Just ordered an Alienware m14x .. 9 Yrs later

Hey Everyone,

I've drooled over Alienware for 9yrs and finally decided to get myself one now that you can get one without selling a kidney.

My decision was between the m11x, m14x and the Asus G53SW.

M11x: After the "its so cute can I keep it?" reaction subsided I realised the m11x screen is simply too small for my decomposing eyes. An otherwise great bit of truely portable kit which got my attention considering I spend my life staring our of plane windows. The other concern was gaming performance and longevity, it just about manages recent releases on medium settings but appears to dip below the 30FPS quite frequently.

G53JH-3DE / G53SW: Despite the "truelife" description Dell uses regarding its screens I know they're quite frankly poor in terms of max brightness capability. This got me looking into alternatives and stumbled on the Asus G series laptops. They generally offer more bang for buck, better screen, GTX 460M card (rather than the 555m on the m14x) but the the new G53SW series using the new Sandy Beaches architecture (already used by m14x) has been recalled and subsequently delayed its release until further notice. A real shame but since its not available its no longer in contention in my book. Sure I could wait for something better to come out but then you would never buy a PC .. Its just like wanting a flying delorean 1. You can't get it.. yet 2. Its got "The Stuff" but in the end its still a delorean

Even if the G53SW was available I've always wanted an Alienware and tick that item off in my "bucket list" before I die, I get the feeling I wouldn't be happy with an ASUS even if was better value for money. This also raises the question of depreciation /re-sale value within the first year if something new comes along .. The glowing alienware devices on ebay sends a chill down my spin and extremely tempting.. an Asus does not.

So.. I went for the m14x. Despite the slightly disappointing screen its got everything I want. A slightly bigger screen than the m11x, smaller than than the not so portable m15x. The Sandy Beach chipset and a decent price.

I actually went for the stock options apart from upgrading the screen to 1900x900. The 3gb graphics card is a complete waste of money so stick with the 1.5Gb option. The same could be said for RAM. 4Gb is more than adequate for single task gaming. For those heavy multi-taskers I would upgrade but for pure gaming most will only use 3Gb. I found some benchmarks the other day where 10 of the latest games were tested and the 6Gb and 8Gb options showed no performance improvements over 4Gb. period.

Don't bother with the £400 (are you kidding me?) SSD upgrade. Stick with the cheaper abeit slower loading times of 7200 rpm and spend the time admiring your glowing alienware. If you must upgrade do it far away from DELL .. same goes for RAM upgrades.

The hardest decision was the screen debate. Its always best to stick to your native resolution but in the end I wanted higher resolution and the flexibility to reduce my resolution below native if I wanted higher graphics and still achieve decent FPS.

Cheers everyone and thanks for the wealth of knowledge on these forums!

James

 

You just say this because your poor Use a SSD and you'll never go back.

 

We are in the same boat ... the M11 is very "cute" but the screen is very small, Asus really good but much larger and heavier, the ideal would be the M14

 

It arrived today! Only took a week and I must say what an excellent bit of kit.

Perfect size, definately portable and the case material in my opinion kicks my Mac Book Pro's aluminum butt

Unforunately my 4yr old daughter has just chosen pink/purple for the lighting theme.. sigh ..

 

lol Sandy Beach

 

I think you should follow these steps..now, you don't want your 9 year old dream into a nightmare, do you?


You'll see a "preparing to run your system for the first time" msg when you start it up for the first time...just follow the instructions on the screen and you are set. Everything will already be installed on your system so you won't have to do anything.
I highly recommend you to update your windows as soon as you get your system. Then, update your Antivirus as well and in case you are using McAfee for your system, I'd delete it and download Microsoft Security Essentials from Windows site. It is free, works really well and lets your machine load faster than McAffe ever does and it is very light on your resources as well. And update MSE as soon as you install it.

Then once everything is updated, open up Alien Respawn/Dell Datasafe and create recovery disks of your entire system. This was you'll have back-up of your factory settings in case anything ever goes wrong. You might wanna have Acronis True Image 2011 and back up the image of the system into a external drive or a secondary partion. This way you'll never have to go through installing windows, updating it and installing other s/w's ever again. Just my 2 cents.

You would also want to register your service tag under your name via Dell's site. This will save you a lot of hassles in case you ever have to call up Dell tech support.

Finally, you should download Hwininfo32 and use it to monitor your system hardware and it's temperatures. Will come in handy if you game a lot and if you are into overclocking.

Follow these steps and you are set. Enjoy the system.
P

 

What is this Sandy Beach chipset I'm reading about? ;-P

 

Gah... going on almost a week now and mine is still listed as 'In production'. C'mon Dalienware.. this waiting is killing me.

 

i think he ment sandy bridge new intel cpu

 

Lol.... I was being sarcastic

 

lmao .. the wifes been going on about holidays for weeks .. beaches on the mind obviously


I actually think Sandy Beach is much better