**Official Alienware M11x Owner's Lounge**

If it's true it would seem Apple is falling way behind, laptops are all outdated, iphone is getting stale (same thing for 2-3 years), and if the tablet really is a giant 10" iphone for $1000 I don't see very many people buying it LOL

I guess I might end up picking up the 11x anyways if it's not too much bigger than other 12" netbooks or else hold off for awhile and see what others are coming out with in the near future.

 

Apple is hardly falling behind, I'd even argue they have a comfortable lead on the competition. No other phone is touching the iphone and they have an increase in MBP sales so... not sure where you get your ideas from

 

Apple never makes a pretense to keep up with the latest and greatest gaming power/technology in their computers. They build computers for quality and limited technical issues (nVidia 8800 fiasco aside, but that was an nVidia issue).

If you always want the the latest and greatest (and most powerful) laptop architeture, you will have to move away from Macs.

I passed my late 2008 unibody MBP (2.8) on to my daughter after a year (and with the release of Dragon Age and Modern Warfare2) as I knew it wouldn't handle the current crop of PC game releases at the settings I prefer.

...and why I went with the M15x as well. The GTX260 will run those and more at my preferred settings and I have yet to need a Crossfire or SLI configuration. When that day comes, I'll move on from the M15x.

 

I was looking at the JT too.. it seems the difference between the 310 and the 335 is greater than the difference between the c2d ulv and the ci7 um so I'll still be more likely to get the m11x

 

My thoughts exactly. Requirements for CPU usage have not gone up tremendously in terms of gaming, as even newer games just ask for a Pentium 4 3Ghz haha but GPUs are steadily increasing and more dependent.

 

Don't want to get off topic...I just ditched my Iphone for a Nexus One though

 

I keep finding bad news... Ah well. Same here. MBP was my first choice till the m11x showed up and now the m11x is being nerfed and the MBP is being left to gather even more dust... Goodness, think I'm jinxing the computers I want to buy?

 

I'd like to point out that, if notebookcheck is to be believed, the difference in performance between the ULV Core 2 and the ULV i5's and i7's is going to be pretty minimal.

In fact, the i5-520um looks to be about a 10% performance improvement AT MOST over the su7300.

To put it all in perspective, none of the ULV chips hold a candle to the high-end i7's, but all are significantly more powerful than the atom line. Here's the chart (ULV i-series at 6,9, and 10. ULV C2D series at 11-13, with the M11x using #'s 12 and 13, most likely).



I know everyone wants the latest and greatest, but quite frankly, after looking at this anyone who considers the c2d ulv a deal-breaker didn't know what they were getting in the first place.

 

So regardless of what we think, the difference isn't all that great? Its not really a dealbreaker. It just got downgraded from "MUST BUY ASAP" to "Wait for reviews". That's just me :laugh: In all reality the ulv processors are like really nerfed to start with?

 

Yeah, pretty much.

Not as nerfed at the atom, though.

 

Just hoping it can hold out at least for a year or two's worth of AAA game titles. Then I'll probably give my 1st gen one off to a sibling and get a refreshed version (hopefully)

 

@nuke737
Malaysian?
Are you a forumer in Lowyat.net too?

Im really hoping to get this machine once it released or maybe wait for a couple of reviews to buy it

 

Uh lol yep. Nope, not in lowyat. Sarawakian too. hehehhee. Any ideas what the price will be in RM?

EDIT: Staying up till around 2 am to get news of the apple event live. I is hardcorez.

 

hmm if according to US$ 1000 about Malaysian Ringgit 3.4-3.5k .. I dont know if it gets taxed..

Oh.. sarawakian? Mirian?

 

Youch. Hate the tax. Hoping its cheaper than the 13 inch MBP or around the same range. Nope. Kuchingnite.

 

lol.. good luck on waiting for the apple.. Im never into Mac OSX

 

Like the build quality, not the OS. Would have gotten the HP Envy for that matter but heck... RM7999??? Lol. Wishing the m11x would be available for order straight from the get go.

