Inside Dell Alienware 15 – disassembly, internal photos and upgrade options
You may be wondering what’s inside the delicious Alienware 15 and to be honest, there’s a lot to see. However, the tear down of this gaming beast is a hassle, so you might want to give this job to a technician. The motherboard is extremely hard to get off, but if you came here just for upgrading – that’s an easy one.
1. Removing the service cover
Removing the main cover on the bottom of the machine is really easy. You just have to unscrew 2 bolts and behind the cover you will find the HDD, the RAM chips and two NGFF slots. So yes, you can upgrade your machine with not just one, but two M.2 SATA SSDs.
2. Removing the keyboard
Before you continue with the full disassembly of the notebook, you’ll have to take care of few cables attached to the keyboard and remove the keyboard itself. You might want to use a soft plastic tool to remove the keyboard after you’ve removed all the cables and screws.
3. Removing the screen
This is a tricky one. You’ll have to get rid of bolts holding the hinges and there are another two screws on the back of the machine keeping the lid tightly. If you are asking yourself if this is necessary, well yes, you need to remove the screen before you can proceed with the motherboard.
4. Removing the motherboard
This is the easy part. Watch out again for all sorts of cables – for the LED (since you have a huge amount of LED options), fans, battery and etc.
After removing the motherboard you will notice that there are not just two M.2 SATA slots, but four! Unfortunately, you can only use two of them, because of some design restrictions. The battery is taking a lot of space and you can’t connect the additional 2 SSDs properly. It was interesting to see that the motherboard supports 4 NGFF slots, though.
Author: Rossen Pandev
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Review?:)
Of course =)
I thought I was the only one who found the extra 2 M.2 slots.
But then I re-read your last paragraph in this article & it was my mistake for not reading everything carefully.
What a shame, those 2 extra M.2 slots would have increase the system performance by a huge margin if for example we install 4x128GB M.2 running RAID 0.
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It might be a problem on your browser maybe. They are loading on mine just fine. (:
Hi do you guys know which hdd cable, I need a knew one, and was wondering if I could just get one off ebay for the m14x or another model
I have the same alienware 15 (2015) and I want to check if 2 x SAMSUNG 950 PRO M.2 512GB PCI-Express 3.0 is compatible with it. Thanks.
I’m wondering the same thing. According to alienware’s youtube channel it may not perform at optimal speeds due to possible lack of driver and/or compatibility issues.
So it is only compatible with m.2 sata? or PCIe as well? I’m so confused since I’ve been told different one or the other.
Anyone having problems removing the plate to get to the battery/memory? I removed the screws, however the plate stays firmly in place. I carefully tried prying loose with a very thin flat screwdriver with no luck. Any tips?
Disregard. I finally got the cover plate loose.
Can you please confirm whats the type of screws(specification) used to bolt the back panel ? Can they be removed using Philips #0 or #1 screwdriver ?
Philips 00
What is the part number for the dc power jack? Where can I get one?