Alienware M17 Review - Detailed.

Alienware M17 Review​

Ok lets start at the very beginning. This laptop is for some gaming and some Photoshop/Illustrator/3D/Web Design etc.
I use Apple Macs, and I’d buy a performance over style any day, I doubt I’ll ever actually own my own Apple Mac, I see now use for their existence . It’s going to go from college to home a few days a week, but via bus or car so portability isn’t an issue.
I’ll grab some comparisons against my desktop PC which is a custom built system running a Q6600, 4GB RAM, 8800GTX, 3 HDD’s.
It needs to be powerful and have some real estate on the screen, my Dell 640m wasn’t cutting it, especially with a 1280x800 res, 1GB ram and 1.6GHz Core Duo. And it just slowed right down and now the battery is dead.
I’ve read a lot of stuff about people moaning about the performance for this system, it’s cheaper than the rest by quite a bit, it still gives a decent FPS at a cheaper price. If you wanted more you should have paid more.

The M17 spec:
Graphics Processor : Dual 512MB ATI® Mobility Radeon™ HD 3870 – CrossFireX™ Enabled!
Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T9400 2.53GHz (6MB Cache 1066MHz FSB)
Display: 17-inch Wide-UXGA 1920 x 1200 LCD (1200p) with Clearview Technology
Fingerprint Reader: Integrated Biometric Fingerprint Reader
Keyboard Options: Illuminated Keyboard - English
Memory: 2GB Dual Channel DDR3 SO-DIMM at 1067MHz - 2 x 1024MB
System Drive: Single Drive Configuration - 160GB 7200 RPM SATA with Free Fall Protection
Operating System: Genuine Windows® Vista Home Premium - English
Notebook Tuners and Remotes: Without Media Center Remote Control or TV Tuner
Optical Drives: 8x Dual Layer Burner (DVD±RW, CD-RW)
Wireless Network Card: Internal Realtek Wireless LAN b/g Mini Card
Sound Hardware: Internal High-Definition Audio with Surround Sound
Warranty: AlienCare 1-Year Free Phone 24/7 and Collect & Return

Total came in at £1317 exc VAT.

Order date: 13th November
Estimated Ship date: 15th December

Phases:
1. 13th November 2008 (Thursday)
2. 14/11/2008 (Friday)
3. 17/11/2008 (Monday)
4. 18/11/2008 (Tuesday)
5. 27/11/2008 (Thursday)
6. Never saw it
7. Never saw it
8. Never saw it
9. 28/11/2008 (Friday)
Delivered. 1/12/2008 (Monday)
Thanks to Alienware for getting it to me 2 weeks before it was estimated to even be shipped, and thanks to DHL who managed to get it to my door before 12 on a Monday morning.

The Laptop:

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As we all know Alienware is well known for high end performance PC’s and Laptops, the M17 is a slightly cheaper Laptop then usual, but without dropping any of the design, it still has the great skullcap design and is subtle yet stylish. It may be a slight back away from the M17x, but that isn’t a problem I still love the look of this just as much. Packing the hardware it does this beast wasn’t going to be thin, or light weight, but then again it’s built as a desktop replacement for gamers.
Also might be a good idea to mention this is my first Alienware purchase, I remember when I bought my first laptop how much I wanted an Alienware one Now I have one, lets hope nothing goes wrong. *touch wood*.

Build and Design.

The Alienware M17 laptop is based on the OCZ White book which can be found around various retailers, although Alienware being the easiest place to purchase such a model from in the UK, the Alienware model features their unique skullcap designed lid and a matte black paint job. It may be as a few people say a step back from the styling of the M17x, and more towards the m9750 but that doesn’t mean it’s skimping on anything else.
Overall the unit feels well built and solid, the quality of the finish is great it’s nice and smooth and defiantly keeps fingerprints off.
The size of the laptop and the amount of stuff packed into it this laptop weighs in at about 5kg/13lbs obviously not something you want to be carrying about 24/7 but easily moveable if your travelling short distances or not very often.

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Screen.

