Alienware M15x Allpowerful Review!

A review from DriverHeaven!

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews.php?reviewid=843

pretty interesting stuff! what do you guys think?

 

Think this was posted up a while ago. I'm still waiting on a review that posts some specific battery life numbers under different settings.

 

It looks good. The review was definitely thorough. I'll believe it when I see an actual customer that is happy with it and it performs they same way for them as it does for the reviewers. The Area51 m15x looked promising before it was released too.

 

2 hours of battery life, that makes me sad.

 

I predict that the m15x is actually going to have about 3 hours battery life and hopefully a little more with the 9 cell, the review was not too in depth about the settings used while doing the battery test

 

that unit was using the 9 cell battery.

 

Yeah I am aware that he states he has the 9 cell, I am saying hopefully with the 6 cell and some decent battery settings you can pull 3 hours, while he says he has the 9 cell he does not mention stealth, alienfx, or brightness settings other than "balanced" setting

 

The M15x looks kinda clunky. If it would have been slim and light, it would have attracted a lot of attention.

I have laid my hands on some good dell systems, but even the XPS 1530 seemed cheap. Haven't had the chance to meet the XPS 13 or XPS 16 yet. I don't seem to like dell systems much.

I wonder what would happen to alienware systems.

 

I held the sxps 16 at my local BB and I did not like it at all I thought about picking one up when I was impatiently waiting for the m15x, its shiny and just feels too plasticky for my taste

 

and heat..we're still dealing with a gaming system here with a GTX 260M.

Good reason to stay away then. If you go into it with that predisposition you will be disappointed.

 

i was looking at the mobile GPU benchmarks. i wish they put ATI's 3870 as another option too. being an older gen card, i should assume its cheaper even while being faster than the 240M.

or i am missing the information that nvidia and dell got some kind of exclusivity deal with the new m15x?

 

I think the 3870 would have been more power hungry then 240 or the new 260m not to mention i doubt they would waste the time making a MxM3.0 3870 .

 

I just configured an m15x with a GTX 260m and a 1080p lcd and its at $1,900.00.. Thats not a bad price at the moment, I am sure it will come down abit in the next few monthes..

 

for the extra 400.00 The ssd option is well worth the money. You cant get it anywhere else for that price.

 

ah this is the information i needed, the adapter is MxM 3. as far as i know, the 3870 power consumption is between the two (as the 3870 and 260M are both built in 55 nm tech).

anyway, my general point is that it would have been better to have more options

 

You know you're a nerd when you skip through the gallery pics to the insides. I feel kind of dirty.

It's a good looking laptop, but given the size of the thing, there should have at least been RAID, Smartbay, or Hybrid GPU. It's a step forward, but also a bit of a drunken stumble backwards.

 

The SSD they offer is not very good. Only has a read of 100MB/s and write of 80MB/s.
Your much better off getting one of the SSD's from Crucial. The cheapest and best preforming. They have a 250MB/s read and a 200MB/s write speed.

 

I wonder how much you could overclock the CPU manually. If it allows OC'ing.

 

i know that you can overclock the RAM to 1600! though im not sure how much of a difference that would make.

 

wrong and wrong.....it is the Samsung 256 GB ssd.....one of the best on the market right now (Same as the Corsair P series)

It gets about 220 read/ 200 write

 

While the samsung is a very good drive, Sammy has yet to provide any fw updates.

This is a troubling fact because gc or trim isn't fully supported. So, once the drive gets full, there isn't a way to reset the LBA (to get rid of the performance degredation). Maybe secure erase works with it but I have yet to hear anything about that, not to mention that isn't a very good way to get performance back.

Great drive that will be short lived due to no future support....

 

I dont know where you got that info from but this is what dell told me when I asked them. The guy called to 2 different guys and asked and they both said its 100 read and 80 write. Thats still much faster then HDD's but the crucial is much more worth it.

 

and you actually looked to a person on the phone at dell for technical information.....that was a mistake right there. There are many members here who have that samsung drive and are happy with the performance (thus far)

Sorry if you did not realize it, but they are incompetent

What is more important is what Sleey0 pointed out about firmware updates

I will have a Corsair X128 shortly myself, so we will see how that goes for me.

 

I dont know but he called up 2 of their tech support guys for XPS/Alienware and thats what they said.

Ether way im going for the Crucial 256 GB SSD. It is the best! and the cheapest 256 GB SSD! (I think! I havent seen other wise yet)

 

How much are you getting them for?

 

I've posted benchmarks in the past proving the 220 reads.

 

Sorry for the triple post. Last I heard Samsung was releasing an update after Win 7 gets released. Has that changed?

 

Well, drives have been out for months now that use the samsung controller and there have been zero updates.

I suppose it is possible, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

Yes they don't release FW updates like OCZ does but I also have the summit drive which is Samsung controller and OCZ said they were told by Samsung no update until after Windows 7. I wish I had a link. I think it was in the ocz forums.

 

The summit is different than the PM800 in the M17x. It's not like all the barefoot drives where they are all the same.

It might work, but I wouldn't risk flashing the fw of a summit onto the PM800.

I think the only way it is going to work is if Dell or Samsung release the fw.

 

I could be wrong about the summit mandrake.

Not 100% sure it will work though....

 

I was just stating I heard from the OCZ forums that Samsung will release the fw after Win 7. So the assumption I made was it will be released for all their SSDs. Wasn't looking to "cross flash"?

 

Oh, ok.

I hope they do release something.