The 3D revision of the M17x has all the accoutrements we’ve come to expect from an Alienware portable—including the also-inevitable hefty price. In the model we tested, though, the price seems to contain a bit of "Alienware tax" for the distinct design and brand. And while it packs considerable graphics muscle, it's by no means a league leader and is actually outscored by a few much cheaper competitors.
Prices on the updated M17x start at $1,499 for the base model, which lacks a 3D-ready display and comes with a lot less storage than the particular machine we tested. The pumped-up M17x we did test will set you back about double that: $2,994, at the time we wrote this. While this particular configuration does sport a cutting-edge processor chip, it didn't use the latest in graphics processing chips (GPUs), and that showed on our tests. For nearly $3,000, this system doesn't quite live up to its high price and celebrity reputation.
Design
In place of the aluminum chassis used on Alienware's earlier version of the M17x, this latest iteration is done up in the same rubbery-feeling finish (in a color dubbed Stealth Black) that was used on the Alienware M11x R2. (The company also offers this machine in a red shade called Soft Touch Nebula Red.) This matte finish helps keep fingerprint smudges to a minimum and provides a nice background for the lid’s illuminated alien-head logo.In fact, the M17x looks like a much bigger version of the M11x R2; it sports the same Corvette-like beveled lid and backlit grillework, and it uses a heavy-duty dual-hinge mechanism that gives it a solid, well-built feel. At 10.1 pounds, this desktop replacement is no lightweight, but it is 2.6 pounds lighter than the version of the Alienware M17x we reviewed in 2009. Its beast of a power brick brings the total travel weight up to 12.2 pounds, however.
The keyboard deck sports the same soft finish as the lid. Down here, you'll find a full-size keyboard and number pad, a touch pad, an alien-head-shaped power switch, a set of media-file transport buttons (volume, play/pause, fast-forward, rewind), an optical-drive eject button, and a switch for turning the Wi-Fi on and off. Also present: a hot key that launches the machine's Alien Command Center software, which contains a utility (AlienFX) that controls the chassis-lighting scheme. It's remarkably customizable: You can illuminate the keyboard (or not), and if you do, even separate it into four zones, with different colors for each zone.
The AlienFX utility lets you assign custom colors to the keyboard, touch pad, grilles, media-control buttons, and more.
You can also use AlienFX to light up the media keys, the power switch, the Alienware logo on the bezel beneath the display, the front speaker grilles, and a strip bordering the touch pad. Each object can have a different color, and you can even program them to respond to specific events, such as the arrival of e-mail.
The keyboard itself is firm and roomy, and the touch pad offers great cursor control. The dual mouse buttons that supplement the pad are responsive and whisper-quiet. Overall, we found very little not to like about the input scheme on this machine.
The keyboard and touch pad are roomy and colorful.
The audio output from this machine was also mostly satisfactory. Mounted in the base are two Klipsch speakers that were loud and distortion-free with our test audio. The bass response was better than average, too, though it could still use some help from a subwoofer to round out the sound.
Features
The M17x is jam-packed with I/O ports. On the left side of the notebook are two USB 3.0 ports, an Ethernet jack, a pair of headphone jacks (for sharing music or movie audio with a buddy), and microphone and S/PDIF audio ports. Also packed in here are video outputs for HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA connections.Over on the right side is a slot-loading Blu-ray/DVD±RW optical drive, as well as a card reader that supports the MultiMediaCard, SD, Memory Stick (MS), and MS Pro media formats. Alongside are two USB 2.0 ports, and an eSATA/USB combo port that supports PowerShare, which allows you to charge USB devices without having to power up the notebook. Finally, on this edge you’ll also find an HDMI input. That item is rare among laptops, and it comes in handy if you want to play video directly from a camcorder (or any device) with an HDMI output.
Wireless networking comes by way of Intel’s Centrino Ultimate N-6300 integrated Wi-Fi adapter and a Bluetooth radio. Alienware offers WiMAX broadband capabilities as a $50 option.
A wealth of ports is located on the left side of the M17x. From left: Ethernet, VGA, HDMI-out, mini-DisplayPort, two USB 3.0, optical audio out, microphone, and two headphone jacks.
A 3-megapixel Webcam is embedded in the display’s upper bezel, along with a dual microphone array. The camera captures significantly more detail than the 1.3-megapixel cameras we’re used to seeing, and it does very well in low lighting conditions. You can use an included utility, Creative Live Central, to capture video and still photos; it’s a fun utility that lets you add all sorts of effects to your photos and video-chat sessions, such as wacky backgrounds that make you appear behind bars. You can also use face effects to, say, add facial hair or turn your image into a werewolf.
