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Alienware was showing off their latest and greatest gaming laptop at their booth at E3 this year and it was introduced to me as the most powerful gaming laptop in the universe.
That's a tall claim, but not a hard one to substantiate; if you simply take the fastest, biggest, most powerful technology currently available for laptops and cram it all into one laptop, you've got the definition of the most powerful gaming laptop in the universe.
So, what's in the Alienware M17x? How about an Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad processor, with 12MB cache and a 1066 MHz front-side bus, Dual 1 GB GDDR3 Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M cards running in SLI, 8 GB of DDR3 (1333 Mhz), Dual Solid State Hard Drives (2 x 256GB) and the Nvidia GeForce 9400M G chipset. The video looks amazing on the M17x's 17 inch WideUXGA 1920x1200 "Beyond HD" (1200p) LCD monitor. In fact, The M17x that I tried was playing Left 4 Dead with what looked to be all possible graphic effects turned on without a hint of lag.
Some slick features that Alienware has included in the M17x include an anodized aluminum case, which comes in "Nebula Red," "Space Black" or "Saucer Silver" and helps the M17x offload heat quickly, as well as the AlienFX Illuminated Keyboard, which has four different zones of lighting and can shift between various colors and can even be programmed to cycle through colors or to change colors in response to certain games or programs, through the AlienFX API, which Alienware is making available to developers. Another slick design element in the M17x is the slot-loading optical drive, which can be you choice of a Dual Layer Blu-ray Combo driver or a Dual Layer DVD Burner.
All this and a slew of ports to interface with almost anything on earth, including a DisplayPort, HDMI, VGA, an ExpressCard slot and an 8-in-1 media card reader. The M17x is definitely what you'd call a "desktop-replacement" laptop, but with a 17" screen, it's not the smallest of laptops. Still, if you're not looking for something that fits in your pocket and there's a game you'd want to play on a laptop, this is the laptop you want to play it on. |
