MBCache, up to 3.8GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0)
- 16GB (2 X 8GB) Dual Channel DDR3 at 1600MHz
- 750GB 7,200 RPM SATA + 32GB mSATA Caching SSD
- 2 GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M with Optimus™
- Intel® AdvancedN WiFi Link 6250 a/g/n 2x2 MIMO Technology with WiMax and Bluetooth 4.0
- Slot Load Dual Layer Bluray Reader (Reads BD and Writes to DVD/CD)
- Windows® 7 Ultimate, 64bit
- Nebula Red color

I went to a local Alienware shop and enquired about the above configuration. It appears that they have 2 standard configurations, one high end and other is base configuration. The high end is priced around Rs.1,50,000 and base around Rs.87,000.

I compared the high end configuration with above mentioned list of components. The difference is in the RAM, HDD and the OS. It had 8GB RAM, 750 GB HDD (No SSD) and win7 home premium 64bit. I asked him for additional RAM and SSD. The store guy told me that I have to buy it in addition to the high end configuration !! so it means that I will be paying more in addition to Rs.1,50,000, which is already more compared to my US configuration.

The sad part is US store can not ship to India .... Please advice me as to what I can do to get my desired configuration with reasonable price.

 

[Maelstrom]

There isn't really any way to ship from the U.S. to India without there being ridiculous shipping costs. Those costs would pretty much offset any gains from having it built in the U.S. anyway.

And as far as the RAM and OS; you would probably be better off buying your own RAM seperatly after you've obtained the machine and installing it yourself. It's not as hard as you think it might be.

And to be honest you don't really need Win7 Ultimate. It's fine if you really want it but there never really was a reason to get it as it offers no real performance increases over Home Premium.

If you don't need any of the things listed on this chart that Ultimate offers that Home doesn't then just go with Home, you won't be disappointed.

 

[MattyB]

Also, don't look at the US price. It's going to be cheaper to build it there than any other country. I did the same thing and it was always 20-30% cheaper in the US than Australia. I'm assuming that since they have such a bigger market they can keep their prices down to be more competitive. Like Maelstrom says, things like RAM, OS and HDD/SSD are better upgraded yourself later for way cheaper. The main thing you need to think of is the processor since the GPU is set (for now).

Good luck!

 

[aravind_kamble]

Thanks for the replies. I like the idea of buying one here locally and later upgrade the RAM or SSD on my own.

 

[AeonSoul]

They pretty much said everything. The only thing you want maxed out at the moment is the processor and the screen, you can later update the ram on your own (the m14x have only 2 slots, so it's easier since they're accessible from the bottom plate) and then you can switch the HDD out with an SSD. It would be definitely cheaper.