Home : Hardware : Reviews : Alienware m15x
Performance
As mentioned earlier, the m15x packs an 8800M GTX and the Intel X9000, both of which are top of the line parts on laptops. Add onto that 4GB of RAM at 667MHz and this laptop is booming at high speed.
Other gaming laptops we’ve seen are SLI enabled, but they also aren’t very portable, so we can appreciate the sacrifice taken. Our last PC review was the HP Blackbird 002, and we’ve since made some changes to how we benchmark. We’re using Supreme Commander because it’s an RTS (and thus high number of units, requires lots of processing power), Quake Wars for heavy lighting effects, Stalker for heavy shadow effects, and Crysis for pure, raw power. We’re also using 3D Mark 06 for general testing (Vantage, while possible for the m15x, did not run on our custom machine). All gauged against our custom built machine.
Supreme Commander held strong with an average of 34.7 in our benchmarks. Framerates rarely dropped below 30, though during our playtest it did crash twice after huge numbers of units suddenly appeared on screen. And just to show the difference, using Stealth mode while playing had a score of 150.
Stalker was much more stressful on the machine, and like the Blackbird 002, had lots of fluctuation. Averaging at 37 FPS, it dropped below 20 FPS at times, but it was generally pleasant to play through.
Crysis ran fairly well, hitting a decent 23 FPS on on very high settings at 800x600, slightly above our custom machine’s 21 FPS. The closeness in score was strange, compared to the other benchmarks, but Crysis with it's 1.2 patch does take advantage of the quad core processor. That and the faster RAM must have contributed.
Some quick notes about gameplay: as stated earlier, Supreme commander was faulted for crashing, which didn’t occur on our custom and another machine I’m currently testing. STALKER had more fluctuation than expected. Quake Wars was difficult to gauge for our benchmark, and 60 FPS is a rough average over a collected amount of data from several hours of gameplay.
