Hanging out for Alienware’s ultraportable M11x laptop? Well, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s now available for pre-order over at Dell. Yes, that’s right, you still won’t get your grubby little mits on it until March. Still keen? If so here’s the low-down on the M11x
Not a lot to write home about but the price tag is only $800. Battery life is rumoured (by Dell) to be around 8.5 hours which is pretty good these days. As with all Dell products you can add on, err, add-ons for a price. For example, doubling your memory to 4 GB will set you back $50, $150 will get you 500 GB of HDD whilst a cool $570 will snag you a 256 GB SSD. If the Alienware M11x ultraportable laptop sounds like your cup of tea then stroll on over to the Dell website.
Not convinced? Then check out these reviews from CNET and PocketLint. Plus here’s video from Revision3 taking a quick look at M11x at CES 2010.
What happens when you overclock a 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 to 4.0GHz? You get the re-vamped Alienware Area-51 ALX, that’s what. The backroom boys at Alienware have ramped up the ALX to a stunning 4.0 GHz of processing gaming speed. 4.0 GHz is described as the processor’s “maximum stable output” and just to prove how extreme 4.0 really is, the unit comes with a liquid-cooling system to prevent meltdown mid-gaming session. Needless to say its other specs are just as exciting
* choice of twin NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GPUs or an ATI CrossFireX configuration with dual ATI Radeon 3870 X2 cards
* up to 4GB of 1,600 MHz Corsair Dominator DDR3 memory
* two 500GB HDDs in RAID-0
* dual-layer DVD burner
* dual ethernet ports
* optional Blu-Ray burner
Now for the downside, the basic model with one video card, 1GB of RAM and obviously without Blu-Ray burner will set you back over US$5,500. Ouch! Of course tacking on a few more bells and whistles will sky-rocket that tag up over the US$7,000 mark and that’s before you start looking at monitors and speakers. Not for the financially faint-hearted. However we’re sure that the package matches its price tag in performance so once you’ve fragged your way through your first session, the dent in your wallet will just be a distant memory.
The guys at Alienware have squeezed a couple of 320 GB 2.5 inch drives into their Area-51 m9750 and Aurora m9700 models. This makes these notebooks the first to sport such a capacity and if you were so inclined to have 640 GB of HDD space available you could squeeze in an amazing 163,000 tunes or 160 movies depending on what your passion is.
On the downside the Area-51 model weighs in at a hefty 8.5 lbs which doesn’t exactly make it a lightweight laptop but then who’s going anywhere when you’ve got so much music and vid to enjoy! It also sports a hefty price tag with a required US$2,400 just to get you the base model with 640 GB of storage. There’s a Solid State 128 GB option available too.
With the increase in popularity of external hard drives and their ever increasing capacity you may have thought manufacturer’s would have given up on trying to squeeze more capacity into a notebook but apparently not. So if you’re looking for a grunty notebook with copious amounts of storage you probably can’t go wrong with one of these offerings from Alienware. Oh yeah, deep pockets a requirement too.
Samsung have announced that their 64 GB solid state drive (SSD) has been snapped up by Alienware and Dell and is now available in the manufacturers notebooks. Dell is offering the drive on its XPS M1330 ultra-portable notebook and Alienware have got dual SSDs tucked away in its Area-51 m9750 gaming notebook along side a spinning 200 GB oh-so-yesterday HDD.
Despite only having a 64 GB max capacity - that figure will, as with all figures techie, increase over time - SSD does boast a number of advantages over its older sibling the HDD
* No moving parts, so less bits to go wrong
* Noise free
* Produces little heat, always a bonus with a lap-burning laptop
* Handles shocks and knocks better
So hats off to Samsung for getting this little sucker out into the world, another step forward in the endless quest to squeeze more stuff into less space.
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