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Dell Alienware m15x - Aliens Beware!

By Aloysius Low - 30 Dec 2009

Alien Attack!

Alien Attack!

You'd expect crazy performance from this machine, and you'll not be wrong with your expectations. Given its specifications, there's simply no match up for this unit, though we do have some scores from two years ago from Dell's equally impressive XPS 1730M notebook that should give us a good idea on how beastly the Alienware m15x is. Together with the Acer Aspire 8935G, a pretty decent desktop replacement for comparison, we've put the m15x through the grinder with our usual battery of tests, from PCMark 05, PCMark Vantage and 3DMark06. And to see how it would handle for an actual game, we've also threw in Far Cry 2.

Notebook Comparison Table
Specifications / Notebook Dell Alienware m15x Acer Aspire  8935G Dell XPS M1730
Processor Intel Core i7-920XM (2.0GHz, with 8MB L2 cache) Intel Core 2 Quad processor Q9000 (2.0GHz, with 6MB L2 cache) Intel Core 2 Extreme processor X7900 (2.80GHz, 4MB L2 cache)
Chipset Intel PM55 Intel PM45 Intel PM965
FSB 1333MHz 1066MHz 800MHz
Memory 8GB DDR3 4GB DDR3 4GB DDR2
HDD 1 x 500GB SATA 5400 RPM 2 x 500GB SATA 5400 RPM 2 x 200GB SATA 7200 RPM
Video NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4670 NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT SLI

As the scores below show, the Dell Alienware m15x is simply a beast of a machine, with scores that blew every other machine out of the water that we've matched up against it. No other unit came close by a long shot. The m15x easily outperformed the competition for PCMark05 and PCMark Vantage scores, but what about 3D performance? Again, the results showed that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX260M of the Alienware machine came up tops yet again and while the PCMark scores were somewhat closer, the 3DMark06 scores just indicated that both units simply have a long way to go before catching up.

As for Far Cry 2 performance, even on Very High settings at full 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution, the m15x easily scored an average of 40.7 frames per second (fps), while on the standard test range of 1280 x 1024 pixels, it scored 48.57 fps - double of what the Acer Aspire 8935G could achieve. This is definitely more than playable, and if you're willing to crank down the settings to medium, expect to see even higher scores though the system is definitely more than capable of handling such high performance settings.

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9.0
  • Design 9
  • Features 8.5
  • Performance 9.5
  • Value 7.5
  • Mobility 7.5
The Good
Top-notch Performance
The Bad
Very Expensive
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