Historically, whenever NVIDIA or AMD launched a new mobile powerhouse GPU, AVADirect and Clevo were ready to ship us a high-end notebook to show us what the latest mobile GPUs could do. The problem is that NVIDIA and AMD have been playing a rapid game of oneupsmanship lately, while Clevo has been content with their dual-GPU + desktop CPU X7200. We've already looked at that notebook twice, so we wanted to see if we could find the high-end hardware elsewhere. Thankfully, Alienware was ready to step up to the plate with their M18x.

Perhaps even more interesting, we were able to pull some strings and get Alienware to agree to send us two M18x units back-to-back. Today we present to you the first of a two-part series where we begin with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580M (tested in both single GPU and SLI modes), and we'll also given a thorough overview of Alienware's M18x. We'll follow up in the near future with a second look at the M18x, but with AMD's Radeon HD 6990M (again tested in single GPU and CrossFire modes), at which point we'll be able to give a full rundown on how these two top-of-the-line mobile graphics solutions stack up.

Read on for the first part of our Alienware M18x coverage, with dual 580Ms and enough performance to put many a desktop to shame.

It’s been quite a while since we’ve looked at triple-GPU CrossFire and SLI performance – or for that matter looking at GPU scaling in-depth. While NVIDIA in particular likes to promote multi-GPU configurations as a price-practical upgrade path, such configurations are still almost always the domain of the high-end gamer. At $700 we have the recently launched GeForce GTX 590 and Radeon HD 6990, dual-GPU cards whose existence is hedged on how well games will scale across multiple GPUs. Beyond that we move into the truly exotic: triple-GPU configurations using three single-GPU cards, and quad-GPU configurations using a pair of the aforementioned dual-GPU cards. If you have the money, NVIDIA and AMD will gladly sell you upwards of $1500 in video cards to maximize your gaming performance.

Today we’re going to be looking at the state of GPU scaling for dual-GPU and triple-GPU configurations. While we accept that multi-GPU scaling will rarely (if ever) hit 100%, just how much performance are you getting out of that 2^nd or 3^rd GPU versus how much money you’ve put into it? That’s the question we’re going to try to answer today.

While most of the desktops we've received so far have been fairly affordable (read: south of two large), we haven't really had a chance to take a run at the cream of the crop. We're talking the big ticket items—the expensive, beastly gaming machines. That all changes today with our review of the DigitalStorm BlackOps. The stock model starts at $1,776, but the demon we have on hand tips the scales at $3,624. That's no small amount of cash to drop on a gaming tower, but the BlackOps Assassin Edition comes with an overclocked Intel Core i7-950 and SLI'd GeForce GTX 580s. The only question that remains: is it worth it?

Picking up immediately from where we left off yesterday with our review of NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 580, we have a second GTX 580 in house courtesy of Asus, who sent over their ENGTX580. With our second GTX 580 in hand we’re taking a look at GTX 580 SLI performance and more; we’ll also be taking a look at voltage/power consumption relationship on the GTX 580, and clock-normalized benchmarking to see just how much of GTX 580’s improved performance is due to architecture and additional SMs, and how much is due to the clockspeed advantage.

The march of progress is inevitable, with faster computers constantly replacing last year's top performing parts. Clevo is a company with a heavy focus on Desktop Replacement (DTR) notebooks, often at the forefront of the latest performance enhancing parts. AVADirect is one of a few vendors that sells Clevo notebooks, letting customers choose the various components. In the past, Clevo has had notebooks with desktop CPUs and a reasonably fast mobile GPU, or mobile CPUs with two GPUs; the X7200 combines the two and offers up to hex-core i7-980X CPU support with GTX 480M SLI graphics to provide what is easily the fastest notebook we've ever tested--with a "UPS battery" to match.

Given the high-end nature of the CPU and GPU options, we asked AVADirect to send us a no-holds-barred system for testing, and that's exactly what we got. Take Intel's fastest i7-980X CPU and add in 480M SLI with a couple of SSDs in RAID 0, and watch the mobile benchmark records topple one by one. If you want the (currently) fastest notebook on the block and are willing to pay the piper, meet the latest heavyweight champion of the world. We’ve got one of the very first review units to hit the streets, and we’re going to see what this bad boy can do. Ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to rummmmble!