On a laptop this big, though, the make-or-break physical feature is the LCD. Here, it doesn't disappoint: The M17x’s 17.3-inch display is stunning. Edge-to-edge glass covers the 1,920x1,080-pixel panel, giving it an ultramodern, seamless look. Colors are crisp and vibrant, and high-definition imagery is highly detailed. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland on Blu-ray looked excellent on the big screen, and the display’s wide viewing range allowed three of us to watch the movie, seated side by side, without experiencing any color loss when looking at the display from an off-center angle.
As with the Acer Aspire 5745DG-3855, another notebook we tested recently with Nvidia's 3D technology inside, the M17x’s screen has a 120Hz refresh rate. When used with Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology, a screen with that spec can display stereoscopic (dual) images for viewing in 3D. (A typical notebook screen or LCD monitor has a 60Hz refresh rate.) To see the 3D effect, you'll need to look at this double image through the set of active-shutter glasses Alienware provides. These glasses are outfitted with LCD-equipped lenses that "open" and "close" in sync with the screen’s refresh rate (60 cycles a second for each eye). It results in a remarkable 3D experience that makes games and video come alive.
Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology supports close to 300 games, most of which are rated "Excellent" by Nvidia’s 3D-quality standards. One of the games we use to measure graphics performance, Far Cry 2, received an Excellent rating, so we loaded it up, donned the glasses, and settled in for some multi-dimensional gaming. For the most part, the 3D quality was very good. We did see a few instances of crosstalk, which we expected. Crosstalk is a double image artifact that is a common side effect of PC-based (as well as HDTV) 3D technology, but it did not detract from the overall experience. Game play was smooth, and the 3D effect provided plenty of depth. We also tried out some content from Nvidia’s 3D Vision Live portal, which offers a nice selection of 3D photos and video clips. A trailer for the movie The Green Hornet looked great in 3D, as did Dinosaurs—Giants of Patagonia. Even Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, arguably the worst movie ever made, looked awesome in 3D mode.
Of course, you have to wear the glasses to view anything in 3D, and we found while reviewing the Acer Aspire 3D laptop, they are bulky and can cause discomfort around the bridge of the nose after an extended period of time. We also experienced some eyestrain after 20 minutes of fast action gaming. And make sure you keep that pair of glasses in a safe place (especially out of the couch cushions), since additional pairs cost $139 each if you buy them from Dell. (Nvidia sells them for $119 each on its site.)
The right edge of the machine: two USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA/USB combo port, an HDMI input, the flash-card reader, and a slot-loading Blu-ray/DVD combo drive.
Our review model was configured with two fast (7,200rpm) 750GB hard drives set in RAID 0 format, giving it a whopping 1.5TB of total storage space. You can shave hundreds of dollars off the price if you opt for less storage, or, for maximum speed, you can opt for dual 256GB solid-state drives (SSDs), which will add $950 to the cost of the notebook.
Performance
Powered by Intel’s Next-Gen (Sandy Bridge) 2.3GHz Core i7-2820QM processor and 8GB of DDR3 system memory, the M17x delivered very good scores on our productivity benchmark tests. On our 64-bit PCMark Vantage test, which measures overall system performance, its score of 10,091 was more than 3,600 points higher than the $1,699 HP Envy 17 and more than 4,000 points higher than the $1,499 Acer Aspire 8943G-9429, two similarly big machines that use a first-generation Core i7 chip. Still, it came up short against the $1,999 Toshiba Qosmio X505-Q898 (10,458), which uses a faster first-gen Core i7 than the HP and Acer systems and has the benefit of a speedy solid-state drive. The M17x prevailed on our CPU-intensive Cinebench 10 test, however, which taxes all the available cores of the CPU. Its score of 20,347 was significantly higher than the HP (10,250), Acer (10,206), and Toshiba (11,045) notebooks, thanks to the processor’s faster clock speed and enhanced Turbo Boost capabilities, which enable it to speed up one or more processor cores on the fly. Only the hyper-pricey $5,325 Malibal Nine X7200 (26,565) and $4,250 Eurocom D900F Panther (25,961) have produced higher scores for us among laptops.
Multimedia performance, measured via our media-file-conversion tests, was also top-shelf. The M17x finished our iTunes Conversion Test (in which we convert 11 standard MP3 files to AAC format) in 2 minutes and 14 seconds, the fastest time of any desktop-replacement laptop to date. It also completed our Windows Media Encoder test (in which we convert a standard 3-minute video clip to DVD-quality format) in just 1 minute and 55 seconds, lagging behind the $5,325 Malibal X7200 by a mere single second and beating out the HP, Acer, and Toshiba notebooks by several minutes.
