Alienware 17 R5 Disassembly and RAM, SSD, HDD upgrade options

In this guide, I will disassemble an Alienware 17 R5. I will remove the back cover and metal middle frame to access the battery, SSD, Wi-Fi card, RAM, cooling fan, speaker, heatsink, and motherboard.

Unscrew seven screws on the back cover. It should be noted that one of the screws is free of detachment, and then you may need to pry the cover with a plastic tool when you first remove the cover. There are some snaps securing the cover to the laptop body.

After removing the back cover, you can see that there is a black metal middle frame covering the fuselage. The internal layout of this notebook is still very neat, and there is no messy cable. If you need to replace or upgrade the hardware, please remember to unplug the battery cable from the motherboard.

There is a spare mechanical hard disk bin in the lower right corner and all the tools for installing the hard drive are reserved, including the HDD caddy, screws and HDD cable. If you need to add a mechanical hard drive, you can install it directly by buying a 9.5mm hard drive.

This notebook comes with two 512GB Samsung PM981 M.2 PCIe SSDs and supports the NVMe protocol. It is also known that other batches of Alienware 17 R5 also use Toshiba’s M.2 SSD.

These are two SO-DIMM memory slots. You only need to remove the back cover to upgrade the memory. The laptop comes with two 8G Hynix DDR4 2400MHz memory.

Remove all metal M2.5XL8 screws, side light strip screws and side light strip cable, as well as mechanical hard drive bay, and all SSDs, wireless network card on the middle metal frame. There are still a lot of snaps on the metal frame. You need to use the tool to open the snaps slowly.

Remove all screws that secure the heatsink, and four screws that hold the fan. I did not remove the entire cooling fan module in this step. This method is a kind of skill for players with certain hands-on ability. After removing the heatsink module, not only can remove the old thermal grease, but also can clean dust on the fan.