Alienware’s latest gaming laptop has been dubbed the most powerful gaming laptop in the universe. Quite the bold claim in the competitive performance laptop market. If there’s one thing that’s certain, you’ll at least feel powerful sitting in front of its massive 17 inch screen, 12 pound aluminum body and glowing lighting effects.
The M17x is a desktop replacement, but what exactly does that mean? The idea behind a desktop replacement laptop is to give consumers the power, and expandability of a desktop PC in the convenience of a portable laptop body. The M17x has 4 USB ports, an external SATA port, two 2.5” Drive bays, and your standard gigabit Ethernet port with Wireless N card. But those are the boring features – lets talk about the guts that make this cheetah purrr.
Our laptop was configured with an Intel Core 2 Duo 9600 running at 2.8Ghz with 4 GB of DDR3 RAM. We have two GeForce 260M video cards running in SLI mode with 1GB dedicated video RAM each. There’s also a GeForce 9400 video card which can be used to conserve battery power. Finally we’re topped off our configuration with a slot loading Blu-Ray drive. All of that is displayed on a gorgeous 1920x1200 WUXGA screen with edge to edge glass.
If you’ve ever bought an Apple product, you know that there’s great care that goes into the packages and presentation. Alienware is similar – you’re new best friend will arrive in a big black box, marked only with an Intel logo. Inside you’ll find a giant blue Alien head, with all your goods laid out for you. The PC’s instruction manual comes leather-bound and fully detailed – there’s even a nice touch with spots for your reinstall and driver discs in the back.