Alienware 13 R3 Autopsy - Component Servicing _ HotHardware

The Alienware 13 R3: A Closer Look at Its Critical Components

To access the critical components of your Alienware 13 R3, you'll need to disable the battery or power to the system first. This is a crucial step to ensure that you can work on the machine safely and effectively. The press-fit cable area is designed with this in mind, and Alienware has taken care to highlight it in their documentation. For example, they specifically mention releasing the "battery" - which refers to disconnecting the power supply.

Taking a closer look at the cable release mechanism, you'll notice that there are positive and negative indications on the cables, indicating which way they should snap back into place when reinstalled. This is a thoughtful design feature, as it helps prevent accidental damage or misalignment of the components. With some gentle wiggling, we're able to release the tab and pull out the battery cable.

With the battery disconnected, we can now access the system's RAM slots. These are DDR4 memory modules with 8GB capacity, specifically designed for small notebooks. Our machine features two 8GB sticks, which are held in place by retention clips that can be easily released. By pulling these clips back, we're able to slide the memory module out of its slot.

As we move on to the M2 slots, you'll notice that our Alienware 13 R3 is equipped with solid-state drive (SSD) support, rather than traditional spinning media. This means that there are only two available M2 slots for installing NVMe SSDs. We currently have a 512GB Toshiba NVMe PCI Express SSD installed in the first slot, which provides fast performance with read and write speeds of around 1.8Gbps and 1Gbps respectively.

For those who want to upgrade or interchange their storage, it's worth noting that our machine supports up to 2TB M2 SSDs. However, for the bulk drive, a slower but more affordable option might be suitable as a secondary volume. We'll need to remove the current SSD from its slot by releasing the retention screw and sliding it out.

Before we wrap up, let's take a look at the third slot in our system - the 802.11AC wireless NIC network interface card. This is plugged into the Killer Wi-Fi gaming NIC, which provides fast and responsive networking for low-latency gaming experiences. The Killer Wi-Fi NIC has prioritization of Quality of Service (QoS) targeted specifically for gamers, making it an excellent choice for those who need high-performance networking.

