Hardware heaven review the M11x R2

Alienware M11x R2 Review - Conclusion

Pretty good review in my opinion. They provide solid data on the benchmarks.

 

Would love to know how they achieved over 5 hours of battery life on the Balanced power plan.

/skeptical

 

-top notch display
-Switching between GPUs was seamless
-battery life? The answer is very little. The performance of the new M11x was very close to the original model

lmao

 

Even if some of the numbers are a bit questionable, I still think it was overall a good review.

Overall, HH is my 5th favorite review site, preceded by Gizmodo/Lifehacker, CNET, AnandTech, and Atomicmpc.com.au.

 

switching between the gpus is seamless, dunno what everyone complains about lol

not being aggressive.. just saying!

 

Probably lowest brightness settings and... No, I don't see how.

 

I would go along with the battery timings, having sat in a hotel room watching videos on battery, mainly 720p such as Eureka & Warehouse 13.

Another thing.. they mentioned having 1333MHz memory, so I checked mine and yep I have 4Gb of the stuff too Nice to know even though it is only running at 800MHz.

 

ROFL I don't know what they're smoking but I want some of that.

Their battery life tests are awkward. Why would you want to watch HD movie on GeForce? Integrated Graphics Intel HD does the job equally well, unless you need an HDMI output. On IGP you can break 5hrs by watching HD video.

And yeah 5hrs on Balanced... doing what idling?

Not saying its not a great machine, aside from few weaknesses. Display is pretty decent imo, usable, but certainly NOT top notch. Unless they've been using CRT displays before m11x.

 

HI all, i handled the HardwareHeaven M11x and M11x R2 reviews and thought I would drop by to chat through your comments.I really should tell you to come over to HH and post but hey, i'm in a generous mood

Regarding the battery life, thats going to be a tough one to work through. I didnt do anything particularly special but i'm sure we all know its going to be dependant on the CPU used, SSD vs Mechanical etc. I also noticed from speaking to someone who emailed me (maybe one of you?) that Alienware seem to be using different batteries in the R2. I have a Samsung one, he had another brand. Its difficult to say without having both if there is any difference in performance between the two.

I will say though that under the same conditions, for me, it wasnt much different to the original M11x with the configuration I had of that model.

GPU switching... this could well be down to the drivers used. For all our testing we completely wipe machines and then do our own build on them. This involves the latest chipset drivers, RST drivers, Intel GFX drivers (June 2010) and Nvidia drivers (258.96 modded to work). With that combo it worked really well for me, to the point where i wasnt sure the GeForce had enabled at first and I had to run a few games to check it was the active GPU. All of the above drivers are newer than those found on the Dell support site, if you havent already. Give that config a shot.

You may also not have noticed that we are using the latest BIOS from Dell, I had assumed it would be on their site but having checked now it seems A01 is still there. We have A02 which could do anything from tweaks to improve power use to optimisations for Optimus. I havent seen the release notes but it will be interesting to see what changes for you guys (if anything) when Dell/AW make that build available.

Screen quality/Brightness: Brigtness was adjusted so it was comfortable for the environment I was in at the time (15x15ft room, lit by 2 daylight energy saving bulbs). Clarity and colour quality was exceptional for me, especially when gaming but this is also a very subjective point. I see a lot of laptops every year and rate the M11x highly in this regard. Some people might not find the gloss screen suitable for their needs though, i accept that. For me, no complaints and of all the screens I have seen recently this is the best.

Think thats it for now... i'm actually in the process of wiping the machine again and getting it into a state I would use on a day to day basis with the aim of seeing how the battery etc is for me. If i get time to complete those tests before Alienware take the review sample back I'll report back on my experiences.

Any q's feel free to post here or on HH.

 

Thanks for the insight Veridian!

 

Thanks for the info, esp. about the driver config you were using. Most helpful and appreciated.

 

Yea, thanks for the follow-up, good info.

 

That's interesting. We'll have to start tracking this here to see if there's any appreciable difference.

That's big news! I suspect that this could very well account for the difference your test system saw regarding battery life. There are a lot of us here that have been running the same set of drivers that you've reported using, so I'm willing to rule them out as a reason for the difference in battery life.

We've had reports of 3 different panels being used in the M11x and quality is said to be significantly better on some of those.

SEC5441 - Samsung
AUO105C - AU Optronics
LGD021E - LG

Could you check which one you have in the review unit?

Would love to hear back from you on this. Real world performance is what we're all basing our opinions on here, and as a rule the R2 is falling short of the R1 by about 90 minutes.

Thanks for taking the time to shed some light on your findings. Great info!

 

HI, its the AUO model I have. Based on the various threads here i've prioritised that as a retest for this evening to see if i can see any problem now that I would specifically be looking for one.

I tried a test just now in daylight, simply switching to a solid black desktop and it seemed fine although its hard to tell when the sun is blazing! The only thing i did note was that as i looked from higher up angles the black did start to grey (as expected). At the optimal angle though it seemed fine. Will report back this evening provided I get time to check.

Also, for the battery, last night i gamed at 13x7 for 1hr 15mins on StarCraft 2 with high textures, medium detail. It was an online game vs AI and WLAN was connected, lighting on and a mouse/ USB headset were connected. Power was down at approx 65% after that 75min session. so we are looking at roughly 3.5hrs there had I continued.

 

Veridian,

What was your SC2 benchmark exactly? (campaign levels, 1v1, 2v2?) Your fps seems dramatically higher than mine, even when I use medium settings (m11x i7).

Also, where did you get the new drivers (the ones not on Dells site)?

Thanks for the review. A very enjoyable read.

 

Hi, the benchmark in the review was a single player level. Essentially beacuase it is easier to control than PvP. We can isolate demanding sections of gameplay and use that over multiple runs to ensure repeatable and correct results. That said, I have been playing PvP on the same settings without any framerate issues (Mainly playing as Zerg vs Terran on 1v1).

The drivers I used were from laptopvideo2go, using their modded inf to make the latest set work fine on the M11x.

 

OK, blacks... from the quick test I did this evening my initial thoughts of them being dependant on the angle were very true for me. Noticable greys when not angled correctly but when I take the time to do some screen positioning it becomes OK. A few tweaks of the Intel control panel (brightness/contrast) improved this further and gave me an end result i was happy with.

Not sure how much more I will be able to check though, AW are asking for the unit back now.