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Alienware M17x Laptop Review

Review
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Alienware’s latest gaming laptop has been dubbed the most powerful gaming laptop in the universe. Quite the bold claim in the competitive performance laptop market. If there’s one thing that’s certain, you’ll at least feel powerful sitting in front of its massive 17 inch screen, 12 pound aluminum body and glowing lighting effects.

The M17x is a desktop replacement, but what exactly does that mean? The idea behind a desktop replacement laptop is to give consumers the power, and expandability of a desktop PC in the convenience of a portable laptop body. The M17x has 4 USB ports, an external SATA port, two 2.5” Drive bays, and your standard gigabit Ethernet port with Wireless N card. But those are the boring features – lets talk about the guts that make this cheetah purrr.

Our laptop was configured with an Intel Core 2 Duo 9600 running at 2.8Ghz with 4 GB of DDR3 RAM. We have two GeForce 260M video cards running in SLI mode with 1GB dedicated video RAM each. There’s also a GeForce 9400 video card which can be used to conserve battery power.  Finally we’re topped off our configuration with a slot loading Blu-Ray drive.  All of that is displayed on a gorgeous 1920x1200 WUXGA screen with edge to edge glass.  

If you’ve ever bought an Apple product, you know that there’s great care that goes into the packages and presentation. Alienware is similar – you’re new best friend will arrive in a big black box, marked only with an Intel logo. Inside you’ll find a giant blue Alien head, with all your goods laid out for you. The PC’s instruction manual comes leather-bound and fully detailed – there’s even a nice touch with spots for your reinstall and driver discs in the back.



 
Reads: 36669
 
Author
Nick Puleo
Owner and Managing Editor

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txshurricane
11:25 AM
7/30/2009

Holy cow, Bap! Nice, detailed review.


Arttemis
12:49 PM
7/30/2009

"There’s also a GeForce 9400 video card which can be used to conserve battery power."

Dear Lord, and alternate graphics solution in addition to SLI'd 260s!? That's ridiculously awesome. The specs on this thing rival my few-month-old gaming PC, and those are some impressive benchmarks.

The embedded pic gallery at the end was a blast to click through. That's one slick looking laptop!

Also, I bought a Dell XPS M170 about a year ago, and it still performs incredibly well with games like TF2 and L4D. If you're interested in a sturdy 17"-laptop case, Targus makes an incredibly sturdy and spacious case that has more room than I can even handle. It's a bit hefty, but it's probably not a big deal when you're planning on carrying an already heavy laptop.


bapenguin
12:59 PM
7/30/2009

That case looks decent. I picked up a Swiss Army one that fits it, but it's still tight.


COG_Network
1:10 PM
7/30/2009

Dukefrukem says...
The Alien Sense is pretty cool huh? So accurate! Nice write up. Wish you did some other benches like 3dmark, cinebench, hdtune and superpi but thanks for checking out those games. I'm surprised at the DoW results.


bapenguin
1:16 PM
7/30/2009

--- Replying to COG_Network -----

I thought about doing some others and figured that for our audience most people would only care about gaming performance. Which is also why I focused on games that have co-op.


Jackel
1:40 PM
7/30/2009

Great review. One thing you could add is avg temps. Especially when gaming laptops get very hot, with all that power in such a small area. Would be nice to know how well they do dissipating that heat.

Also, check out NHC (notebook hardware control) to undervolt your CPU to conserve battery / lower temps when not gaming.

As an aside. I've been using an Asus barebones that I built 3 years ago that still can run most modern games at playable framerates.


mightbe
4:12 PM
7/30/2009

A great review for sure.

I'm not sold on the system as a whole though. The cost just seems incredibly prohibitive. There are a good amount of gaming laptops for less than half of the retail price that get blisteringly fast performance.

Of course, you're not looking for a good value if your considering dropping this kind of coin on a laptop. You want flashy shit for no good reason and BLAST PROCESSING. For you folks, this is your dream machine.

If it weren't for the considerable heft of this bad boy, I'd swap my daily use ASUS G50 for it in a heartbeat. And I'll continue to pimp ASUS laptops as they're incredible performance for the money and last for freaking ever. Not to mention the phenomenal warranty that comes with them.

As for big honkin' laptop bags, I'm absolutely in love with my OGIO City Corp (Messenger Style) case. It's durable, roomy, slips on my roller carry-on, and pads the crap out of my favorite little lappy. I've only got a 15" but it's wider than normal and still has room to grow in this posh pack.

Glad you're liking your new machine though! Now get alienware to do a giveaway...

I could use a replacement for my desktop.


kimianks
8:51 AM
8/27/2009

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