The Alienware m15 comes with an 11.4V, 90Wh Li-ion battery with a part number of XGRXX, which provides over 15 hours of battery life. This notebook comes with two Samsung PM981 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs. If you need a larger hard drive to store data and files, you can replace the existing M.2 SSD with two large SSD. Help install SSD in m15 2nd slot as secondary storage. Technical Support. A win win #alienwarerunsinfamily. Shop Alienware m15 R3 15.6' Gaming Laptop Intel Core i7 16GB Memory NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 1TB SSD AlienFX RGB Keyboard Lunar Light at Best Buy. Find low everyday prices and buy online for delivery or in-store pick-up. The M15 R3 has, surprisingly, a 2230 SSD slot generally reserved for data storage. It’s a welcome addition to Alienware’s M15 R2 successor that offers the opportunity to install a bonus extra disk for dual booting Linux or archiving media files, downloads and other less pressing data.

Alienware is a well-known brand in the gaming laptop market, and with each new CPU or GPU update, the company outfits its laptops accordingly. Today, we’re taking apart the Alienware 15 R3, which features the new Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ and NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1070 with 8GB GDDR5, 16GB of RAM, 256GB of SSD and an FHD display.

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1. Removing the bottom cover

Alienware 15 did put a lot of efforts on heat radiation. It’s using an all-metal body to ensure excellent heat dissipation. The backplane also distributed a lot of air vent.

Remove all screws securing the bottom cover to the laptop.

Pry up the bottom cover with a crowbar. Be careful, do not remove the light bar.

Under the bottom cover, you can get access to the RAM, SSD and hard drive. We also find two spare M.2 2242 SSD slots on the left of the laptop.

Before touching any hardware, the good idea is to disconnect the battery connector from the motherboard.

2. Removing the RAM

Separate the clips and the RAM will pop up.
The Alienware 15 R3 comes with two Samsung 8GB DDR4 2667MHz RAMs. The model is M471AK43BB1-CTD.

3. Removing the M.2 SSD

Remove one screw and take the SSD out of its slot.
Toshiba 256GB NVMe SSD, Dell P/N: 08D5HT.

4. Removing the hard drive

Remove three screws and disconnect the SATA cable from the motherboard. You can remove the hard drive module.
The laptop comes with an HGST 1TB 7200RPM hard drive, Dell P/N: 0J30643.

5. Removing the wireless Wi-Fi card

Remove one screw securing the wireless card.
Disconnect two antenna cables. You can remove the wireless card.

Killer 1535 802.11ac 2×2 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1

6. SSD upgrade option

Here’re two 2242 M.2 slots, which you can add extra M.2 SSD.

7. Removing the back baffle

Remove the screw securing the back baffle.

To remove the back baffle, you need to release four buckles close to the cooling fan module.

8. Removing the middle frame

Remove all screws securing the middle frame.
Pry up it with a pick and remove it.

7. Removing the battery

Remove all screws securing the battery and take it out of its bay.

The Alienware 15 R3 comes with an 11.4V, 99Wh Li-ion battery, Dell P/N: 9NJM1.

Under the battery, you can get access to the touchpad.

9. Removing the motherboard

Remove all screws securing the motherboard and disconnect all cables connected to the motherboard.
You can remove the motherboard from the chassis.

10. Removing the heat sink and cooling fan module

The cooling fan comes from Taiwan SUNON.

Red: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card with 8G GDDR5 video memory
Yellow: Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ (Quad-Core, 6MB Cache, up to 3.5GHz w/ Turbo Boost)
Green: South Bridge

The back of the motherboard

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card and Micron 8GB GDDR5 video memory, the model of video memory is 6GA47 D91CB.

Intel® Core™ i7-6700HQ (Quad-Core, 6MB Cache, up to 3.5GHz w/ Turbo Boost)

South Bridge

ENE KB90220 IO chip

Source: pconline

I noticed it says “GPU 2 on my motherboard and it’s empty. Does this mean I can install another mobile 1070 GPU? Thanks.

Alienware m15 is the first lightweight notebook in the Alienware family. It weighs only 2.16kg and is thinner than the previous Alienware 13. It is also the first narrow-frame notebook in the Alienware family. It is equipped with a full HD IPS display with a 15.6-inch 144Hz refresh rate of 100% sRGB color gamut.

As a gaming laptop, the Alienware m15 keeps the option of dual SSD while keeping the light and thin. The Alienware m15 is powered by Intel’s eighth-generation 7-8750H processor, and the graphics card offers up to NVIDIA GTX 1070Max-Q 8GB GDDR5, It has a 60Wh or 90Wh lithium-ion battery, the 90Wh battery life up to 17 hours!

To access its internal components, we need to remove its bottom panel. Its panel is fixed by 11 screws. It is worth noting that there are two screws on both sides of the notebook ports. This design seems to be uncommon.

After removing the screws, you need to insert a plastic tool or an old credit card under the bottom plate, then carefully slide the tool to separate the bottom plate from the laptop.

After removing the bottom plate, we can see all of its internal components, including the battery, SSD, RAM, speakers, heatsink, fan, and motherboard.

The Alienware m15 comes with an 11.4V, 90Wh Li-ion battery with a part number of XGRXX, which provides over 15 hours of battery life. This notebook comes with two Samsung PM981 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSDs. If you need a larger hard drive to store data and files, you can replace the existing M.2 SSD with two large SSD.

Its speaker size is not very large, which located on both sides of the battery. It has only two memory slots. In my case, it has two Micron 8GB DDR4 2666MHz memory, and you can replace it with two 16GB memory if necessary.

It comes with a Killer 1550 wireless network card with a part number of 028V8D, it supports advanced 802.11ac Wave 2 and can drive twice the throughput of what standard 2×2 11ac adapters can deliver.

Alienware M15 R3 Ssd Upgrade

Loosen all the screws that fix the heat sink and the fan, disconnect the two fan cables from the motherboard. You can remove the cooling system module. The CPU and the GPU share two heat pipes and a third heat pipe with two fans. The other two images are NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card and Intel i7-8750H processor.

Alienware M15 R2 Ssd Upgrade

Hi Michael did you ever find a caddy? I’m looking for one too.