Alienware M17x Gaming Laptop Review

Performance Analysis and Conclusion

While the list of specifications of our review unit isn’t as crazy as the £4,000 version, we still expected a fair amount of speed. A minimum of 20fps from Crysis at 1,680 x 1,050 with 2x AA isn’t too bad, for example. To get Crysis running at a reasonable frame rate we disabled anti-aliasing - this simple change resulted in an average frame rate of 28fps and a minimum of 26fps.

If you wanted to play Crysis at the native 1,920 x 1,200 of the screen, you’d have to be prepared to the quality settings down to medium. However, we’d rather have the high-quality textures and slight blockiness of playing at a sub-native resolution than suffer low-res blurry textures.

Other games proved more fruitful, with World of Conflict returning a better set of benchmark results - in fact, we were able to play the game at the native resolution and high quality settings, and with 2x AA. The frame rate might have dipped from an average of 28fps to a minimum of 17fps, but we could struggle through. However, we did drop the AA from time to time when things got a bit hectic. The M17x kicked out plenty of heat, and a fair amount of noise, during extended gaming sessions, with the whining CPU fan proving irritating


The Core 2 Duo T9600 processor delivered decent application performance across all of our tests, beating the Asus G60Vx in all of our benchmarks. Its score of 978 in the Gimp image editing test was only marginally faster than the 946 of the Asus. The Alienware scored an impressive 1,066 in the video encoding test and 788 in the multi-tasking benchmark, compared to the 978 and 673 of the Asus, putting clear daylight between the two systems.

Battery life was better than anticipated too, although its time of 1hr 37m in our demanding Crysis test still won't see you playing many games away from the mains. And we wouldn't recommend lugging the Alienware around anyway due to its considerable bulk.

Conclusion

There's no doubting that the Alienware M17x is a striking piece of design and one that we actually came to like. It’s the best Alienware machine we’ve seen for ages in terms of looks and build quality, brilliantly combining the solidity of outdoor latrines with sci-fi set-design.

However, this isn't quite enough to distract from its main problem - the fact that, as a gaming laptop, it's firmly wedged between a rock and a hard place. Its bulk means that it's not suitable for transport and, if you spent two grand on a desktop machine instead, it’d be at least twice as powerful and certainly much more upgradable.

The M17x may be one of the best examples of its kind we’ve seen, but it's just not quite worth its inflated asking price. If you do want the spec we’ve reviewed, you have to phone Alienware directly as some of these components aren’t listed on the web-site to ‘avoid confusion’. Nice work, Alienware.

• Performance
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• -
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• 8/10

• Features
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• -
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• 8/10

• Value
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• x
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• x
• x
• -
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• -
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• 6/10

• Overall
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• -
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• 7/10

Score Guide