Overall, our Alienware 13 R3 autopsy has revealed the ease with which you can access its critical components - RAM, storage, and wireless radio. By following Alienware's guidelines and taking care to disconnect power, you'll be able to make any necessary upgrades or repairs without risking damage to your machine. We'll have a full review of our experience with the Alienware 13 R3, including benchmark data, available in the coming days when we plug our battery cable back into place.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey there it's Dave Alton Villa for hot hardware here back with the Alienware 13 are three the newly redesigned 13-inch gaming notebook from Dells Alienware division and I have it flipped on its lid here some of you have asked some questions about how serviceable this machine is so now you are looking at the bottom of the machine I have it resting comfortably here on a nice microfiber cloth to protect the lid and you're looking at the bottom here where we can actually get access to various components in the system to service it so we're going to commit an alien autopsy of sorts stick with us so first things first I am safely grounded and discharged I'm working in a relatively static free environment that's definitely something you want to do when you get into the sensitive components of a notebook or any computer for that matter make sure you are grounded and statically discharged you might want to touch a little bit of metal what have you before you go at this thing I have taken the liberty of loosening the screws here on the bottom of the machine the bottom plate one two three four five screws to be exact there's actually a couple of screws up here in the front edge of the device as well but I don't think you need those to release the lid which actually sort of press fits into the screw sockets at least that's how they seem to once you back them out they reach a certain point and then you have to kind of pull them out of the socket I've already done that just to make it easy for the camera here but here we are removing the entire bottom plate of the machine and voila you are looking at the insides of our alien beast alright so here we are a little bit closer up with the internals of the Alienware 13 r3 and you can see there's various different component areas here too to consider you've got of course the fan and heat pipe assembly that cool both the CPU and GPU not accessible here in this current setup there's actually a few more screws that we could probably pull to pull this faceplate off the bottom as well but Alienware gives you access to the critical components you might want to upgrade or interchange or what have you for things like RAM and hard drive and even the Wi-Fi radio but taking a look at things here Alienware does a very good job of calling out something that's important and that is disabling the battery or power to the components before you actually get your hands in there and start mucking around with them so here we are in this little press-fit cable area here and alienware again very specific about release batt cable first that's sound advice thanks t million where we appreciate that we've even got positive and negative indication here for which way this cable actually snaps back into its spot but we're going to go ahead and pull this tab hopefully it's going to be nice and gentle but I don't know it's a little bit of work for sure let's wiggle it out ah there we go we are released now the battery is disconnected from the system and we can go ahead and work on the components take a look at them what have you to service the machine alright so Q we are dropped down a little bit closer into the memory slot area these are actually ddr4 sodium's for small out leg dims for notebooks and specifically we've got 2 8 gig sticks these are PC 420 400 megahertz variety and we just pull these little retention clips back here a little bit and this baby should slide up yep there we go so with that guy out and you can see this is one of the eight gig sticks you could go in here and drop in a pair of sixteen gig sticks actually so domestics if you wanted to I believe it does take up to 32 gigabytes of RAM and here we are spun around to the m2 slots the solid state drive slots in this machine incidentally it is a solid state drive affair only with the Alienware 13 does not support standard two and a half inch spinning media but just these m2 sticks so you've actually get 2 m2 slots here the first one is populated there's a second spare so you can install up to a one terabyte m2 SSD here and a second one terabyte SSD secondary volume here I don't believe rate is supported I'll report back in the comments it does not look to be a configuration from Alienware though technically the platform should support it so at any rate we've got two available m2 slots here and you just pull this screw which I'll show you momentarily to remove a stick if you'd like to change it out alright so I've gone ahead and pulled that screw out and now I've released the m2 stick it's a PCI Express nvme SSD from Toshiba and just pull it out from the slot there and wallah the solid-state drive is now removed this is again a 512 gig Toshiba nvme PCI Express SSD you can install up to a one terabyte SSD in here as well and it does take standard m2 SATA 6 gigabits SATA sticks if you want to go a slower lower-cost memory maybe you could do that for the bulk drive as a secondary volume here in the second slot I'd advise sticking with PCI Express nvme SSDs for the boot volume for sure because they're just so much faster specifically this stick we actually already measured it in a dough is pushing about a gig per second for writes and about one point eight gigs a second of read performance so very good performance from that Toshiba PCI Express nvme SSD finally before we wrap it up and want to call out one more part in the system here in the third slot this is your 802 11 AC wireless NIC network interface card plugged in here you can see it's got a couple of wires and a retention screw mechanism as well but this is the killer 1535 wireless gaming NIC for low paying times and fast responsiveness during your gaming events so that's plugged in right there we can get access to it if you want to but it's a very good NIC very powerful nick has lots of prioritization of quality of service targeted specifically for gamers so good stuff killing networks 1535 in that slot so that's it you've just witnessed our alien autopsy of the Alienware 13 r3 as you can see very easy to get access to all the major component areas in the system from RAM to storage to even the wireless radio and alienware is very good about calling out the steps and the areas in which you can access the machine and how you should do it especially disconnecting that power supply so make sure you stop by hot hardware for the full review with all