 

Any chance DELL is setting up the M11x to be the first to use Sony's 11 inch OLED screen???

otherwise the M11x is the dumbest thing I have ever seen.

 

yet another sarawakian amongst the community.

 

To those of you saying a i7 ulv wont make much of a difference I strongly disagree with you.

It has already been proven clock for clock the I architecture is 20-50% faster than the Core architecture.

Now the su7300 is 1.3 ghz(overclocking currently is only on Asus which is built in from the manufacturer and something Dell dosnt really do so dont hold out on that prospect).

If we had a i7-640um its 1.2ghz.

Given the base clocks I would say that might make around 10% faster for the new i7 processor.

But lets consider these factors:
The i7 turbos up to 2.8ghz and the su7300 does not turbo at all
The i7 supports hyperthreading so that makes 4 logical cores and the su7300 does not support hyperthreading.

Given those additional factors I can see a i7-640ulv performing on average 30% faster and in best case scenarios even 70% faster.

That is a big jump. Not to mention the greatly increased performance of the new integrated graphics that come on the I7. For those that dont know there is a huge difference between the intel new gen integrated graphics and last gen.

So yes there is a huge difference between having a core i7 processor and a core 2 duo. Maybe core i5 isnt as big of a difference but being Alienware we should hope/expect them to put in high performance cpu's, otherwise whats the point of paying more for less from a so called "High End/Boutique" vendor?

 

Yeah I agree. It's just about recycling old tech... I'm not interested in spending cash on Core2Duo

 

Even though I'm probably becoming known for these rebuttal posts, I don't actually enjoy doing them all that much.

Well, ok, I guess I don't really mind them either (other than how much time they take!)

To be fair, I said an i5 wouldn't make much of a difference. Even so, if notebookcheck is to be believed (DISCLAIMER: I'm assuming they are right, if they are not then my entire argument here is invalid), even the i7 620 isn't going to be much better (they are both ranked below the T5250 and T5600, which themselves are only about 10% above the core 2 ULV's). You need to get up to the i7 640 to see any big difference.

Yep. I don't blame people for wanting the newer tech, I'm just trying to point out that it's not really going to make a significant difference in the performance of the system.

I thought Alienware supported overclocking, but I could be mistaken.

Reasonable, although it's probably even a little better than that. Remember, the 640 is the high-end ULV - not the i5 that people were anticipating (even though that was mostly wishful thinking, anyway). The i7 640 would almost certainly push the price above the $999 promised, so I don't think anyone expected it.

The i7 640 only turbos to 2.266GHz, not 2.8GHz. See here for a comparison of Intel's ULV processors (no benchmarks, just specs). It is still faster, but not by anywhere near 70%. And again, nobody expected this cpu in the m11x - they expected the i5.

Which is completely irrelevant when the system has an nvidia dedicated gpu.

There's only a big difference if it's the i7-640, and even then it's less than 30%, not "70% in the best case". It still doesn't hold a candle to non-ULV chips, core 2 or core iX, and it still blows the atom out of the water. And I understand the sentiment that Alienware of all companies should be using the latest and greatest, after all they're Alienware . All I'm saying is that if you were expecting an i5, the SU7300 should not be a deal breaker for you since it's not really any less powerful!

Basically, if you don't think the Core 2 SU7300 is going to be enough for you, the i5 and probably i7 ULV chips would not have been either!

 

Ok you did say i5 in your original but even then Alienware should do better than that for a high end vendor. Asus UL30JT is confirmed to have the i7 ulvs and confirmed at under $1000. If Asus can do it I EXPECT it from Alienware.

I know they do on deskotps but I havent seen overclocking on laptops (at least factory overclocking).

Sorry I was looking at the lv variant not the ulv variant my bad.

