Dell Alienware M18X

Dell’s Alienware line are some of the most powerful gaming machines available on the market, short of soldering your computer together yourself you’ll be hard pressed to come across a more powerful machine. The Dell Alienware M18x laptop offers high quality specs which more often than not aren’t built in to laptops since it drives up the cost. With a gaming laptop, performance is key – that and looking good, we’re happy to see the Alienware M18x has both.

What we like best

With the M18x it’s best to start with the processor, because with this laptop you can get a Intel Core i7 -2960XM, this is the best processor Intel currently have available, a quad-core with 4.0 GHz overclocked with 8MB cache in a word – wow. To assist this heft processor Dell have kindly offered the options of up to 1.5 TB storage and 16 Gb RAM, so it’s certainly safe to say this laptop can handle anything you have to throw at it. (NB probably not smart to throw heavy things at your Dell Alienware M18x)

Of course we haven’t yet mentioned the key component of any gamers PC, the graphics card. This laptop can be purchased with either NVIDIA GeForce GTX460M or AMD Radeon HD6970M, both very respectable but the AMD card is almost twice as expensive as the Nvidias if you place your faith in such a tenuous things RRM. The Alienware M18x is an expensive machine and naturally you are paying for quality with an AMD graphics card but Nvidia make a quality graphics card so you’re safe as houses either way.
Overclocking your processor is a great way to get an advantage over your online opponents; naturally some skill in the game is required of course. If you prefer not to tinker with your computer and risk frying it, a safely (and professionally) overclocked processor will put you light-years ahead of your competition.

The Alienware M18x laptop is also wrapped up rather nicely; it has a stodgy shell of rubber and black lacquer work, it looks like it’s modeled on a Cylon. You also get to tailor keyboard lighting so it’s illuminated to preference of colour and region of the keyboard which could certainly come in handy whilst gaming in the dark.

We also like that you can hook up the Dell Alienware M18x to a 3D television for immersive gaming.

What we like least

An Alienware laptop is something we’re not quite taken with, if you’re that diehard a gamer, surely a desktop is more in order, so you can set up a proper station, with screen and sound and all the peripheries for the best gaming experience possible. Whilst we appreciate the spacious 18.4 inch screen it does make this laptop immobile so taking it over to a friends’ will be quite a chore.