Alienware M14x: the Sound and the Fury
by Dustin Sklavos on July 19, 2011 12:35 AM ESTConclusion: Too Much By Half
When I say the Alienware M14x is too much by half, I'm not talking about the pricetag. Truth be told the price is actually remarkably reasonable given the excellent build quality, bling, and extra features. I'm talking about the configuration and cooling design, and these are things that significantly limit what you can do with the M14x.
If I were ordering an M14x for myself, I don't think I'd upgrade to any of the quad-core options. While surface thermals and internal temperatures aren't terrible, they aren't stellar either, and the more important issue is the fact that the fan is so loud under load. Just sticking with the standard issue, bottom rung Intel Core i5-2410M and 1.5GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M should help keep heat and the corresponding noise in check. Not only that, but I suspect gaming performance would only take a minor hit. The M14x is GPU-limited at the notebook's native 1600x900 resolution (a totally worthwhile upgrade), not video memory or CPU-limited.
And that really brings us to the central issue of the M14x: it just seems like Alienware overshot, not just with the review configuration but with the configuration options in general. I can accept the increased bulk and weight if it means a GPU like the GT 555M, but 3GB of video memory is gratuitous and unnecessary, and while Sandy Bridge has made major strides in bringing down power consumption and heat in mobile quad-core chips, we just aren't there yet. Ivy Bridge is probably the one we're waiting for, along with 28nm mobile GPUs.
If you can deal with the bulk, the potential noise, and the bottom intake fan on the M14x, there's an awful lot to recommend it. Gamers should definitely consider it as a portable option, and it's an otherwise well-built notebook that's just plain comfortable to use. The GeForce GT 555M is a force to be reckoned with in this class, too, offering the kind of performance we'd really like to see become standard. It's unfortunate that the GDDR5 version is hamstrung in a couple areas, as the extra bandwidth could be put to use, but for now the DDR3 model in the M14x is the preferred configuration. Hopefully GDDR5 will only continue to proliferate the way it has in AMD's lines, shoring up the memory bandwidth issues that make it hard for a good GPU to handle high resolution gaming. For now, the 555M is in the sweet spot for the M14x's 900p screen, and the M14x is a solid choice for mobile gaming.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
I agree with you on high-DPI being a problem for those of us with less than perfect eyesight (welcome to the world of 35+ year olds!), but the 1366x768 resolution itself is still an eyesore in the sense of being a pain to use. Windows is really targeted at higher resolution displays, and 16:9 widescreen didn't help the situation. I'd much rather have 1440x900 or 1680x1050 (or 1920x1280 or even 1280x800) than all the 16:9 stuff. 768 vertical pixels just doesn't cut it for me; just like 1024x768 went out of fashion about six years back, a wider version of 1024x768 isn't any better. Your 1280x1024 desktop display is a relief in more way than one I'm sure!Incidentally, I use a 30" desktop LCD at 2560x1600, and I have to set the DPI to 120 in Windows and deal with the various programs that don't work right with font scaling in order to use the LCD without eyestrain. And yet, given the choice, I still wouldn't go back to a lower resolution, lower DPI panel. It's the proverbial Catch-22: I need the higher resolution, but the higher DPI is difficult to see, but you can't get high resolution and low DPI unless you're running a 40+ inch HDTV. (And running a 30" LCD at 1920x1200 results in scaling blurriness, so I prefer to deal with the Windows DPI crud.)
FH123 - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
I can't really argue with that. We're basically on the same page - and I'm 46 - although I do tilt the other way and use my 8-year old XGA laptop screen most often. I like working with the machine on my lap.Age makes you cynical about progress. I recently evaluated a Thinkpad X220 with a great IPS screen, but quite high DPI at 12.5" and with 1366x768 16:9 resolution. The perfect example of the schizophrenic nature of progress, it also took 90 seconds to fully boot Windows 7 from a conventional disk. My 8-year old Northwood P4 (Thinkpad T30) boots XP in less than 1 minute including a virus scanner and full-disk encryption (also no SSD). Would I feel the benefit of SandyBridge if I moved on to it? Probably, but my old machine is surprisingly easy to live with. There are too many things, like boot / load times, that are not improved even with SSDs, for example Thinkpad applets and the Intel display driver UI that I suspect are written in .NET. There are others, like ever shallower keyboards and less-tall, low contrast screens, that are in fact regressing. Among screens today a 14" 1280x800 screen would possibly be ideal for me ... if it still existed.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
At CES 2011, Lenovo was demoing a ThinkPad Edge that could boot in under 10 seconds. Now *that* is a laptop I'd like to fool around with -- I was very curious what sort of tweaks they had made to get it to boot that quickly. Obviously there was no bloatware, but even so my desktop with an overclocked i7-965 and Vertex 2 SSD takes about 12 seconds to boot Win7, and that's not including the 15 seconds it takes to POST.FH123 - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
Yeah, this is why the X220 being so slow surprised me. I'm sure it had the "Lenovo Enhanced Experience" sticker, which I thought is partly about quick boot time. An SSD would have made a huge difference of course, but even so. Then, once you start using some of the Lenovo apps to, say, adjust your power management settings (on a Thinkpad T410s WITH AN SSD that I have), they can take ages to come up, i.e. several seconds. In my view applets like that should open up instantly. Lenovo Enhanced Experience is a mixture of the good and the awful. It possibly comes down to some manager not seeing that they can't write this stuff completely in .NET, Flash, Java or whatever they're using.There's a video on YouTube somewhere where Lenovo explain how they worked quite deeply with device driver manfuacturers to cut down the boot time. Of course they don't say exactly what they did and you can supposedly only reap the benefit from their preload. Based on my extremely limited experience I have to wonder whether that only works well on select demo machines. It must be hard rolling out the performance tweaks across every driver and BIOS revision.
sir_laser - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
Shoutouts to Faulkner and Shakespeare!FH123: So what you are saying, in part, is that it is very difficult to find high quality low DPI laptop screens in the consumer market?
FH123 - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
I must confess I haven't looked at the consumer market. I buy business laptops, usually Thinkpads for their keyboards. I have the impression that complaints about poor screens are universal though and have more to do with the manufacture and availability of those screens. There seem to be some markets where high quality screens are more common, e.g. tablets, workstation and large high-end laptops - as well as anything made by Apple. However try to find a decent screen in a mainstream 14" Windows laptop and the situation is dire.Beenthere - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
...but refuse to buy it with an Intel CPU. Alienware told me they do not know if or when they will be using Llano APUs but this would seem like a smart move for good gaming performance with low power consumption and low heat/fan noise.JarredWalton - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
Ah, yes, the anti-Intel sentiment. Unfortunately, as an enthusiast company, there's really no place for Llano in Alienware's current lineup. The ULV processors used in the M11x are generally equal to Llano in terms of power use for idle/low use, equal in multi-threaded performance, and much faster in single-threaded performance.Llano A8-3800M vs. M11x R3:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/385?vs=396
Llano A8-3800M+6630M vs. M11x R3:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/386?vs=396
Beenthere - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
So Alienware loses another sale. In this economy it's gotta hurt to not be selling what consumers want.cjl - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 - link
You know, I believe the evidence is that consumers want performance and battery life, and by and large, they don't really care what brand of processor the computer has. Those that do mainly prefer intel (thanks to their advertising). So, I would say that Alienware is selling exactly what consumers want.