As an Area-51m owner, I guess I would thank them for (finally) making upgrades available.
But if they had offered the 200W Quadro 6000 Laptop (384 bit / 24GB), they would have made another sale today. I see Asus have them (surprisingly) in a 15" chassis...
Its not even a different generation. This will upgrade a laptop with an existing RTX 2060 or 2070 to either a 2070 or 2080. That's a pretty high price to pay for the performance increase you'd get out of doing so, but presumably some of the cost involves sending a technician to your home to perform the upgrade which likely won't be something a segment of Anandtech's readers will not find adds much value since we are comfortable with it being a DIY project.
What might be more interesting to some owners might be getting their hands on the apparently more powerful cooling hardware alone to make an existing laptop quieter or operate at a lower temp. Giving a laptop with a 2060 a cooling system that can handle a 2080 would be an interesting project, though I doubt Dell is sell only the cooler without onsite installation to end users. That'll be a gray market thing you might be able to do if the equipment ends up on eBay someday -- likely after its no longer considered high performance hardware.
It is quite strange that a premium gaming laptop would choose to skimp on the cooling for lower end GPU models - surely an extra heatpipe or two can't possibly cost that much?
The only downside to the user is weight, while the upsides of a cooler laptop and lower noise are far more tangible in what is a relatively heavy laptop no matter which way you look at it.
TBH aside from the minor cost savings they make, I suspect it's more to do with preventing end-users from doing this upgrade themselves.
Very much a Dell thing indeed. In their Latitude e6xx0 series machines there were two different cooling systems for the iGPU and the dGPU versions that could sometimes be swapped out without too much difficulty. Back in the C2D generation, the e6400 dGPU heatpipe could easily be installed in the iGPU version resulting in a cooler CPU and less fan noise, though the Intel 4500MHD was nothing at all to get excited about even when it was new. I did that swap for fun on an old e6400 I had laying around a few years ago. It helped, but at that point the laptop was already a dinosaur and not particularly useful.
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Notmyusualid - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
As an Area-51m owner, I guess I would thank them for (finally) making upgrades available.But if they had offered the 200W Quadro 6000 Laptop (384 bit / 24GB), they would have made another sale today. I see Asus have them (surprisingly) in a 15" chassis...
Zeratul56 - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
And I felt bad spending 700 to upgrade from my 980 to the 2080 Super. I can’t imagine spending over 1000 to get an upgrade over 1 or 2 generations.PeachNCream - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
Its not even a different generation. This will upgrade a laptop with an existing RTX 2060 or 2070 to either a 2070 or 2080. That's a pretty high price to pay for the performance increase you'd get out of doing so, but presumably some of the cost involves sending a technician to your home to perform the upgrade which likely won't be something a segment of Anandtech's readers will not find adds much value since we are comfortable with it being a DIY project.What might be more interesting to some owners might be getting their hands on the apparently more powerful cooling hardware alone to make an existing laptop quieter or operate at a lower temp. Giving a laptop with a 2060 a cooling system that can handle a 2080 would be an interesting project, though I doubt Dell is sell only the cooler without onsite installation to end users. That'll be a gray market thing you might be able to do if the equipment ends up on eBay someday -- likely after its no longer considered high performance hardware.
rems - Friday, November 8, 2019 - link
$1,038.99 is now $838.99 (2070)Retycint - Monday, November 11, 2019 - link
It is quite strange that a premium gaming laptop would choose to skimp on the cooling for lower end GPU models - surely an extra heatpipe or two can't possibly cost that much?s.yu - Monday, November 11, 2019 - link
I don't think Alienware under Dell is as premium as it was independent.Spunjji - Monday, November 11, 2019 - link
Standard Dell.The only downside to the user is weight, while the upsides of a cooler laptop and lower noise are far more tangible in what is a relatively heavy laptop no matter which way you look at it.
TBH aside from the minor cost savings they make, I suspect it's more to do with preventing end-users from doing this upgrade themselves.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, November 12, 2019 - link
Very much a Dell thing indeed. In their Latitude e6xx0 series machines there were two different cooling systems for the iGPU and the dGPU versions that could sometimes be swapped out without too much difficulty. Back in the C2D generation, the e6400 dGPU heatpipe could easily be installed in the iGPU version resulting in a cooler CPU and less fan noise, though the Intel 4500MHD was nothing at all to get excited about even when it was new. I did that swap for fun on an old e6400 I had laying around a few years ago. It helped, but at that point the laptop was already a dinosaur and not particularly useful.uspstracking - Wednesday, December 4, 2019 - link
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