These numbers were overall very satisfactory for the price, but you're likely not buying an Alienware machine just to putter in spreadsheets or bulk-convert MP3 files. Fueled by a dedicated Nvidia GeForce GTX 460M graphics processing unit (GPU), the M17x turned in respectable scores on our graphics tests, but we expected much better performance from a gaming rig with a $3,000 price.
First, we ran our real-world Far Cry 2 DirectX 9 gaming test at the laptop's native resolution (1,920x1,080). Here, the M17x churned out 37.9 frames per second (fps), which is certainly a good frame rate but significantly slower than the HP Envy 17, which used an ATI Radeon HD 5850 GPU in our test unit and produced a far superior 103.5fps. In contrast, the Toshiba Qosmio X505-Q898 used the same GeForce GPU as our Alienware M17x and delivered a very similar 38.4fps. On the DirectX 10 version of Far Cry 2, the M17x’s score of 47.3fps lagged behind the Qosmio by around 5fps, and it was much slower than the HP Envy 17's 65.2fps.
We then moved on to the older, but still-demanding, test game Company of Heroes. On this test, the M17x gave us 69fps in DirectX 9 mode, while both the HP Envy 17 and Toshiba Qosmio trounced it with scores of 139.7fps and 94.6fps, respectively. The Acer Aspire 8943G also beat the M17x, with a score of 86.7fps. Results from the DirectX 10 version of the test were similar: The M17x simply could not match the frame rates of the less expensive HP, Acer, and Toshiba notebooks.
Battery life was typical for a big-screen notebook. The M17x’s nine-cell battery lasted 2 hours and 5 minutes on our Battery-Rundown Test, in which we loop playback of a DVD movie until the battery gives out. That’s a full 7 minutes better than the average across desktop replacements we've tested (1:58) and 10 minutes longer than the Toshiba Qosmio above lasted on this test. It's also in-line with competing mega-laptops: The HP Envy 17 endured just 1:42, while the Acer Aspire 8943G held out a bit longer, lasting 2:39.
Conclusion
The M17x comes with a basic one-year parts-and-labor warranty, which includes in-home service that Alienware/Dell can authorize once you’ve completed a remote diagnostic session. Toll-free technical support is available 24/7, as is Dell’s online technical chat service. You can boost the coverage to up to four years’ worth of basic support. The first year is free; beyond that, you pay $199 to add a year, and up to $399 for an additional three years. Alternately, you can choose an Advanced plan; it covers damage from accidental spills and drops. Advanced plans include the basic service and start at $69 for the first year and go up to $519 for four years. (See Alienware's M17x configurator for the full breakdown of options.)Bundled software includes Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) and the Creative Live Central utility we mentioned earlier. Also, the previously mentioned Alienware Command Center software includes a couple of handy elements in addition to the AlienFX utility we discussed. Using one of them, AlienFusion, you can choose among three power plans or create your own to save battery life. The other, AlienTouch, lets you adjust the touch pad’s sensitivity, tapping, and scrolling settings.
Another utility, AlienReSpawn, comes preloaded, as well. It lets you create recovery discs, though you’ll have to upgrade to the $39.99 Premium version of this software to perform backup and restore functions; we'd really have liked to have seen this included for this machine's lofty price. If you're willing to do manual backups to optical media, Roxio Creator, another program that comes standard, helps you back up files to blank CD/DVD media and provides an easy, icon-driven menu for selecting which files to archive.
Our bottom line? No doubt, the Alienware M17x remains one of the top gaming laptops on the wow-factor scale. Its cool lighting and edgy look will appeal to serious gamers, and it offers the latest components, a boatload of storage, and all the I/O ports you could want. It also does a fantastic job of displaying games and other content in 2D and 3D mode.
Two of the key areas—the 3D, and the graphics oomph—disappoint a bit, though. Though the 3D rendering looks great, we wish the shutter glasses were more comfortable. And while this rig can handle productivity tasks with ease, its graphics performance, though good, won’t quite earn you the bragging rights you'd expect for the money, given what we've seen from less-expensive notebooks like the Toshiba Qosmio X505-Q898 and HP Envy 17. You'll have to determine your top priority in your gaming laptop, and choose accordingly.
Price (at time of review): $2,994 (direct, as tested)
www.dell.com
800-915-3355
See all of our Alienware M17x (2011 3D Version) coverage
See all of our Dell coverage
Related Laptop Reviews on ComputerShopper.com
Eurocom Racer
HP Envy 17 3D
Toshiba Qosmio X505-Q898
Computer Shopper does not currently have pricing information for this product. It may be available directly from the manufacturer's Web site.
Special Deal: | |
 | Dell Alienware M17x 1769 Alienware M17x |