The system features a 17” screen this can be specced to either a WXGA 1440x900 resolution or a WUXGA 1920x1200. I’ve picked the 1920x1200 screen and I’m sure many other users will too, unless they’re on a tight budget, of course 1920x1200 is much crisper and allows for full HD the 1440x900 screen will still do 720p HD and it will also be clearer to see maybe for those with bad eyesight.
The screen itself looks great its high resolution makes for a crisp display and it’s got some bold colours too. The viewing angles are pretty good, from the top after about 50° you start loosing some colour definition. Left and right the screen looks perfect as you go around until you hit about 60° off centre, looking from below up the screen does have a worse off viewing angle dropping some colour out, but it’s still impressive.
The screen is glossy and the plastic around it is also glossy, so it does reflect stuff well, in bright light though on a low brightness you can quite easily get distracted by the reflection, turning up the brightness to maximum can solve that to a good extent.
There is some yet minimal backlight leaking around the screen but nothing too drastic. Backlight on low there is no backlight leakage that I could see, maximum brightness there was some.

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The back of the screen features the Alienware skullcap design which looks great and has the Alienware logo in the middle which lights up in blue whilst the system is on, unlike the M17x/M15x the colour of this head can not be changed in the system. It can however be turned off if the Keyboard backlight is also disabled via Fn+F10

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Webcam.

At the top of the screen is a 2.0 Mega Pixel webcam, this webcam also is placed on a tilting mechanism allowing you to adjust where it looks without messing around with the monitor.
2 mega-pixels isn’t a huge amount but it’s more than enough for using webcam applications, taking your own pictures to spam yourself over social networking sites that plague the internet. Generally people aren’t going to be using a laptop or PC webcam for much more than doing that, so it’s up to the job and 2.0 MP produces a nice image overall.
The webcam can also be used for facial recognition as a security level where it can be combined with software to allow you to just display your face to the camera and log in.

Keyboard and Touchpad.

Like the M17x and the M15x this laptop also has a backlit keyboard, unlike the M17x and M15x this keyboard only has three colours, Red, Green and Blue. Where as the others feature thousands of colours thanks to Alienware’s AlienFX software. Although the R, G and B lights could technically be used to create 16.2 million colours like any monitor I doubt it will happen. Images - Red - Green - Blue - Off

They keyboard itself has a lovely feel and is responsive with some minimal feedback. It’s not like my G11 Logitech keyboard which I adore but it’s nice enough and isn’t weak. One thing that annoys me though is the layout. It isn’t a proper UK model. There left shift is oversized forcing the backslash between the Alt and Space Bar which results in a smaller Ctrl, fn and Windows key. The Enter/Return key isn’t the inverted L shape either it’s a long key which means that the hash (#) key is above it. When you get used to things like that it can be a pain.

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Along side the touchpad, or more to the bottom right corner of the top is a fingerprint reader, like the webcam this can also be used to secure the laptops user accounts. The fingerprint software flashed a message on boot about it having to be set up with a wizard, although it never told me what program needed to be set up and the message wasn’t clickable. I finally found it when I came to test it. I have to say, it works great the ability to log all your fingers means if you accidentally loose one somehow you can still log in.

Ports.

The M17 has a nice selection of ports these include:
• 3.5mm Headphone Jack
• 3.5mm Microphone Jack
• FireWire A
• 4x USB 2.0 (one the combo port)
• Optical Audio
• Coaxial
• eSATA/USB Combo port
• VGA
• HDMI
• Ethernet