of our benchmark data that will be coming online in the next couple of days when I plug my battery cable back in but this de volta villain for hardware with the Alienware 13 r3 and our alien where alien autopsy now immortalized on the interwebs thanks for stopping byhey there it's Dave Alton Villa for hot hardware here back with the Alienware 13 are three the newly redesigned 13-inch gaming notebook from Dells Alienware division and I have it flipped on its lid here some of you have asked some questions about how serviceable this machine is so now you are looking at the bottom of the machine I have it resting comfortably here on a nice microfiber cloth to protect the lid and you're looking at the bottom here where we can actually get access to various components in the system to service it so we're going to commit an alien autopsy of sorts stick with us so first things first I am safely grounded and discharged I'm working in a relatively static free environment that's definitely something you want to do when you get into the sensitive components of a notebook or any computer for that matter make sure you are grounded and statically discharged you might want to touch a little bit of metal what have you before you go at this thing I have taken the liberty of loosening the screws here on the bottom of the machine the bottom plate one two three four five screws to be exact there's actually a couple of screws up here in the front edge of the device as well but I don't think you need those to release the lid which actually sort of press fits into the screw sockets at least that's how they seem to once you back them out they reach a certain point and then you have to kind of pull them out of the socket I've already done that just to make it easy for the camera here but here we are removing the entire bottom plate of the machine and voila you are looking at the insides of our alien beast alright so here we are a little bit closer up with the internals of the Alienware 13 r3 and you can see there's various different component areas here too to consider you've got of course the fan and heat pipe assembly that cool both the CPU and GPU not accessible here in this current setup there's actually a few more screws that we could probably pull to pull this faceplate off the bottom as well but Alienware gives you access to the critical components you might want to upgrade or interchange or what have you for things like RAM and hard drive and even the Wi-Fi radio but taking a look at things here Alienware does a very good job of calling out something that's important and that is disabling the battery or power to the components before you actually get your hands in there and start mucking around with them so here we are in this little press-fit cable area here and alienware again very specific about release batt cable first that's sound advice thanks t million where we appreciate that we've even got positive and negative indication here for which way this cable actually snaps back into its spot but we're going to go ahead and pull this tab hopefully it's going to be nice and gentle but I don't know it's a little bit of work for sure let's wiggle it out ah there we go we are released now the battery is disconnected from the system and we can go ahead and work on the components take a look at them what have you to service the machine alright so Q we are dropped down a little bit closer into the memory slot area these are actually ddr4 sodium's for small out leg dims for notebooks and specifically we've got 2 8 gig sticks these are PC 420 400 megahertz variety and we just pull these little retention clips back here a little bit and this baby should slide up yep there we go so with that guy out and you can see this is one of the eight gig sticks you could go in here and drop in a pair of sixteen gig sticks actually so domestics if you wanted to I believe it does take up to 32 gigabytes of RAM and here we are spun around to the m2 slots the solid state drive slots in this machine incidentally it is a solid state drive affair only with the Alienware 13 does not support standard two and a half inch spinning media but just these m2 sticks so you've actually get 2 m2 slots here the first one is populated there's a second spare so you can install up to a one terabyte m2 SSD here and a second one terabyte SSD secondary volume here I don't believe rate is supported I'll report back in the comments it does not look to be a configuration from Alienware though technically the platform should support it so at any rate we've got two available m2 slots here and you just pull this screw which I'll show you momentarily to remove a stick if you'd like to change it out alright so I've gone ahead and pulled that screw out and now I've released the m2 stick it's a PCI Express nvme SSD from Toshiba and just pull it out from the slot there and wallah the solid-state drive is now removed this is again a 512 gig Toshiba nvme PCI Express SSD you can install up to a one terabyte SSD in here as well and it does take standard m2 SATA 6 gigabits SATA sticks if you want to go a slower lower-cost memory maybe you could do that for the bulk drive as a secondary volume here in the second slot I'd advise sticking with PCI Express nvme SSDs for the boot volume for sure because they're just so much faster specifically this stick we actually already measured it in a dough is pushing about a gig per second for writes and about one point eight gigs a second of read performance so very good performance from that Toshiba PCI Express nvme SSD finally before we wrap it up and want to call out one more part in the system here in the third slot this is your 802 11 AC wireless NIC network interface card plugged in here you can see it's got a couple of wires and a retention screw mechanism as well but this is the killer 1535 wireless gaming NIC for low paying times and fast responsiveness during your gaming events so that's plugged in right there we can get access to it if you want to but it's a very good NIC very powerful nick has lots of prioritization of quality of service targeted specifically for gamers so good stuff killing networks 1535 in that slot so that's it you've just witnessed our alien autopsy of the Alienware 13 r3 as you can see very easy to get access to all the major component areas in the system from RAM to storage to even the wireless radio and alienware is very good about calling out the steps and the areas in which you can access the machine and how you should do it especially disconnecting that power supply so make sure you stop by hot hardware for the full review with all of our benchmark data that will be coming online in the next couple of days when I plug my battery cable back in but this de volta villain for hardware with the Alienware 13 r3 and our alien where alien autopsy now immortalized on the interwebs thanks for stopping by\n"