Verdict: A very fast 15.4in gaming laptop, but more plastic than fantastic.
Alienware laptops pop up in unusual places: Lex Luthor in 'Smallville' uses one and the bad guys in '24' use them too. An Alienware laptop seems to be the portable PC of choice for villains. While evildoers bent on hacking the Pentagon for nuclear missile access codes will probably already have an m15x, should the rest of us look to Alienware for our next gaming laptop?
Perhaps so, as the m15x is a product we've wanted to see for ages: a gaming laptop with a 15.4in screen. It crams an Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX and a 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 - the fastest mobile graphics card and CPU - into its small chassis too. With a 160GB, 7,200rpm Seagate Momentus hard disk, it looks as though the m15x could be the Holy Grail of mobile gaming - a fast and portable laptop PC.
The X9000 might be the fastest mobile CPU available, but it's also multiplier unlocked to 3.2GHz. Annoyingly, the BIOS of the m15x doesn't provide any options for overclocking. As the X9000 costs £400 more than the 2.5GHz T9300 of the Vadim Fusion laptop, you're paying £400 for an extra 300MHz of CPU speed. This is even more galling considering that a T9300 is perfectly fine for gaming, as proven by the Vadim laptop.
The screen is also cause for puzzlement. It may measure 15.4in on the diagonal, but the bezel adds another 2.3in. The m15x is still more compact than the Vadim with its 17in screen, but by less than the comparative size of the screens alone suggests. Our review laptop had a 1,920 x 1,200 screen, although a 1,440 x 900 screen is available and will save you £180. We can't comment on the quality of the lower-resolution screen, but the amount of pixels it contains is a more sensible number for a mobile graphics card.
The screen we were sent, like that of the Vadim, proved to be dull and lacking in vibrancy. Viewed up close, it's a little grainy, but it's the grey whites and muted colours that make it an uninspiring panel to spend any time looking at.
The m15x has lights all over the place; there's a light tube running around the edge of the screen, glowing alien eyes on the lid, another light running around the trackpad, plus the Alienware branding under the screen. The decent if unexceptional keyboard also glows (although you could opt for the unlit version and save £30). The easy-to-use AlienFX software controls the colour of the lights, and you can configure certain lights to change colour depending on whether you're using battery or mains power.
Above the keyboard is a series of touch-sensitive buttons. To the left of the alien-face power button is a slider bar for volume, which is annoyingly unresponsive and of little practical use, as it doesn't display the volume level. To the right of the alien face are touch-sensitive buttons for Bluetooth and WiFi, plus a flying saucer and a speedometer. For some reason, the flying saucer represents AlienFusion, Alienware's custom power management software. The Speedometer, just as oddly, enables Stealth Mode, which downclocks the multiplier of your CPU for longer battery life (it used an 8x multiplier for a 1.6GHz CPU in our case).
There are two problems with these touch-sensitive buttons: they aren't very sensitive to the touch, plus they remain partially lit even when turned off. We spent ages wondering why the benchmarks were so slow before realising that Stealth Mode was enabled, only to spend the next five minutes hammering the speedometer button to turn off Stealth Mode.
Not content with a row of special buttons and controls above the keyboard, Alienware has allocated the F-keys alternative functions. Pressing Fn-F8, for example, ejects the optical drive - the m15x clearly thinks that it's a MacBook, as this is the only way to eject the optical drive. However, the key next to Eject is 'U/D GFX', which will try to disable your gaming graphics card in favour of the poxy Intel integrated GPU (in order to extend battery life). It can only disable the graphics card after a restart, but it's annoying to have to tell a pop-up to go away just because you've missed the Eject button.
The rest of the alternative functions of the F-keys are mostly welcome: Fn-F10 launches Media Center and Fn-F9 the 2-megapixel webcam. Fn-F12 turns off the trackpad, which is handy if you know your keyboard shortcuts and tend to hit the trackpad while typing. The trackpad usefully turns itself off if you plug in a mouse as well. Fn-F6 reveals a slight flaw with the ports of the x15m - it switches the display between the built-in screen and the HDMI output. If you want to use a DVI screen then you need to buy the HDMI-to-DVI adaptor for £13.
As well as the HDMI output on the right-hand side, there's a media card slot for SD, MMC and Memory Stick, plus a USB port and a FireWire B port. The left-hand side has two more USB 2 ports, plus headset connections (the built-in speakers are pretty poor) and Gigabit Ethernet. The optical drive on the left can be swapped for a secondary battery (which costs £46) without needing to turn off the laptop.
However, we aren't convinced by the build quality of the m15x. The screen flexes too easily, as does the main body of the chassis. Worse, if you apply pressure to the lid, it presses into the back of TFT. Cramming the m15x into a bag or leaving something heavy on top of it could irreparably damage the screen. We'd recommend taking the three years of warranty cover for an extra £160 rather than the single year included in the price listed. The shiny plastic of the m15x also looked and felt increasingly cheap the more time we spent with it.
Performance
There's no denying that the configuration of Alienware m15x is very fast. Two of our three benchmarks came in at around or over 1,000, making this laptop as fast or faster than our reference desktop machine. However, these results came after we disabled the Intel Turbo Memory (aka Robson) technology in the BIOS, which had been reducing performance by around 10 per cent. It's supposed to cache commonly used data, but we didn't see any benefit.
Gaming performance was very good too. Crysis was problematic, with its minimum of 14fps and average of 19fps at 1,280 x 1,024, but this game is a problem even on similarly priced desktops. Other games were more enjoyable - Call of Duty 4, for example, was pretty much playable at 1,920 x 1,200 with a minimum of 24fps and average of 41fps without AA. Trying to play games at the native 1,920 x 1,200 of this screen clearly pushes the GeForce 8800M GTX to its limits, making the 1,440 x 900 screen seem a more sensible option.
The standard battery lasted for an hour and 20 minutes when gaming, which is a good result.
Conclusion
The Alienware Area-51 m15x promises so much - unique styling, fast components and a fairly compact chassis. However, the touch-sensitive buttons lack finesse and the dull screen lacks quality, while the chassis is flimsy. The X9000 CPU and high-res screen also massively inflate the price with little benefit. We can only recommend that evil arch-villains buy this laptop, and only then because we hope that we might be hindering their nefarious schemes as they shout, 'Is it in Stealth Mode or is it just slow? I can't tell!' while the superhero closes in unseen.