It also includes a DC IN, 7-in-1 Card reader, an Express Card slot, Volume control wheel and a Kensington Lock gap.
Most of the ports are spread across the Right and back side of the unit, the Left has the memory card and express card slot, also the two HDD cages can be found along this edge including the air-vent for the CPU. The Back of the unit also has two air vents one for the CPU and one for the two ATi 3870’s.
One thing most high-end laptops have is a DVI port and considering the system is running two 3870’s it’s a bit of a let down for those who would like it, instead you’ll either use Analogue VGA or HDMI.
The front of the unit unusually supports an optical drive which can be kitted from a minimum of a DVD/RW up to a Blu-Ray drive. Sitting either side of the unit are some stereo speakers
Unlike most laptops there is no S-Video out port, which I often use with my other laptop and actually frequently use on my 8800GTX as S-Video to Component for Hi-Definition. Although the M17 makes up for the loss, with HDMI, allowing it to carry the video in full 1080p and audio as well.
The selection of ports is useful and easily adequate for most users, there is enough spacing around most ports so something can be plugged into each socket.
One interesting thing to note is that the USB ports are upside down, the two on the right hand side of the unit that is. The eSATA/USB combo port is the correct way up and the 4th USB port is rotated at 90°

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Sound.

The M17 supports 4 channel integrated sound, along with up to 5.1 support via the Optical Audio.
Two speakers situated on the front of the unit and a subwoofer located below the system offers the same as most other high-end notebooks, some may generally fall back on the subwoofer like cheaper versions, although stereo sound is standard in most laptops these days it’s up to how good it actually sounds.
I have to say that the M17 has a decent set of speakers, the sound didn’t distort or sound ‘tinny’ even when the unit was turned up to the max, which was impressive, then again the speakers do take up some nice real estate on the front.

The system also features a Digital Microphone Array which is situated on the bottom of the screen, it works fairly well and gives a clear sound, with no setting up it worked perfectly in-game with Left4Dead.


Performance/Benchmarks.

This Alienware is fitted with a T9400 Core 2 Duo CPU, running at 2.53GHz it also sports 6MB Cache, so where as the .27GHz of speed might not be much over the base 2.26GHz but the Cache is doubled from 3MB to 6MB, one thing that generally helps in Games and more demanding applications. Comparing to a Q6600 (at the shown clock speed) with 8MB of cache. I decided that I would run all these tests on my PC with only 2GB of RAM, seen as some of my older 3DMark scores were run with 2GB before.

These were the same in all tests.
M17 - 2GB DDR3 1066MHz – 160GB 7200RPM – 8.11 Modded Drivers
Desktop – 2GB DDR2 800MHz – 160GB 7200RPM – 178.24 Nvidia drivers

wPrime

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Considering wPrime takes advantage of multiple cores and a higher clock speed it’s no surprise the Q6600 comes out faster here.

SuperPi

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Again like wPrime, SuperPi loves higher clock speeds although uses only 1 core, so the 3.2GHz beats the 2.53GHz, but only by 4 seconds.

3DMark06

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When this was run on my desktop around a year or so ago it was running overclocked and Vista was at its minimum I tried to cut Vista down just as much here to get that same performance.

Falling at 2135 points behind the desktop system I’m saying that the drivers may be affecting it and the fact that the Quadcore CPU is adding 2000-3000 more than the dual core would to the score.
For a laptop that’s still a nice score.

**Update: Using the ATi 8.12 Drivers the system at the same settings, all stock gave a score of 12572.

3DMark Vantage

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Vantage is a tool that takes advantage of Vista and DX10, which makes the M17 a perfect candidate for its interrogation.

Again the M17 falls behind but it’s not a shock, by 900 odd points the M17 is still close to the desktop performance, but the lack of a Quadcore CPU again lets it down.

HDTune

Using HDTune 2.55, free version.
Comparing a 160GB WD 3.5” HDD to the M17’s 2.5” both 7200RPM drives.

Desktop:

Laptop:


The desktop drive holds a much more even speed without fluctuating as much although the laptop drive ends up with the better Average speed. The desktop drive has a faster minimum speed the M17 has a faster maximum speed. Access time is faster on the desktop drive by all of 3.7 ms not really noticeable.

Photoshop CS4 Benchmark

This benchmark is the driverheaven.net Photoshop benchmark. You can grab it from here - http://www.driverheaven.net/photoshop.php
Ill be comparing these tests on Photoshop CS4 on both systems. CS4 makes use of graphics cards for OpenGL rendering, so performance comparing the systems could differ on that as well as the CPU’s. Also comparing these results to older versions such as CS3/CS2 won’t be equal because of code re-writes etc. Also note that my desktop is using 4GB of RAM in this test. Giving Photoshop much more to eat on, there is also other drives as scratch disks for increased performance.


