Review: M17x gaming laptop, Alienware’s Portable Flagship
The M17x is Alienware’s portable flagship as well as one of the most powerful laptops available on the planet. Alienware’s M17x is the latest gaming notebook considered by the Pro’s as the best of the best in regards to powerful gaming laptops available today. Alienware is known for their high end, high performance systems and the M17x gaming laptop meets this challenge head-on.
It combines the latest in hardware with an extreme high quality finish to produce a laptop that is incredibly fast, well designed and reliable. There’s only one problem with this rig, it’s also one of the most expensive laptops on the planet. Flip side of that coin is you definitely get what you pay for with this machine. Prices start at $1,799, and our test system came in just under five grand, so be prepared to dish out some bucks for a fully equipped rig. If you take gaming seriously, you won’t be disappointed.
This champion sports a deep black matte finish, you can also get it in a silver anodized aluminum finish. The smooth aluminum lid sports the always-present alien-head logo and has a look that says this machine isn’t playing around. It’s a heavier than usual laptop (12.7 pounds.) but this rig wasn’t meant to be a laptop that gets hauled to school. If your going to bring this bad boy to a LAN party I suggest a seriously strong case or back pack. There’s nothing like dropping a few G’s on the ground for an impact test.
Alienware didn’t hold back on the lighting either, there are lights every where. They installed LEDs under the keyboard, behind the speaker grill, and underneath the touch strip above the keyboard. The really cool part about the lighting is you can change the colors from the command center, there’s also different zones which you can change the colors of LED’s from one side to other. Basically you can color code the keyboard by zones, which is helpful in the more intense games.
The 17.1-inch wide-screen LCD display offers a 1900 x 1200 screen resolution which delivers rich colors and a remarkably crisp image. A web-cam is centered at the top of the screen, just below the screen written in block letters it says Alienware and it is LED back-lighted. The power button is a chrome Alienware Logo which blinks when the hard drive is active.
The keyboard has a more traditional tapered key design, rather than the wider, flat keys that many laptop are fitted with. Alienware says the traditional keys pattern provides more space between the individual letters, which is better for first-person shooters and it’s hard core gaming audience. They also added some new touch-sensitive controls across the top of the keyboard. The touch strip allows you to eject the optical media, control volume, turn on/off the Wi-Fi, and activate or deactivate the “Command Center” (we will talk more about that later).
The M17x actually starts at a much more reasonable $1,799 price than our almost $5,000 test machine. The specs for the cheapest system are a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8600, single Nvidia GeForce GTX 260M GPU, 4GB of RAM, a 250GB 7,200rpm hard drive, a DVD burner, and a lower-resolution 1,440×900 screen. Our machine had the 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9300 which can be overclocked up to 3.2GHz, 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and dual Nvidia GeForce GTX280M graphics card which put this machine at the top of my list in high performance testing.
The battery life on most gaming laptops is generally poor at best. The Alienware M17x ran for 1 hour and 30 minutes on our video playback battery drain test which isn’t all that bad for a high performance gaming rig. To be honest I didn’t really expect anything better considering the laptop is the most power hungry rig I have tested.
No shortage on connectivity options here, with ports and slots conveniently positioned along the sides of the M17x including a rarely seen mini-Firewire port and three separate video output options, DisplayPort, 2 USB ports and 2 USB/eSATA combo ports, an ExpressCard/54 slot, a flash-card reader supporting eight formats, a FireWire port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, and four audio jacks for connecting to a six-channel surround-sound speaker system.
The Command Center is where you go to adjust the AlienSense face-recognition settings (which is software/Webcam combination as an added measure of security) as well as the AlienTouch settings, which control touch-pad settings, including tapping, sensitivity, and scrolling.
We tested this machine with Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 which are two of my favorites and I have to tell you this was the best gaming experience I have ever had. There were times we would get 176 frames steady in UT3, and it was a smooth and impressive game play, I didn’t want to stop playing. I’m sure that’s due to the SLI configuration of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX280M.
Bottom Line:
Is it worth it? Yes, if you have the money, and you want a high performance portable rig that is second to none. This was by far the best experience I had on a laptop, I loved all the eye candy that Alienware is known for as well. However, it does comes with Vista, if you can wait for Windows 7, thats what I would do unless your a Vista or Linux Fan. I highly recommend this gaming rig if you can afford it.
I really enjoyed the post. Wish I could afford one of these laptops.
Very informative article. I have one of the fantastic machine and I can honest say you put steel on target with your analysis.
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