Alienware 18 Gaming Notebook Review
by Dustin Sklavos on September 16, 2013 12:00 PM ESTThe aforementioned issues with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M don't prevent it from turning in an excellent performance, just not the one we'd hoped for. That in mind, the two 780Ms in the Alienware 18 are still able to offer a fantastic gaming experience with a decent amount of headroom.
Results for our "Value" benchmarks are in Bench but not really necessary when you're dealing with this much gaming horsepower. For academic purposes I'll trot out the "Mainstream" benchmarks before hitting the high end where the Alienware 18 will really shine.
The mainstream benchmarks are at least helpful for teasing out which games are more CPU limited versus which ones are more GPU limited. Skyrim and StarCraft II are old hands, but we've found GRiD 2 to also be a bit exacting on the CPU. Of course, the enthusiast class 1080p benchmarks are where the two GTX 780Ms in SLI will really stretch their legs, and for these we've included performance data from a desktop system with an overclocked i7-4770K and GeForce GTX 780 as a point of comparison.
Skyrim and StarCraft II continue to scarcely benefit from the extra GPU horsepower, and keep in mind that SLI does have CPU overhead, but every other game gets a healthy boost. Unfortunately a single desktop GTX 780 paired with a 4.4GHz Haswell chip is still at least as fast or faster. While there are games that obviously need more CPU power, I honestly think the Alienware 18 would benefit as a whole from a jump to the much more expensive i7-4930MX. That puts the buyer in an unfortunate position; the 18 is already very expensive to begin with, but if you want to get the most out of your multi-GPU configuration you're probably going to want to have the extra headroom the i7-4930MX will give you to play with, which is a $500 upgrade on top of the highest end stock model.
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brucek2 - Monday, September 16, 2013 - link
Your original question asked about "all these weak resolution screens on notebooks nowadays", so it sounded a lot more like a question about the industry in general than this about particular machine.cjb110 - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Sorry but (a) is a terrible suggestion, given the lack of upgradability the machine should be built as a whole unit. For years gaming laptops have always suffered as they couldn't drive the panels they were paired with. Downscaling looks obviously crap, so kudos to Alienware by sticking with a panel their machine can actually game on.boeush - Friday, September 20, 2013 - link
"Downscaling looks obviously crap..."Why should it? In reality, it is upscaling. For instance, you render the game at 1920x1080, then scale up the result to 2560x1440 (if that's the actual display resolution, which IMO is what should be the case on an 18''+ high-end notebook!) As long as the aspect ratio is the same, the up-scaling will work well without any image distortion (and if done right, may even provide an additional antialiasing effect.)
brucek2 - Monday, September 16, 2013 - link
re: win7/8, I just now got a sales email from Dell. The big promo in the subject line? the usual Not -X% off, or +X% power, or FREE <gizmo> -- but"Want Win 7? Swap it out for free during Summer Clearance"
Promos of course are about telling customers what they want to hear, not necessarily about establishing truths. But still very telling that their research convinced them that this would be the most important selling point in a new system now.
kyuu - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Looks to me like a play at getting a few extra bucks by selling some old Win7 keys they have lying around to people who don't realize that Win7 offers nothing over Win8.Laststop311 - Monday, September 16, 2013 - link
The m18x is a truly superb machine if you like to goto your buddies and lan party it up. In that respect it is very portable. But like the article suggests it's much better building a mini itx system. I sold my m18x and used the proceeds to build a mini itx bitfenix prodigy setup.I got a i7-4770k OC'd to 4.8Ghz on all cores HT and turbo disabled. With the awesome Asus z87 mini itx boards. Cooling the CPU is a simple corsair h100i with 4 fans in push pull. 140mm exhaust in the rear and large 200mm intake fan in the front. 4 rad fans are the high static pressure noctua 120mm's and the rear is a 140mm noctua. Always use noctua fans they never let ya down. I've had the same 120mm noctuas for 4 years now and they are still as silent and deadly as the first day I got em. Xigmatek fluid circulative bearing 200mm fan for the intake is also dead silent.
PSU was a tough find. The problem is 160mm just barely fits and if you want a modular psu you need to go down to 140mm. The only modular psu with atleast 600 watts at that size was a silverstone. Luckily it does exist. I'm not a fan of dual GPU setups but I splurged and got a titan. If it wasn;t for getting a titan the sale of my m18x would of covered the whole build and a more modest gtx 770 but with next gen gaming around the corner and the new systems using up to 5GB V ram per game the Titan was the best future proof choice.
For storage we have the wonderful 512GB Samsung 840 Pro and a 4tb Seagate NAS model drive for its superior noise level. Paid only 250 dollars out of craigslist for the SSD it's also where i got my dell u3014 for 515. No optical drive installed the radiator on the top blocks it but who needs an optical drive really. Hvae an external usb 3.0 dvd burner in the house somewhere if I really need to use a disc.
As you can see selling the m18x r1 (I had it upgraded with gtx 680m in SLI and the triple pipe heatsink from the R2 extreme edition up from the single pipe the r1 came with and it had the i7-2960xm overclocked to 4.1ghz) led to me having a WAYYY better mini ITX set up. The single gpu titan with an overclock to 1067mhz and memory at 6.2ghz performs more fluid than the gtx 680m setup and even with the gpu's fan cranking up it's still much quieter than the laptop. CPU speed is a very large increase as well. So dustin is very much correct you can just build a mini itx system and put to rest the large heavy gaming notebooks.
The future of gaming notebooks is something like the razer blade 14 3rd generation. 6.5 hour HD video battery rundown time and impressive 1600x900 native resolution gaming in a package at about 4 pounds and 0.66" thick all the way around, no fatter bumps. It can have longevity like an ultrabook but also have gaming muscle. For 2000 with a 256GB mSATA SSD it's the way to go if you must have a gaming laptop. Other then that usage get a mini itx system + a cheaper haswell ultrabook with a good 8 hour battery life.
thesavvymage - Monday, September 16, 2013 - link
why would you buy the 4770k and then disable HT? Might as well have gotten the i5....ShieTar - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
Yeah, I second that question. Especially for somebody who was looking for cost-efficient gaming, the 4670K would have made more sense.Then again, working hard to get an ITX gaming system, and then taking a 30", 24lbs monitor along with it doesn't make a whole lot of sense either.
5150Joker - Wednesday, September 18, 2013 - link
Hate to break it to you but if you compared benchmark results of your 680M SLI OC'd with an unlocked vbios, it would be nearly as fast as the bitfenix mini-itx system you built while being much better for portability. Furthermore, you could have upgraded that M18x with 780M SLI and when OC'd matches a Titan.5150Joker - Tuesday, September 17, 2013 - link
This review lost all credibility when the author tried comparing the M18 to an ITX desktop.