My desktop system flew through most of the stages in the test, only slowing down on a few of them, but nothing outrageous.

Looking at the M17 it fared pretty well. Beating the desktop system in two of the tests but falling behind in others up to 7.4 seconds slower. Along with the 3 second faster on one test and 1.3 on the other.
Overall the laptop was slower by 20.5 seconds. Still much better than most laptops in sure.

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Just to note when DriverHeaven.net tested a M17x system loaded with Extreme Edition x9000 CPU, Nvidia 8800 GTX M x2 (SLI), 160GB 7,200rpm and 2GB system memory (2x1GB), costing £3000. That’s 1700 more than this system, it finished these tests in CS2 with 108 seconds.

Cinebench 10

Cinebench 10 tests a CPU it allows it to render a 3D model. More cores allows the process to be completed much quicker as the image is split into sections for each single core to render. So once again more cores the better.

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The Single CPU uses only 1 core so it’s a easy way to compare clock speeds. Here we can see that the Q6600 at 3.2GHz is faster than a 2.53GHz core by about 40 odd second. When we turn it into multiple cores though the Q6600 slices through cutting its original time down to 1min 22seconds. Making it 3.36 times faster. The Dual core pulls the score down as well but obviously not as much, running in at 2:47. 1.91 times faster, almost double performance from the extra core.

Battery Life

A powerhouse of a laptop isn’t ever going to last for a long time, but the M17 does a good job of holding some power together for longer than some others. The laptop managed 1hr 50mins whilst I browsed the web, run on full brightness, with music playing at about 30% from iTunes. During this time I also installed Crysis on the system and at the same time downloaded 3DMark06. If you tried to get some performance it wouldn’t surprise me if you got over 2 hours.

Temperatures

Running the 3870’s in Left4Dead and other applications the max I ever saw was 74°C on the hottest card, the other was generally about 1-2°C cooler. For some strange reason Call of Duty 5 (World at War) pushed the temps of the laptop to something MUCH higher than any other application had by almost 10°C, giving me 82°C under load. Considering that they are air-cooled in a notebook the temps were impressive, compared to my 8800GTX which is watercooled they’re higher at load, but idle it’s cooler.

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CPU temperatures are easily acceptable for an air-cooled notebook. Slightly cooler than my heavily over-volted Q6600 on average. These temperatures are obviously dependant on room temperature which at the time was about 22-24°C. 90% of users won’t ever experience full 100% load under normal conditions, especially for prolonged periods. Whilst gaming the laptop kept about 60°C at maximum.

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Hard Drive temperatures might not seem hugely important, but they are. The hotter a HDD gets the shorter it’s lifespan can be. So the cooler the better, as every laptop on the market today has no way of actively air cooling a notebook hard drive they sit in a spot just heating up, at idle of 43°C the notebook drive ways much warmer than either of my desktop drives, and is a lot warmer than then when they’re in use as well.
A notebook cooler would be useful for such an issue as it would circulate air below the system to remove heat.

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Gaming.

Obviously this is one of the main points people purchase Alienware systems, they expect it to handle games well, after all that’s who Alienware cater for. The gamers laptops obviously aimed more towards LAN party goers, or people who might not want a full desktop. So this is where the system should shine. Looking at the 3DMark scores I expect the M17 to fall behind the laptop by about 10FPS especially with more CPU intensive games, we can see the system is certainly up to the task of demanding applications thanks to the 2.53GHz C2D CPU but not as good as the Q6600.
Now these results will be Mobile 3870’s against a desktop overclocked 8800GTX, the web will surely hold many other’s but I don’t have anything else to test on and along with only two PC’s only a small collection of games although I regularly play them, well except Crysis.
To compare and save time so I can play with this some more these results, except Crysis will be 1680x1050 only. The settings across both systems will be the same.
The 3870x2 is running with ATi 8.11 drivers modded for a mobile system. The 8800GTX is running on 178.24 which is an older driver but one I have stable performance with in my games.

