Alienware maintains its reputation for making the best and most powerful laptops known to man. They often put the latest and best technologies into their laptops, even if it makes them look like a tank and weigh just as much. With their latest creation in the 15″ league they’ve dropped the glove for other manufacturers. The laptop starts out at a reasonable $1500 but with a few extras thrown in the price quickly climbs to a stunning $3500 with i7 920 processor, GT 260M videocard and 4 gigabytes of memory.
There are two screen resolutions available, 1900×1080 and 1600×900. With the finer resolution being priced at $100 higher I see no good reason to pick the latter and miss out on full HD 1080p video playback. There is also an option besides the normal GT 240M discrete video card. For some extra the customer can choose a GT 260M instead, which I can recommend as the video card at these resolutions will most probably be the bottleneck in recent games. Alienware tried to make the laptop a bit more portable than its predecessor, the M17x. They shrunk the case, used only 1 video card and swapped anodized aluminum with magnesium in the case, but the final 9.5 pounds weight is still out of this world. Though it doesn’t bend time-space contiinum around it, I still wouldn’t like to carry this computer on a daily basis.
This gaming laptop comes with 4 gigabytes memory which whould be enough for even the most recent titles, or heaviest multitasking in windows. We can find a d-sub VGA connector on the chassis along with the displayport which Dell seems prefer to HDMI on its laptops. There are 3 USB connectors fitted on the computer which I think could be a bit on the low end for this amount of money. A keyboard, a mouse and a pendrive already fills it all and we haven’t added a controller yet. The rest of the connectors don’t seem to be worth mentioning, they’re along the lines of other notebooks.
Alienware tried to add to the portability with an extended 9 cell battery but the 1.5 hours of video playback it makes possible still makes me think they haven’t really thought this through. $3000 is decent money and a laptop for this amount should bear at least 3 hours on its own.
Alienware-Dell seems to have gotten heat dissipation right. The fans run quietly and the case doesn’t get hot even during prolonged gaming sessions. The 9 cell battery may help airflow a little because it lifts the back of the laptop off the table a little.
All in all the M15x starts out at a rather friendly $1500 but choosing a few options skyrocket the price to $3000. There is still no rival though, so anyone who wants to have the best and fastest 15″ gaming notebook should start putting some money in the jar.
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