Integrated graphics are entirely relevant. Lets say you want to do some WOW gaming. The new integrated graphics will have enough juice to run the game comfortably the old integrated graphics would not. So using the SU7300 would require you to switch over to dedicated graphics which suck huge amounts of juice cutting battery life down to 2 or less hours. With the new integrated graphics you could keep the power hungry nvidia off and likely still get 4 - 6hours of juice out of it. That is quite a huge difference.

I understand the ULV chips whether i7 or not dont hold a candle to full power chips but Im not comparing a ulv chip to a non ulv variant. Yes it will be a 30% gain or more going with the i7-640.

Its not necessarily that a SU7300 wont be enough today. But a 30% performance difference between the SU7300 and the i7-640 will be enough to make enough 3 years down the road. I dont purchase laptops every year or even 2. I purchase a laptop and use it until it is unusable. Getting a current gen processor will mean that the laptop will be useful that much longer.

 

Giant iPod touch at the apple conference...no news for MBP's. m11x looking like the best bet if you want small form factor and are looking to buy now. Curious what the dimensions of it are now.

 

Ok so what are the differances going to be between this and the LG P310 2.53 c2d, 9600m gt and 4gb of ram ?

 

LG gets a 1-2k lower 3DMark score. http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-LG-P310-Camini-Notebook.15859.0.html

 

The LG will have about half the graphics performance (14 vs 28 FPS, Crysis on High according to notebookcheck) and about double the CPU performance.

 

@ op and ck = We'll see the reviewers' and the first adopters' reactions and probably that would settle the score quite nicely, no?

@ blue = Freaking square slab (ipad) but no MBP. Cries

EDIT: Co-incidence? Maybe steve's behind it... http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget....092-rm-eng.jpg

 

No score to settle, I just pointed out that the i5 ULV really isn't much better than the Core 2 SU7300. cknobman made a good point that the higher-end i7 is a fair amount better than the SU7300, and as it is now it wont even be an upgrade option.

I think we've both made our points clear now.

 

i have my 9600m gt overclocked to about 7500k in 3dmark06, should i sell it and go for m11x ? ;P i love the looks and bat life, but p310 is well slim and nice too. New apple Ipad is a hugee fail for me, how can larger iphone be better than netbook? steve u just dnt make sense today. At least if they put osx on it, but i never been mac fan anyway although i love the iphone

 

Cross posted on the M11x Debut discussion thread:

New question out!

Question: Alienware announced a price for the Alienware M11x to be below $1000. How affordable do you expect a mobile gaming system of this caliber to be?

Aaaand the answer after you hand in your email yadda yadda...

The Alienware M11x, with over 6.5 hours of battery life and weighing under 4.5 lbs. will start at an amazing $799! Leave it to the folks at Alienware to enable truly mobile performance gaming at an affordable price.

Thank you for entering the Alienware M11x Sweepstakes!

---
That's the last raffle question right?

 

Agreed.

Im still crossing my fingers for that i7-640 option though!!!!!

I can wait 3-4 months (maybe more) as long as I know its coming.

 

This is probably a silly question, but has anyone here contacted Alienware to ask about the specs?

 

Cool, so it's official $799 like people have said. I have a lot of room to work with then considering I have about ~$1200 with shiping to spend on this thing haha

 

EDIT: Never mind, was a bit hasty at typing that. Its 7 am where I'm at.

 

So its i7 or bust? lol. Stupid maxiPad. Guess I'll get the m11x anyway lol.

 

LOL so I called Dell. The only information the rep could give out was that it will be released in the first quarter of 2010. It was worth a shot, I guess

 

Lol you could have tried to be very difficult and yell iPad a few times in between at them. But that probably wouldn't have helped. Nice try though

 

Anyone wants to guess the specifications of the $799 configuration?

Here's mine:

• CPU: Intel SU4100
  reason: since the SU7300 will be optional, the only logical lower end processor for this kind of notebook would be the SU4100. Also Mr. Moo and Darkhan hinted that and I trust them!
  
