Dell Alienware M17x (2012) review

If you’re after a showcase of what the most powerful mobile hardware can do, the new 2012 version of Dell’s Alienware M17x is it. This is an almost old-school huge desktop replacement laptop with a brand-new quad-core Intel Ivy Bridge Core i7-3610QM processor, a top-of-the-range AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics chip and a 17in 1,920 x 1,080 display.

The laptop is huge, and reminds us of models from six years ago that crammed desktop parts into a laptop chassis. It’s 45mm thick when closed and weighs 4.3kg, so you’re unlikely to take it out of the house very often. This is a desktop replacement laptop; it’s best for those who don’t have enough space for a desktop but don’t want to be short of processing and gaming power. It will just about fit in a rucksack, though, and is certainly more practical than a PC to take to a LAN party.

All the laptop’s connections are on the left and right of the base, and there are plenty of them. You get four USB3 ports, a combination USB/eSATA port and an SD and Memory Stick card reader. There are VGA, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, and audio is similarly comprehensive. As well as microphone, headphone and S/PDIF outputs, there’s a combination microphone and headphone port which works with mobile phone headsets. You even get an HDMI input so you can use the screen with other devices such as games consoles. Being an Alienware system, you can also use the AlienFX utility to change the colour of the LEDs around the base, touchpad and keyboard. We went for neon pink.

The M17x has plenty of room for a full-sized keyboard and numeric keypad, but we weren’t particularly impressed with its quality. The keys have plenty of travel, but there’s an annoying amount of flex, especially around the WASD keys; no good at all if you want nothing to delay a quick sidestep in a first-person shooter. The large and accurate touchpad was better, letting us navigate the Windows desktop with ease.

No corners have been cut when it comes to the screen, though. It’s a reflective model, so works best in darker environments, but colours are vibrant and consistent across the panel’s surface. The Full HD resolution is perfect for sharp 3D graphics and Blu-ray films; our test model came with a Blu-ray reader and combo drive, but you can save £90 by opting for a DVD writer instead. It’s a slot-loading drive, which always feels classy. The laptop also has a Sound Blaster Recon3Di sound card, which has a number of effects to help the built-in speakers sound their best. We found Surround made music sound artificial, but Crystalizer and Bass gave music some extra punch. The speakers sound far better than most laptop models, with clear mid-range and treble and some bass. They’re not particularly loud, though, so you’ll want separate speakers or headphones if you want to get involved in a film.

When it comes to performance, the M17x is like no laptop we’ve seen. Its Core i7-3610QM processor is a quad-core model with Hyper-Threading, so appears at eight cores in Windows. It managed a huge 86 in our video-encoding test, which is up there with lower-end Core i5 desktop processors, but the four cores and Hyper-Threading really helped in the multitasking test, where the laptop managed 108; even faster than our desktop Core i5-2500K reference processor. Overall the M17x managed a score if 100, which makes it the fastest laptop we’ve ever seen.

Our test model came fitted with a 64GB SSD boot disk and a 500GB disk for data. The SSD boot disk makes it quick to boot and helps Windows 7 feel snappy, but it’s very small for a system partition. You will have to be careful to install your programs to the second drive to avoid running out of room. We think the small SSD would have been better used as a cache for a hard disk, to speed up performance while maintaining a large boot drive. If you’d rather not have the SSD, you can specify a 500GB hard disk and save £130.

It’s also the quickest laptop we’ve ever come across in games. In our Dirt 3 laptop test, which we run at 1,280×720 with 4x anti-aliasing and High detail, we saw a huge 73fps. When we turned up the resolution to the laptop’s native 1,920 x 1,080 and put the detail up to Ultra, we still saw 62fps. We also ran our Crysis 2 test, which we normally only use to test desktop PCs. Here we saw 36.7fps at 1,920 x 1,080 and Ultra detail, which is good enough for smooth gameplay and, astonishingly, quicker than a desktop Radeon HD 7950 in this test. This is a laptop that can play any game at 1080p and maximum detail levels – but be prepared to put up with a whoosh from the cooling fans.

All this power does come at the cost of battery life; the M17x is no Ultrabook, but neither is it a short-lived disaster. We saw two hours and forty-five minutes in our light-use test, so at least you can get through a film in a power cut. The laptop could also loop our Crysis 2 benchmark for an hour and ten minutes on battery, so you can even fit in some gaming away from the mains.

Dell’s Alienware M17x is astonishing. Its 2D and 3D power is astounding for a laptop and puts many mid-to-high-end desktop PCs to shame. This power is backed up with a fantastic screen, but it’s a shame about the flexy keyboard. If you’re after extreme power, though, there’s nothing quite like it.