Maingrear’s Rival to the Dell Alienware M17x; Introducing the eX-L 18 Gaming Laptop

We recently looked at the new gaming laptop from Dell, the Alienware M17x, and now Maingear has launched a rival gaming laptop the eX-L 18. The question is, can Maingear beat the aliens?

So lets look at the raw specifications of the Maingaear eX-L 18:

• CPU – Up to Intel Core 2 Extreme quad processor
• Chipset – Intel MCP79
• Graphics – Single or Dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M
• Memory – Up to 8GB DDR3-1333
• Storage – Up to 3 2.5″ SATA or SSD drives (RAID Available)
• Optical Drive – DVD or Blu-ray
• Display – 18.4″ LCD 1920×1080
• OS – Windows Vista Premium with Free Windows 7 Upgrade Offer

Maingear is quite upbeat about the laptops performance. “MainGear has equipped the eX-L 18 with the world's fastest notebook graphics solution," said Rene Hass, General Manager of the notebook business unit at NVIDIA. "With NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M GPUs, MainGear's customers will experience breathtaking in gaming physics from titles such as Terminator Salvation or Darkest of Days and are ready for GPU computing applications such as Badaboom, vReveal and Arcsoft SimHD.”

However looking closer at the specifications of this laptop are very similar to that of the Alienware M17x. Both have the option of using Intel Core 2 Extemee quad core processors, both support dual nVidia video cards via SLI (which is you remember is a technology that splits the display into two parts and assigns each portion to a dedicated graphics card), both support up to 8GB of memory, both have traditional or SSD drives, both have Blu-ray support and both offer custom laser etching technology to personalize your laptop.

The display is physically bigger on the Maingear being 18.4″ compared to Dell’s 17″ but the screen resolution on the Alienware is better.

A couple of minor things which stand out on the Maingear are that it can hold up to 3 2.5″ SATA or SSD drives where as the Alienware M17x can only hold 2 and, guess what, the webcam is 3 megapixels on the Maingear compared to the 2 on the Dell Alienware.

Other than that we will have to wait until the two machines can be tested side by side to see which one truly is the world’s fastest laptop.

If you live in the USA you can purchase the MAINGEAR eX-L 18 at MAINGEAR’s Web site www.maingear.com or order by phone at (888-MAINGEAR). The base price $2,999. UK customers could try contacting Maingear and check international shipping but watchout for a possible 110V / 220V incompatibility.