• Graphics: GeForce GT 335M
  reason: Alienware didn't talk about any other option. It better be there at this price or else!
• RAM: 2 GB DDR3
  reason: It's the minimum RAM expected in any notebook these days. Even netbooks are starting to ship with 2GB of RAM. Also, the models shown at CES had 2 GB of RAM.
• HDD: 250 GB 7200 RPM
  reason: Also that's today's standard on fully featured machines. (Well, except for the Mac Mini .)

 

Yea LOL a square pad not even a rectangle! Doesn't Jobs know that 1024x768 4:3 is 1980's technology? This could have been handy for web browsing and watching Hulu movies but there's gonna be an awful lot of black on that screen when you try to play widescreen movies LOL Not to mention it's gonna cost an extra 30 dollars a month to do it...meh even the tablet is a huge disappointment.

The m11x is looking like a supercomputer by comparison!

 

No Macbook updates bummed me a bit. I was really hoping for an i5 13" mbpro with a newer GPU to bootcamp but I may end up with an m11x after all.

I get a nagging feeling though that the m11x is going to have a really hard time living up to the hype when it lands in front of me in the real world. I don't know why, i just do.

 

Su4100 might have 280 or something smaller seeing as how the 335 is already a waste with a 7300 bottlenecking it no sense using it with a 4100.

If I had to take a guess though since it says Alienware on it it will be 799.00 for su4100, geforce 260, 1gb ram 120gb HD, moving up to 999.00 for 2gb ram 250gb HD geforce 280. Su7300 will be 1199.00 with 1gb ram 250gb HD and probably geforce 310 moving up to 1499.00 for 2gb ram 500gb HD and geforce 335.

Yea I'm bitter..so sue me

 

No Hulu since there isn't flash player intergration. Its hurting mate, hurting.

@ MAG = The aussies get 4gb off the get go, so shouldn't we get it standard too?

 

Same here. Either mr good ol' jobs has some flying pigs in his cabinet yet to be released or he's being naaaaasstie.

 

LOL Yea I forgot about the missing flashplayer plug in at one of the first web pages he showed on it It's starting to seem like due to the economy everything is just going cheap as possible to keep uninformed buyers purchasing these products because at first glance they seem like heck of a deal...and even when they're broke it's hard to pass up what they think is a heck of a deal.

Meh I need to sleep LOL been up since yesterday, stayed up to watch that Apple conference...I am probably not even making sense anymore.

 

Awwww... lol. Not even frikkin hulu... That's just sad. I'ma gonna wait and see if the universities start picking em up and subsidising em for students like some eco friendly project to reduce paper usage, then i'll probably get one. I already have an ipod touch 2nd gen so no need to a huge version.

 

The GTX 260M and 280M are both high end cards of the 200 series. They are much more powerful than the GT 335M which is a mid-range card of the 300 series.

I see the GT 335M being the only option on graphics.

I still think 2 GB will be standard at the $799 configuration.

 

MAG, those specs look in line with what I'd expect for a $799 default/standard config @ Dell.

Now, here's what I'm going to guess and say I will be upgrading to as most likely these options will certainly exist.

SU7300
335m
500GB 7200 RPM HDD (would consider a 128GB SSD if cheap + external HDD)
4GB DDR3
---
as for uncertainties, I'll go with
Intel 5300 Wireless card
I really hope Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR if not, micro USB-BT here I come.
Depending on cost and if available, a sleeve since I'm guessing this form factor is in between 13.3 and 10.1 so it might already be tough to find a good fitting sleeve =D
Oh and unless gray looks good, I'm going with fingerprint magnet black.
oh what fun it is to speculate!!

BLAAAAAAHHHHH

 

So... pay more and get less.. Don't quite see that happening. Alrightey, we'll see next week what everyone gets from good ol' dellienware ay? hahahah :laugh:

 

Yea Nvidia naming convention is rather confusing, especially when you've been awake for 2 days straight and start drinkingROFL. I'm goin to bed. cheers!