Left4Dead

Left4Dead is a new Zombie survival FPS game, 4 player co-op through campaigns with continuously different AI and pickup locations. It’s a great game and well worth the buy, considering it’s a new game it isn’t overly demanding and therefore runs at a decent framerate. There are a lot of Physics in the game and some dynamic lighting with my 8800GTX supporting PhysX on the GOU there might be an advantage towards it there.

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Here we can see that surprisingly the 3870x2 keeps right on the heels of the 8800GTX. An average frame rate of 65 compared to the 68 of the 8800GTX. Easily playable at this resolution with all settings maxxed and x4 MSAA.

Unreal Tournament 3

UT3 was tested with my all settings set to the highest possible, which although looks awesome defiantly hurts the FPS, I also ran the game at my own custom settings on 1680x1050 to give an idea of the FPS increase between the lowest and the highest. The average FPS at lowest quality with .ini edits was a steady 120fps, maxing at 200FPS and no lower than 63.
Running the game with an uncapped frame rate. A 5 minute Deathmatch game playing with 5 bots (set to skilled) on Shangri La.

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Here I expected the M17 to fall behind like it did with Left4Dead, although I wasn’t so hopeful and thought it would be much lower. To my surprise the 3870s held their heads up high and pulled out the same average framerate as the 8800GTX a comfy 69 FPS.

Crysis

Tested using the Crysis benchmarking tool at 1024x768 and 1680x1050. DX10, Very High, High, Medium. We all know Crysis is more of a benchmark than a game for the majority of today’s systems, but that’s just why I’m testing it. When Crysis was released the 8800GTX was the second fastest nVidia card, beaten only by a 8800Ultra, which my overclocked card matched quite nicely.

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As you can see Crysis still sucks the life out of any system if you want to run this at a decent FPS your looking Medium settings at 1024x768 before you push a comfortable 60FPS average. The M17 tries to keep up but it just slows to a crawl and turns into a slideshow.

Call of Duty : World at War

I tested Call of Duty5: World at War by playing through the Semper Fi level of the game for 5 minutes with the settings all maxxed out. The newest Call of Duty, has gone back in time to World War 2 again. Stepping away from the modern combat of CoD4 it might not be as popular, but it’s still going to get played.
My desktop system flew flawlessly though the whole campaign when I bought the game without any hiccups, and the same for any online that I played. So it was time to see what it was like on the M17. After spending ages installing the game I finally booted it up and played the first 5 mins with fraps recording.

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My 8800GTX here outshone the 3870’s by quite a bit for once. And these aren’t the latest drivers, I’ve heard 180 ones improve performance but I’ve heard bad things about some stability in certain games. That aside the ATi drivers are newer but also have a huge chance to improve with CoD5. The average FPS was just over 20FPS slower than the desktop system. At the same time bringing the GPU fan to it’s maximum speed as the cards hung at about 80°C. The game was still playable and you could easily cut the settings back for more FPS.

Summary.

The M17 is as much as I expected if not more. For the price and performance it certainly offers, where as at the moment the 3870’s might fall behind other mobile solutions from nVidia, ATi are known to improve cards performances with their drivers, we can only hope. Saying that it’s easily putting out close to the same FPS as my desktop system that I built a year ago for roughly the same price.

It works and does what it should, at stock settings it’s great and can put a decent FPS out to any game today except Crysis. The options to kit it out with are extensive and you can make a cheap laptop end up being a serious beast.

Battery life for such a system is good holding out for near 2 hours. Although being such a size generally it’ll be sitting on a desk at home or in the office. It will cope with pretty much everything you throw at it.

I can only hope that Alienware sort out the BIOS to give those with Extreme CPUs the option to overclock, some software for things like the touch controls, and maybe a option to have more than 3 colours on the keyboard, the possibility is there. And I’ve even seen mine a teal colour as I jumped into the BIOS for some odd reason.

