Laptops and gaming haven’t always gone hand-in-hand as laptop designers are often concerned with battery life and weight. However the designers over at Alienware have created a laptop bursting with power that is ready for hardcore game players. The Alienware M17x is a formidable machine with high specs and lots of alien juice.
Alienware has been in the high performance computing market for over a decade and a few years back they were bought by Dell but maintain a level of independence. Now with access to Dell’s outlets the Alienware M17x has landed worldwide.
These Dell laptops are awesome and full of muscle and as with almost all Dell products they can be customized heavily. On the CPU front, the entry level machine has an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 which is a dual core CPU running at 2.4Ghz. But this can be changed for a whole variety of CPUs with the top offering being the Intel CoreT 2 Extreme Quad QX9300 which is a hefty four core machine with 12MB of cache.
To compliment the monster CPU there are some great graphics in the form of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M or dual, yes, dual video cards in a laptop, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280Ms using SLI. For those who haven’t heard of SLI before it is a technology that splits the display into two parts and assigns each portion to a dedicated graphics card. This is all handled internally and there is just one connection to the monitor/LCD display but behind the scenes there are lots of clever things happening to increase the performance. This laptop also has a HDMI port if you want to connect it to an even bigger monitor or TV.
So how does it handle games? According to driverheaven.net you can play Far Cry 2 at 1920×1200 with maximum detail with an average of 36 FPS. Crysis Warhead which is just about the most demanding game on the market is easily handled by the Alienware machine. With a resolution of 1680×1050 and maximum details settings the M17x provided a cool gameplay experience with an average of 30 FPS.
If you are on the road and not shooting aliens in glorious 3D, the Alienware M17x also includes another video card which doesn’t consumer so much energy. You can switch to the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M GPU for battery saving operation. This makes the M17x a truly groundbreaking system as it has three NVIDA GPUs.
The Alienware M17x also supports up to 8GB DDR3 1333MHz memory, up to 1TB of hard disk space or 512GB of Solid State Storage Capacity using RAID 0. The screen supports what Dell are calling “Beyond HD” resolutions with a WUXGA 1200p (1920 x 1200) Edge-to-Edge LCD display.
“The Alienware M17x is a gamer's dream and sets the universal standard for 17-inch laptops that enthusiasts worldwide will love,” said Michael Tatelman, vice president of sales and marketing for Dell's consumer business. “Alienware's premium performance is critically important to the larger Dell consumer product portfolio, and our new 'All Powerful' branding campaign conveys the brand's technological strength as much as Adamo conveys precision craftsmanship and design.”
The Alienware M17x is available from Dell’s UK website and prices start from £1,699. For fun I configured myself a top notch machine with dual video cards, 8GB of memory, Blu-Ray, 256GB Solid State SATA Drive and an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9000 but no namby-pamby office software and it came to the nice price of £3,764… Hmmm, the price of a 2 year old family car… Priorities, priorities…
One thought on “Dell’s Hardcore Gaming Laptop With A Touch of ET”
omg I do the exact same thing when you can pimp out your own laptops, I always just give it the best or everything and see how much it comes to, I never buy it of coarse but just like to see how much it would be