alienware M17x laptop review

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The good: Highest-end components; imposing design; fantastic performance.

The bad: Starting configurations are overpriced; touch controls are a bit wonky.

The bottom line: If you're looking to drop some major change on a show-off gaming laptop, it's hard to do better than the Alienware Area-51 m17x, a mean-looking, high-performance black slab.

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just come right out and say the Alienware m17x is about as powerful as a laptop gets, at least if it's as tricked-out as our $6,000-plus review unit was. More modest builds are available for as little as $1,999, but at that level, you get a fairly yawn-inducing set of midrange components, dressed up in a very attractive shell.

The Alienware really shines when packed out with dual Nvidia GeForce 9800 GPUs and an Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 processor. Of course, few people, even serious gamers, need that much horsepower, but as a display of conspicuous consumption, it's hard to beat, with an illuminated keyboard, imposing new black-slab aesthetic, and a Blu-ray drive.
Alienware almost has a better case to make with this system's smaller cousin, the 15-inch m15x, which at least has the distinction of being one of the only mainstream-size gaming laptops out there. Gamers with more realistic budgets are encouraged to check out the Gateway P-7811FX, easily the best bang for your gaming buck. Still, excess has its fans, and if your gaming laptop is just as much about making a statement as playing games, few do it as well.

	Alienware Area-51 m17x	Average for category [desktop replacement]
Video	S-video, HDMI	VGA-out, S-Video, HDMI
Audio	Stereo speakers with subwoofer, headphone/microphone jacks, optical audio	Stereo speakers with subwoofer, headphone/microphone jacks.
Data	4 USB 2.0, 2 FireWire (1 mini, 1 full-size), SD card reader	4 USB 2.0, mini-FireWire, SD card reader
Expansion	ExpressCard/54	ExpressCard/54
Networking	modem, Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth	modem, Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, optional Bluetooth
Optical drive	Blu-ray DVD burner	DVD burner [high-end: HD DVD or Blu-Ray]

Our Alienware m17x is tricked out with plenty of high-end components, including two 500GB 5,400rpm hard drives, for a whopping 1TB of total storage. We also got twin Nvidia GeForce 9800 graphics cards (which, unfortunately, do not appear to be currently available on the Alienware Web site) in an SLI configuration, a 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 CPU, and 4GB of RAM. By way of comparison, our current favorite gaming laptop, the $1,449 Gateway P-7811FX, has a Core 2 Duo P8400, only 200GB of hard drive space (but it's a 7,200rpm drive), a single GeForce 9800 card, and the same 4GB of RAM. The Alienware is clearly more powerful, but also costs around four times as much.
The combination of the Core 2 Extreme X9000 CPU and Nvidia GeForce 9800 makes the m17x nearly unstoppable in our benchmark tests, easily besting other high-end multimedia desktop replacements such as the HP Pavilion dv7-1025nr (and, of course, the Gateway P-7811FX). In all honesty, the difference will be hard to notice in casual Web surfing or office apps, but gaming performance is impressive. The twin GeForce 9800 graphics cards got us an amazing119.5 frames per second in Unreal Tournament 3 at the extremely high resolution of 1,920x1,200. The Gateway got about half that score (also, that's still nothing to sneer at).