I’ve heard bad things about Alienware’s services, although the internet is just a huge media house, and generally only the bad stuff ends up there. Here is a first time user who had a great experience, and will defiantly consider them in the future.

Pros:
• Quality built system
• Decent price/performance ratio
• Stylish but not in-your-face
• Nice finish – rubbery
• Excellent screen
• Nice speakers
• HDMI
• Design
• Keyboard feel


Cons:
• Battery life – Not that you expect much from a system like this.
• Weight
• Cooling seems a bit lacking there are hardly any vents on the underside for the fans.
• Annoying touch buttons – no way to reprogram.
• Upside down USB ports
• No DVI interface
• Keyboard layout – Not UK.

Thanks for reading and sorry about the iffy picture quality. Hopefully it will help some more of you decide.

 

I hope you realize that the HDMI port IS a DVI port.

they carry the same connections.

differences:
DVI can carry 2 digital and one analog signal.

HDMI can only carry one digital signal with sound.

a small adapter turns that HDMI into a DVI-D single-link.

 

nice review, thanks

 

Yes i know HDMI is DVI but the fact my monitors aren't HDMI and they're DVI is the main problem. For a TV yea great. I don't like adapters.

 

This is a great review, we appreciate the time you took on this and we thank you for sharing your experiences with other members. I will also share this with my colleagues here in the office.

Thank you.

 

Isn't the onboard sound 7.1 capable?

Hear hear, on all points.

- F

 

Very nice review. Thank you for the time you put into it for us. Well done.

 

Very nice review. I"m feeling a bit better about my impending purchase, assuming Alienware ever gets their collective together with the ATI card vendor, keyboard vendor, etc and gets my system built and delivered.

The box I ordered is pretty much the same as yours, the difference being that I went with 4gigs of ram and 64bit.

I doubt that I will post as detailed a review as this. However, I am interested in which tool will best capture frame rates. My game of choice is Everquest2, which tends to be much more graphics intensive than most. I'm currently playing it on a dualcore 2Ghz Insprion 1710 with a 256meg nvidia card, so, I"m going to be really interested how the dual's and the 64bit os affect that process.

Thanks for the review.

 

nice review. you really spend time on it.

 

FRAPS is the standard. I've been using it for a couple of years now to do my benchmarking.

 

Thanks.

And yea get hold of FRAPS the free version is enough and allows you to do a timed benchmark, for example i set mine to 300 seconds and to log FPS and max/min/averages, that gets put together in a excel file.

It'll also show you the FPS in any corner of the screen when the benchmark isn't running.

 

I would like to add that the upside down USB is due to upside down motherboard which allow you to change cpu gpu and tons of other stuff from the bottom of the notebook, which doesn't require you to open the top of the notebook including removing your LCD.

This design is very nice.

 

very nice review/comparison..I hope you werent using the stock AW drivers. They need some upgrading for performance reasons. Anyhow, I appreciate the review, and the effort put forth. +rep

 

For the touch buttons the program in the M9750 downloads section MIGHT work. TRY AT YOUR OWN RISK...

+1 rep for you

 

if not the alienware drivers for the 3870, where do u recommend getting the latest drivers?

 

I spoke with Alienware today they said they are expecting 3870(with bios update) and backlit keyboards next week by the 10th they still expect befor Xmas delivery. I ordered the Quad core, dual 3870, and 4 gb cant wait!!!

 

Here's a great place..just use the mobility modder to adapt them to laptop cards.
http://www.driverheavendownloads.net/ati.htm

And, I like the http://www.donotargue.com tweaked drivers - no mobility modder needed

Also, the OCZ drivers here are "ok" - http://www.ocztechnology.com/drivers/OCZ_17_inch_DIY_Gaming_Notebook__OCZDIY17A2/ - no mods needed here either

 

Yea i was running the tests with 8.11 from ATi modded.

 

Only ati video drivers or some other else you`re talikng about here?

