m14x for working

I am thinking about buying a m14x more for working than gaming.

Prob im going to play rarely on it since I got a huge gaming desktop at home and M14x doesnt seem to have a superb hardware for gaming but the enough for running somethings at high nowadays.

Still, I am going to buy a laptop and I really like the alienware design and since Im into gaming for more than 15 years its really my passion and I would love to carry a machine made for "people like me".

I was in doubt about xps 15z or this m14x but now Im tending to the m14x so I wonder if there is someone which owns it and carry it everyday for working and stuff and not for real gaming.

Just in case, I will dive into dual boot because I usually work at Linux distros but I dont think it will be a hard tweaking to get it working, will it?

 

get the 900p screen on the m14x if you don't play a lot game on it.

 

The Alienware M14X has a great build quality, great keyboard & touchpad, very strong performance, and it's really stylish. the 1600*900 screen is sharp and good enough for normal use, and it can be carried around easily. it will give you around 4 hours of working time on normal stuff, and it will blast out the very modern games when needed. True, it has a very loud fan, but this very fan is the reason why the system remains cool.
Another thing you might like about the alienware is that it can be easily upgraded, you can easily change the hard drive to SSD in the future if you like, you can add more ram, change the battery yourself, and another cool stuff you can upgrade on your own in the future.

in the end, it's your call. in my opinion the m14x is better worth for the money than the 15z.

 

I take mine to work and to be fair watch more movies than I do gaming as I too have a gaming pc at home.

Its nice because I can had a game if I want but has the grunt to do other stuff.

Personally i dont find it too cumbersome to carry around, had a couple of big clevo's and m1710 in the past. They are like carrying lead about.

It is quite stylish in some ways, definitely way cooler with the lights off.

 

the m14x is rather loud at times, and it runs hot. Putting hot objects on your lap can reduce sperm count and cause peremeant reprodcutive damage. if you are a male.
snopes.com: Laptops Reduce Sperm Count
Scroll down to where it says the study and notice it was by SUNY. Not scopes.com, permanent reproductive damage... Something that will make your life miserable imaging not being able to have your own children. Imagine all of that having to go through just because you sat a laptop on your person 2 or more hours a day.

So if you use this on your lap please for the sake of your two best friends use a chill pad.

 

Just to add, I am using mine for work as a C# developer and can say that both the keyboard and screen 900p version is fine for that. sometimes wish they had a little higher res screen but can always hook up an external for that. The weight of the laptop is abit of a downer as it weighs more than my 15" macbook pro, all is good as long as you have a rucksack. Battery life is appox 3 hours of working.

 

Croatoan I hope you don't mind if that goes in my sig.

The m14x will work perfectly for working, it's got all that power under the hood. I recommend specifically the 900p screen and an SSD for fast booting. Although I would upgrade the hard drive aftermarket since AW's hard drive upgrade is overpriced.

 

No not at all was chuckling to myself when I wrote it. Two good examples of ignorance is bliss lmao

 

A few questions, because I'm debating between the M14x and M11x (leaning towards the M14x).

1) What is battery life in a "word processing"/internet browsing/wifi on/AlienFX off environment using onboard graphics? Is it as advertised (6 hours)?

2) How is heat in that scenario?

3) Does the automatic graphics switching actually work? I had to find a utility to force onboard graphics on my mother's MacBook Pro because iPhoto running in the background was forcing the computer to use the video card. I do NOT want that scenario.

The most processor intensive work I do is encoding basic video, the rest of the time I'm working in Word and Excel and looking up work related things online. My current laptop is luck to last 2 hours. I need 5 hours on a charge ideally. I also work in a car a lot. Granted, if ambient temperature is hot, any hardware is going to stay hot but that scenario not included, I'm under the impression that for light tasks/onboard graphics, Alienware's do very well in the cooling department. Is that truly the case?

 

1. Its more like 5hrs in light use. If you turned off wireless you would probably get over 6 for word/excel/music

2. Heat is non existant under light load, it will only start warming up if encoding/gaming heavy flash etc.

3. So far the gfx switching has been working a treat! Plus if there is an application enabling/not enabling the nvidia you can go into the nvidia control panel and change it. Like you I have a MBP and use gfxstatus to force intel. Sometimes this will occur though as certain programs (ie photoshop) will enable your gfx as designed because many people will want the gpu to help accelerate the job. I make sure all non gaming apps/browsers/video players use intel gfx on my m14x

 

That's good to know! My Aspire is burning me alive as I type this.

What about on the M11x? Anyone know if battery life is significantly longer? I doubt that low voltage i7 could really do the job on encoding anyway. I don't game a lot at all. If I didn't do any video work at all, I'd lean towards an 14x with the i5 or possibly the M11x with the i7. Being that I do, I almost want to lean towards the 2.3GHz i7 in the M14x even though it's quite the ripoff on price.

 

For laptops such as m14x the cooling system has a combo capacity for the GPU as well as the CPU. That means a single fan driven combo heatsink. This is a good thing if you want to drive only one of these parts since the system will cool it faster than a dedicated system would.

 

Thanks for all the opinions! Looks like the M14X is really what I am looking for.