Official Site Bumtion Network: Review: Alienware M11x Gaming Laptop

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Review: Alienware M11x Gaming Laptop

Posted by Bumtion Network

Generally, anything that comes from Alienware’s stable is built for performance. One perfect example was the M17x that we reviewed some time ago. So, when we first saw the Alienware M11x Gaming Notebook for the first time, we were a little bit suspicious. We were like - “Are you serious, Alienware? An 11-inch gaming laptop?”

Furthermore, the outfit also claims that the M11x is able to deliver performance without sacrificing battery life. That bold statement pretty much defies the very nature of a gaming laptop, which would always prioritize performance over anything; including its battery life.

So, does the M11x able to deliver all those promises on our reviews desk? Well, jump in to find out the answer.

IN A GLANCE

The Alienware M11x with its lid closed. Check out the highly polished finish - certified thumbprint magnet.

It comes with a nifty felt case that can be use to wipe away all those thumbprints on its body.

The laptop with its lid open.

As per M17x and M15x, the keyboard's backlit and couple of other lights around the M11x can be customized using the AlienFX software.

Speaker, audio and 2 of its USB ports. By now, you should already realized that the M11x does not come with an optical drive.

Underneath the laptop. As you can see, the battery is located inside the laptop itself. Users have to open this whole plate in order to take it out. Don't worry, the instructions are written inside M11x's manual book.

The battery indicator.

Closer look at the laptop's fan.

INTERNAL HARDWARE

There are two processors options for the M11x: the single-core Pentium SU4100 and the one in our review unit, the dual-core Core 2 Duo SU7300; both are running at 1.30GHz but the SU7300 spots a bigger L2 cache. As these two comes from the same Intel’s Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) family of processors, they are one of the factors that contribute to M11x’s long battery life touted by Alienware.

The second part of the puzzle would be the laptop’s dual GPU system – the Intel GMA 4500MHD GPU which is integrated within the laptop’s Intel GS45 Express chipset and also, an NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M as its dedicated GPU. As you might know, the integrated GPU eat less power compared to dedicated but doesn’t perform as good as the later. On M11x, you can switch to either GPU at any given time using button combination regardless of whether the laptop is plugged to a power socket or running on battery.

Further customization can also be made to its RAM configurations and hard disk drives, which comes in a number of configurations including the 8GB DDR3 RAM and 256GB solid state drive that is equipped into our review unit. As for the rest of its hardware, they are pretty self-explanatory through the specification summary below.

Before we move on, we would like to add a little bit on M11x processors. As you can see, 1.30 GHz clock speed is quite slow for a gaming machine. Thankfully, the Alienware M11x has a built-in overclock function that can be activated through the laptop’s BIOS. In our review unit, the function pushes the SU7300's clock speed from 1.30GHz to 1.60GHz. For the sake of standardization, we are going to stick with the overclocked speed throughout this review.

REVIEW UNIT SPECIFICATION

PERFORMANCE TEST
Synthetic Test

PCMark Vantage

The blazing fast solid state drive in our review unit scored very high in HDD test and contributed significantly to the overall benchmark score. So, don't be too shocked if you found the score is a little bit high.

3DMark Vantage

Since the 3DMark Vantage refuses to run on M11x due to its resolution, we hooked the laptop to our 24" Dell G2410 LCD Monitor instead, through M11x's VGA port. The laptop was able to churn out a rather good FPS rate in Entry settings but fell down considerably when Performance settings were in use.

Gaming
Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Resolution: 1366x768 / Quality: High

These statistics were recorded using the popular video capture software, FRAPS, during the game's first 10 minute or so in the first mission of single player's mode. For those who are familiar with the game, it was from the start of the game (in the boat) right until the squad met the scientist. Interestingly, the average FPS didn't change much even when we lowered down the game's graphic settings.

Colin McRae: DiRT2

Resolution: 1280x720 / Quality: Medium + 2xMSAA

Again, these statistics were recorded using FRAPS for a duration of 2 laps at The Battle of Battersea. As a rally game, DiRT 2 contains an extensive amount of natural elements such as dirt and water that pretty much pushed M11x to its limit. Not to forget, this game also has excellent damage models.

Company of Heroes

Resolution: 1366x768 / Quality: Set A

This game is rather old but it still able to give the M11x some challenge when the graphic settings were set to maximum. However, the laptop has no problem running the game smoothly when we lowered down its settings. These figures were given by the game's built-in benchmark test.

Battery Life

For battery test, our ultimate goal is to find out how fast we can deplete the M11x's 8-cells battery. For that purpose, we set the laptop's power profile to High Performance with maximum screen brightness and Wi-Fi turned on. We also opted for the NVIDIA discrete graphics instead of the laptop's integrated graphics.
Battery Eater Pro v2.70

The Battery Eater contains two type of tests which can be used to determine a laptop's battery performance whether it's on maximum (Classic mode) or minimum (Reader's Test) workload. As our objective is to deplete the M11x's battery as quickly as possible, we chose to use the Classic mode. It took the test around 2 hours and 47 minute to totally empty the battery on M11x.

Practical Test

This part of the test is also very straight forward. In the first part of the test, we made sure the battery capacity was full and we then played Battlefield: Bad Company 2 until the battery runs out completely. Same goes with the second part of our practical test which focused on productivity, we made sure that the M11x’s battery power is filled to the brim and we then fired up around 10 tabs of Google Chrome that involved occasional YouTube together with constant Internet browsing; two Microsoft Word 2010 Beta documents, and 2 image manipulation jobs on Paint.NET.

The outcome of the test was pretty good, if not downright impressive. The battery managed to contain our Battlefield session for close to 2 and half hours, while it flats out exactly at 4 hours mark during our productivity test.

PRICING
According to Dell Malaysia's website**, this particular unit costs around RM 6,599 - which is a little bit ridiculous, in our opinion. For that kind of price, we would rather go for M15x instead. While the review unit benefits quite well from the luxurious amount of RAM and speedy solid state drive, replacing them with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard disk drive would resulted in a more economical price of RM 3,999.
We rarely comment on product pricing but we thought that readers out there should be made aware of this.
**as of 12:10am, 20th March 2010
CONCLUSION
Even though its gaming performances might not able to satisfy those hardcore gamers that prefer maximum graphic settings all the time but for the rest of us who are content with slightly lesser graphical flair, the M11x did live up to its expectation. It also did fairly well in our battery tests considering how intense those tests were. Thus, it is pretty safe to say that it would able to last even longer if its power savings features are enabled.
All in all, the M11x is a rather unique offering from Alienware. It is not the best gaming laptop around but it is still mobile and powerful enough for you to get your game fix anytime and anywhere you like.
Pro: Built-in overclock capability, good battery life even with high performance settings, highly mobile gaming machine, acceptable gaming performance.
Cons: No optical drives, pretty heavy for its size, highly reflective display, polished body is too prone to thumbprints, gaming performances not for picky hardcore gamers.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: CPU detail is wrong. Both options are dual core and the extra 1 meg of cache in the SU7300 does not make a great deal of difference to performance. Ram options and HD options are a better bet. The CPU is advertised as 1.73 some programs show that and others 1.6 so still not actually sure what the true overclock speed is.; May 5, 2010 at 6:39 AM
Laptop Review said...: Alienware finally joined the netbooks range.; June 12, 2010 at 9:41 PM