 

Well.. AW needs some tweaking as well

 

That was a phenomenal review...

Extensive pictures, excellent write up, benchmarks oh my!

Deserved rep..

 

Yeah, this was a lot more than what I had expected in a review. Good job on it!

 

Great review, thanks for putting that together! I have an M17 ordered so this only made me more eager to get mine.

Great Job!

 

Thanks, glad it's helpful

 

A good one there, +rep for you. Might even consider an AW M17

 

JellyBeans responding with an AW&m17-diss in 3... 2... 1...

 

LOL!!!
Whizzo thats sick....
mine is shipped...can't wait...
great review!!!

 

That's funny you say that whizzo, because he's currently in the AW onsite warranty thread dissing the M17.

 

Scotty- Can you get a picture of the bottom am curious about the fan situation/setiup? I thought there was one around here but havent seen it.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=325495

Here's a link to my review. It has pics of the guts.

 

thank you very much Scotty this is exactly what I have been waiting for, excellent work

 

good to see that they didnt mess up your gpus by leaving the tape on im look forward now to ordering one of these

 

It's very rare to see a professional review like this. Perfect full review man.

 

+1 great review but could you post a pic of the vents on the buttom since its cooled by 1 fan i wanna see how the vents are.

 

I linked to my pics of the bottom in post #30. One fan cools both GPUs, which is the big heatsink in the back, and another fan cools the CPU, which is the heatsink on the left of the user.

 

An awesome review man... Now that's what I call a review, that's along the lines of what I wanted fusionsenses to do when he got his...

 

How much noise does this model put out? Are the fans loud?

 

Just created my account to say thanks for the review. Been thinking on replacing my rather new desktop with AW's M17 with all the goodies. It seems to pack enough punch for games and video editing etc. and it's still movable and takes less space on my desk.

Thanks Scotty!

 

compared to ? a desktop ?

 

In games like Crysis and FarCry i guess ?

ATI's drivers are still immature, you can see that from the beta drivers

that one driver makes a lot of difference since ATI doesnt release a driver every 2 days. And note that this is just a beta driver.

http://www.techpowerup.com/77908/ATI...Available.html

 

Well i come from a 7950GTX so its not quite like that Used to have like 3 different drivers since some drivers work better in some games, likes Crysis for eg but have some issues with some other games.

Good thing about ATI drivers is that every release actually fixes a lot of things without making a lot of bugs in other games hence why there are 1000 drivers out there and almost every person uses a different driver

 

VERY slow? Even compared the Sager, the M17 is not what I would call slow. As far as temps, what is it you're looking for exactly? Cold air to come out of the exhaust vents under full load?

 

Regarding Far Cry 2 specifically, E-wrecked got around 24fps average when playing at 1920 x 1200 on ultra high settings with his X9100 using the 8.11 drivers (modded). After using the 8.12 beta drivers, his average was pretty much doubled (46 fps @ 3.33ghz, 51fps @ about 3.5ghz, 40-44fps at stock 3.06ghz). So yeah, the drivers were the issue. These drivers don't seem to have an impact on other games (i.e DMC4, Crysis, others), while some seem to (i.e GTA 4, though not by much).

 

actually, 77°C is nothing to worry about, regardless of if it's the GPUs or the (desktop) CPU.

 

temps are a bit tricky to compare since it has a lot of factors, like environment temp, cooler etc. Still 75-80c is acceptable.

 

High 90s C is where I start to get worried. My GPUs run at 85C, full load.

 

Will probably run way lower here environment temp is like 0c atm, so i guess like 20c inside ? and using a cooler too. So hopefully should be around 70-75ish

 

I've never owned a laptop like this before but am looking at possibly buying one. What kind of fan noise should I expect from it?

 

Not much (if any) if you undervolt it and use a good cooler.

- F

 

that is quite simply a ridiculous claim. you could not possibly hope to lower your temps to below 45°C (about where the fans kick in) simpy by undervolting and using "a good cooler". plus, the cooler itself will make fan noise as well, and it'll be on all the time.