Alienware m15x Laptop Review
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Hardware Laptops
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Written by admin
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Wednesday, 15 October 2008 |
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Page 2 of 3
Where's my buttons gone
The first thing that will puzzle you with the Alienware is where your eject and volume controls have gone, normally you push in at the side of the DVD drive to eject the tray or hold down the FN key to up the volume, but with the Alienware you have to press a keyboard combination to eject the drive and likewise for the volume you have to press a touch sensitive button and swipe your finger from left to write to adjust the volume.
The latter is a pretty cool touch which only has a slight drawback, in that some games did not work alongside the fancy volume control, so we had to resort to entering the games menu in order to change the volume.
Next to the above you also get a few other touch sensitive buttons in the form of your Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Command centre and Stealth option (more on this in a bit).
Battery
Battery performance when playing games will provide you with around an hour and 20 minutes in high performance mode and for DVD’s it was a similar story, though there are still a few ways you can adjust your laptop to improve battery life.
The first method is to use the command center to customise your own power management profile, i.e. when to put hard drives into standby mode or reduce the power of your CPU.
Secondly you can press the Stealth button which automatically throttles back the power of your CPU and GPU in order to reduce battery drain, though you must ensure that you turn off the Stealth mode before playing games, otherwise you could be wondering why your laptop is performing slower.
Performance
For testing we decided the best way to benchmark the Alienwares performance was to use FRAPS, which allowed us to play the games in real-time and get an average FPS score in the process. For some DX10 games - that had issues with the above software - we either used the built in benchmark utilities or made a visual inspection of how well the game(s) performed.
Also worth mentioning is that all our tests are carried out with the virus checker (AVG) and the Windows defender program running, plus we make sure that loads of action is going on the screen - thus a better representation of the laptops performance is gleamed.
Crysis
Our first game out of the blocks was Crysis (with latest patch), which we ran in DX10 mode for testing. However as Fraps was not recording the average frame rate performance properly we had to make a visual analysis instead.
In terms of resolution we used the Alienware's highest resolution of 1440 x 900 and set everything to high - with no AA.
During the opening level, which is primarily outdoors, we headed for a spot that contained loads of action and we found the laptop to average around the 15fps mark, so not really that playable.
In medium settings the laptop performed better, reaching 26 to nearly 30fps at times (when the action was quietening down).
At low settings we were getting nearly 50fps (46fps) and to be honest the lowest DX10 setting still looks as good as the medium setting on DX9 mode.
Next up we ran the same tests again but in DX9 mode and for this we were able to get more accurate readings due to FRAPS working again.
1440 x 900 on High achieved an average of 23.340 FPS - though we still found this just about playable.
1440 x 900 on Medium achieved an average of 36.307 FPS
1440 x 900 on low achieved an average of 62.957 FPS
Whilst the above does not seem like a lot, you will find most desktop PC's struggle to run this game properly.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 17 October 2008 )
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