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If you decide to buy your Alienware m15x without any extras you should find the following items enclosed within the box. A rugged mouse mat with an Alienware logo on the top, a leather bound folder containing your recovery CD's and technical information, a soft cover to protect your laptop from scratches, an Alienware cap and an AC mains adaptor.

Customise

As with their partner website, Dell, you can customise your purchase before embarking on laptop heaven. So for example you can adjust what type of laptop lid you want, graphics card, CPU, hard drive, accessories, that sort of thing.

As you can see from above you won't get a lot of extras for your money, but we were lucky to some extent that one of our colleagues' (not attached to the mag) had already bought the m15x Alienware laptop and was able to show us the quality of the case that you can buy at an extra - check out the image gallery on the 3rd page.

This was a large silver case that could easily withstand the odd knock or two and is equipped with several pouches for your games and places for your accessories (AC Mains etc).

You could argue that for £2000 you should have got one as standard, but the above is certainly a lot better quality than your average laptop bag and is the reason for the extra cost.

Reviewed Spec

The spec that we reviewed was as follows....

• Laptop case: Silver Skullcap Design
• 15.4" WideXGA+ 1440 x 900 LCD (720p) with Clearview Technology with Webcam
• OS: Windows Vista Home Premium with SP1
• 512MB GeforceGo 8800M GTX Graphics card
• Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 2.8GHz (6MB Cache 800MHz FSB)
• 2GB DDR2 667Mhz Memory
• 160GB 7200rpm SATA Hard drive
• Bluetooth
• Dual Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
• 8 x DVD-RW Drive
• 3 x USB
• 1 x Firewire port
• 1 x HDMI
• Alienrespawn (bit like windows restore)
• Alienware Mesh Cap
• Alienware Personalised Nameplate
• Alienware Mousepad
• Alienware Owner Identification Card 

Design

In terms of design we got our hands on the Silver Skullcap version for our review, which features a similar look and feel to the Area-51 desktop cases with its ridged alien looking contours. Again it was lucky that our colleagues' laptop had the Silver Ripley Design, which gave us chance to compare the two. In all honesty both designs look equally as good as each other, the Ripley design provides a smoother surface (like an alien head supposedly) and as the price is identical its just down to personal taste at the end of the day (check out the gallery at the bottom of page 3 for some examples of the two lid designs).

Alienware certainly want you to feel that you have bought one of their laptops (that's for sure). For a start they have added an alien head to the top of the laptop lid which glows different colours when the laptop is being charged - cool effect.

Likewise a small alien head is used for powering on the laptop and the keyboard, sides of the LCD screen, touch pad and buttons directly below the display are also backlit. The latters colours can also be changed using the command center software supplied with the device and when you check out the gallery at the end of the review you can have a look at some of the colour choices we had a play about with.

The above would seem like a bit gimmicky for most people, but it actually does provide a great visual experience when the laptop is used in the dark. Of course you can turn off the back light completely if this is not your cup of tea.

Dotted around the sides you have various ports for connectivity, 3 x USB, 1 x Firewire, 1 x HDMI, 3.5mm headphone/mic jack, Ethernet port, 1 x PCMICA card slot and 1 x SD card slot which are both under protective covers.

You won't find a DVI port, so for outputting to an external monitor you will need a HDMI to DVI cable which will cost around £14. Again we would have expected one to have been included in the price.

However the HDMI port does allow you to output to larger LCD screens for movie/games playback and if you have the Blue-ray drive option you can watch HD films on a bigger screen to.

The internal 15.4" screen was in itself great for playing games, with no motion blur, ghosting or problems to report during testing. DVD movie playback (you get Cyberlink PowerDVD software for this) was also of an acceptable quality, blacks were not perfect, yet they weren’t poor either.

Likewise the sound quality was also better than we had expected, movies were possibly a little bit on the weaker side in terms of playback quality, but in terms of gaming they made for a great experience during testing.

As we got the 1440 x 900 res display as opposed to the 1920 x 1200, the only advantage to be had from the latter would be for playing back movies at FULL HD (slightly higher than 1080p), however for games there is no point.

The device is powerful enough to handle the 1440 x 900 resolution, but 1920 x 1200 would be more of a struggle - not to mention difficult on the eye due to the smaller display.

At the top of the screen lid you also get a Cyberlink webcam, we are not sure what the mp (mega pixel) rating was for this but it did produce a good video image and is equipped with loads of funny extras for transforming your picture during video calls.

On a negative note we were not as impressed with the overall build quality - especially for the price. Whilst the laptop itself is heavy, we did notice that the frame surrounding the 15.4" screen felt a touch loose and bouncy when pressed, however this could be down to our review unit as our colleagues' Alienware did not have the latters issue.

Also the case has a cheaper plastic feel to it (though it's not as bad as it sounds), especially when you close the lid, so it may be advisable to protect your investment - when transporting - with one of those heavy cases or grab hold of the 3 year warranty, as opposed to the 1 year.

The integrated keyboard we felt was really good, it does not have the heavy strong feel of say an MSI, but it was more than capable of providing hours of stress free gaming.

As for the touch pad, this is flush to the casing and has a nice added bonus of turning itself off when you plug in an external mouse.

To be honest we found the touch pad to be a bit fiddly in terms of responsiveness, however it does just enough for most OS tasks, such as web browsing, but for series gamers you will want to add your own mouse anyways - something that is once again an added extra.

Noise levels are not too bad, with the hard drive being mainly silent throughout and the fans kicking up a storm when heavier demands are placed on the graphics card, but it’s never enough to stop you from enjoying your games.

Though if you want to use the laptop on your lap you will find it start to get a little uncomfortable after an hour or so (as the laptop can get quite warm), but our colleague bought himself a laptop cooling tray which he says seems to keep things pretty cool.