My m15x Experience

After seeing the m15x from Alienware I thought it was the ideal laptop for me, LOTS of power in a 15 inch laptop, ideal for someone like myself who likes to play the more demanding games and moves about a lot.

I ordered my m15x from Alienware UK on 26th February. I was away at sea at this time and I wasn't due back home until the 24th May, so I wasn't concerned about any delays. I followed with great interest the discussions here about the problems with the m15x and I was more than a little concerned that I had spent my money on a lemon.

The specs I ordered are as follows:

T9500 CPU
2GB RAM
1440x900 display.
8800M GTX
2x 200GB 7200 RPM HDDs
Vista Home Premium


Well my m15x arrived on 26th March, and when I arrived home yesterday I tentatively took it out the packaging it had been in for two months and checked it out. I checked the LAN port for any cracks, checked the movement of the screen hinges, checked the keyboard for flex, checked the AlienFX lighting.... all fine.

I downloaded SP1 for Vista, checked all the drivers were up to date and flashed the BIOS to x32, and installed 3dMark06........

Now according to the documents left on my system by the Alienware tech who tested the system it scored over 10,300 3d marks. When I run 3dMark 06 I got a little under 5,000. Hmmmm, what is going on here then. I scratched my head, started to think maybe I had got a defective system, and then realised I had my system in "Stealth" mode! After putting the system back to "high performance" mode and running 3dMark06 again I got 9,800 3d marks.

I was happy with that, so I started to install a few games. First up was my all time favourite Medieval II Total War with the Kingdoms Expansion. This runs fantastically well at maximum detail settings. Next I tried Supreme Commander, and that also runs brilliantly well in max detail. Finally as the ultimate test I installed Crysis and let the game auto-detect the best settings. It decided that my m15x could handle the "high" detail settings and lo and behold that also runs very well indeed.

Suffice to say I am very happy indeed with my m15x. I understand that many here are having problems with theirs, but there is at least one person out there who has an m15x that performs as advertised.

 

Glad to se you enjoying your system mate

 

Welcome to the forum Pielstick
congratulations on receiving a perfect working system. keep an eye on the 3D scores over the next few weeks and keep us posted.
i can imagine what it was like reading these threads about all our (especially me) bad luck we have had.
its great when we get some good news like this.
now go and enjoy your m15x as youve waited long enough for it.

 

Congratulations on owning the best 15" lapy in the world. Glad it's what you expected. If you have time to reply, could you tell us what resolution you had crysis running on when your settings where on all high?

 

well,you won in a lottery ,enjoy your beast

 

hey congrats. I have to admit that with the thread title I was half expecting another bad customer review, but it's great to see you got a good one and are enjoying it.

 

The M15x seems to be getting better and better.

 

Pielstick,

Congratulations and thank you for sharing your experience with us. Enjoy!

 

Welcome to the forums, Pielstrick, I see that it's your first post!

Congratulations on your system, enjoy it and I hope the good experience lasts.

 

Thanks everyone

Spadess, I was running Crysis at 1440x900. I am running everything at the native resolution of the display. I felt that the 1920x1200 display was too much for a 15" screen.

I'm just installing more games on it now, and I will report back as I try more stuff, but so far everything runs fantastically well. When I get a chance I will install Fraps and get some hard numbers for framerates. I have noticed that when the GPU fan kicks in it is a bit noisy and the air being blown out the back is pretty hot, but that means the cooling is doing its job!

The only slightly disappointing thing about it is the speakers which are pretty underwhelming. This is to be expected with laptop speakers though, and I will be using a decent pair of headphones with my m15x most of the time. I have a Dell 27" LCD at home, and at some point I will connect it to the m15x via the HDMI output and see what it looks like.

 

Fantastic thanks pielstick! I doubt youl really have any problems then if its running off the ground!

 

Can you stress your CPU for us?

Stress suing prime95 or Orthos, monitor temps using CoreTemp or ThermoFan

 

perhaps he can't get online...

 

It's glad to see a positive review amidst all the, unfortunately, negative ones ...

Btw Pielstick where do you work? At sea as what?

 

ClapClapClap....Good deal glad to hear pos feedback.
-J.B.

 

Lessaj7 - I will try that sometime in the next few days.

lightning penguin - I'm a marine engineer with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.

At the moment I have the following games installed:

Battle Of Britain II - Wings Of Victory
Lock On: Modern Air Combat with Flaming Cliffs Expansion
Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946
Silent Hunter III
Silent Hunter 4
Command & Conquer 3 with Kane's Wrath Expansion
Warhammer 40K Dawn Of War with Winter Assault, Dark Crusade and Soulstorm Expansions
Medieval II Total War with Kingdoms Expansion
Sid Meier's Civilization IV with Warlords and Beyond The Sword Expansions
Supreme Commander with Forged Alliance Expansion
X3 Reunion
World In Conflict
Crysis
Half Life 2 with Episode 1 & 2
Company Of Heroes with Opposing Fronts Expansion

I'm a big fan of flight simulators too and over the next few days I am going to install Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, Flight Simulator X and X-Plane 9 on the additional Smart Bay 200GB HDD.

So far this laptop eats everything I have run on it and I am very impressed. The real test will be Flight Simulator X which is a very poorly optimised piece of software that requires brute power to push it along. My previous laptop was the enormous HP Pavilion HDX9095, and so far the m15x absolutely blows it away in terms of performance.

Some more observations I have noticed:

When sitting in a dark room there is quite a bit of light leakage at the top and bottom of the LCD when the screen is black. It's only really noticeable in a very dark room and I can live with it.

There is a very small blemish on the chassis where my right wrist rests when typing. It looks like a small piece of debris became trapped when the lacquer was applied to the chassis. It's hardly noticeable though.

The glossy finish collects fingerprints and grease from my hands VERY easily, especially after I have been typing.

I have heard some people comment the buit in web cam is rubbish. My girlfriend reports the quality is fine when we have used it with MSN Messenger (although the HDX9000 has the best webcam I have ever used!).

I tried the HDMI output last night on my Dell 27" LCD. This screen has a native res of 1920x1200 and the 1440x900 res didn't look so great on the large screen. I wish the m15x had a VGA output so I could configure this display at its native res but again it's not a show stopper.

I'm running all my games at 4x FSAA and 8x AA. I don't think the higher FSAA modes are worthwhile on a 15" screen and 4x seems to give the best balance between image quality and performance on this screen size.

This is my second Vista system, and I learned on my last one that some of Vista's new features aren't at all necessary for a competent computer user. I disable User Account Control, Windows Desktop Search Service and Superfetch in order to make Vista much more snappy and avoid many of the incompatibility issues.

I'll see how I get on with my new m15x over the next few days, but so far I am VERY happy that I finally have a no-compromise gaming laptop that runs anything I throw at it!

 

I'm glad for you mate. Seriously am. Enjoy it

 

This is very heartening, my little beastie should be with me soon. Here's hoping I get a similarly fantastic experience!

 

could u explain your HDMI issue... cant u just change the output res of the HDMI to 1920x1200 and keep your main m15x monitor at 1440x900 ....

?

 

You can display at native res on your 27" LCD. I had a 1440x900 and displayed on my 24" 1920x1200 just fine.

 

Pielstick, thanks for sharing!!! keep us updated with FlightSim X. I've been curious as to how it works on our m15x's in real life usage...

 

I had it connected to a 60'' Pioneer Plasma @ 1900x1080p. My buddy and I took turns playing cod4 and CSS. No problem with hdmi, if ya do manually connect a 2nd monitor in control panel.
-J.B.

 

Wow playing computer games on a 60" screen must be alot of fun.