Alienware M11x review
Alienware has long been known for their line of gaming notebooks.
From their 17 inch “desktop replacements” which weigh in at 5.3kg or more, to their more mobile 15 inch notebook, Alienware has sought to establish themselves in the gaming laptop niche market for many years.
At last year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Dell, which owns the Alienware brand, unveiled a smaller (and lighter) Alienware notebook, the M11x.
The Alienware M11x has two graphics adapters, one Intel-based and the other Nvidia-based. Initially you switched between the two by pressing a combination of keys, but after Nvidia’s Optimus technology became available Dell incorporated it into newer models of the notebook.
Dell South Africa provided MyBroadband with one of these newer models to review.
Build quality and design
Even without powering up the device it stands out thanks to its design. As with other Alienware notebooks, the M11x has very angular lines and sports the head of a so-called “Grey alien.”
When powered up, lights stream from various places in the body and these can even be configured. Different colours and strobe patterns can all be set up with the bundled software.
It’s certainly not this reviewers cup of tea but I can acknowledge that the gaudy design might attract some while it repulses others.
The body itself is solid and the keyboard hardly has any flex. That is, it doesn’t bend much while typing on it. It’s definitely not the best notebook keyboard in the world, but it types comfortably enough.
The touch pad also doesn’t come across as the finest money can buy. It doesn’t have a middle-click button (for those who use it to open links in new tabs in their browser) and it doesn’t seem to support multi-touch gestures either.
Performance
When it finally came time to test the gaming performance of the machine we were a little disappointed at first.
It seemed as if the Nvidia GeForce 335M graphics card should be performing much better than we were seeing, which led us to discover that the notebook was loaded with a fairly old version of Nvidia’s graphics card driver.
Once the drivers were upgraded to version 257.30 we saw a drastic improvement in game benchmarks and performance.
Left 4 Dead 2 ran relatively well in the maximum resolution supported with medium graphics settings and StarCraft 2 performed well even with some of the graphics settings tweaked slighly higher.
Even graphically intensive games such as Metro 2033 seemed to run well.
It’s worth noting that Steam reported a problem with the graphics card when launching games. This is probably due to the Nvidia Optimus technology kicking in only after the game is launched.
The biggest drawback to the unit we reviewed is that it only shipped with 2GB RAM. This doesn’t seem like it’ll be a problem as Dell indicated that the pre-configured systems being sold in South Africa will have 4GB RAM. The lack of optical drive might also be a deal-breaker for some, but it can be remedied to a degree with an external USB drive.
Overall the Alienware M11x is a solid gaming notebook, though a touch on the expensive side and perhaps a little gaudy for some. Hard core PC gamers would probably be better served by a desktop PC they put together themselves.
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