Alienware m17x Hands-On

The Alienware m15x was one of the fastest systems to ever cruise through our offices, and although it had some heat issues, we were pleased with what the fastest 15-inch system we’d ever laid eyes on had to offer. Now enter the 17-inch version, appropriately named the m17x. For those who are worried about overheating: I ran the ATI Tool and GPU-Z for 20 minutes and found that the graphics cards had a peak temperature of 77-degrees Celsius. Hopefully the BIOS in the m17x maintains better control of the system’s fans than the m15x did.  Get this though: the power brick was 114.5 degrees Fahrenheit when we shot it with our temperature gun. So far, no signs of cracking, at least. Check out the video below to see more.

Most features remain the same as the m15x. The system still has an Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 clocked at 2.8GHz, still has 4GB of DDR2 SO-DIMM clocked at 667MHz, and the hot swappable 2x Dual-Layer Blu-ray drive that can be exchanged for a second hard drive. However, it trades the measly 200GB hard drive of the m15x was traded out for two 500GB 5,400rpm drives in RAID 0. And more importantly for gamers, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTX discrete graphics cards were replaced by newer 9800M series cards, with SLI enabled. By comparison, the new 9800M GT series offers the same amount of processor cores (96 cores per card) as the 8800M GTX series, but that’s just shy of the new 9800M GTX cards that offer 112 cores per card, and are not available currently from Alienware. You can output to a monitor or your TV using the side HDMI port, or through an included HDMI to DVI adapter. Other ports include optical audio, S-video out, HD TV tuner, microphone/headphone, audio-out, three USB ports, FireWire A/B, Express Card, a lock slot, Ethernet, and a 7-in-1 card reader. The unit comes packaged with a Bluetooth remote which you can use to control Windows Media Center. The m17x has the same customizable keyboard and area backlighting as the m15x, which can be changed easily using Alienware’s proprietary ALienFX System Lighting software. We fired up Crysis for a few minutes today and were able to run the high-intensity game with the graphics on “very high” until we got into a serious firefight. We expect that it will cut through the graphics on “high” like butter, but stay tuned while our benchmarking continues.