January 26th, 2009

Alienware M17 - Is this the ultimate gaming notebook?

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 9:33 am

Categories: Mobile Technology, My Alienware Experience

Tags: Alienware, Performance, Alienware M17, Games, Notebooks, Personal Technology, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

For a few weeks over the holiday and New Year period I had the opportunity of spending a fair bit of hands on time with Alienware’s mobile gaming apotheosis - the 17-inch M17. Does the M17 live up to the hype?

The notebook

I won’t bore you with the unboxing and jump straight to the point where you’ve ripped off the plastic bag and the screen protector and end up with matte black 9.5lb notebook on your lap. Once at this point I was stuck by several things simultaneously:

• A 9.5lb notebook is a massive bit of kit.
• The 1.7″ thick just adds to the feeling of the M17 being massive.
• The rubbery tactile nature of the case feels like it might take a long time to get used to, but it doesn’t. This finish, called “soft-touch” and it is designed to be impervious to fingerprints and resist minor scratches. My tests seem to show that it’s quite effective at both.
• The charging block really is a brick - I didn’t weigh that thing but it must have come it at around 3lb.
• On first opening the notebook you are presented by what feels like acres of keyboard and screen.

In the subject of the screen, I have to say that once the system is fired up that 17″ widescreen WUXGA 1920 x 1200 with Clearview really does look a beauty. It’s the kind of screen that you can happily sit in front of for hours and over the time I had the notebook there wasn’t a time when I saw fault with it. To achieve a great gaming experience, especially action games, you need a screen that can cope with both light and dark. The screen on the Alienware does just that.

Note: I make a point of being honest in all reviews so I do have to criticism Alienware’s choice of default background wallpaper. Not because of asthetics but because it seemed to have a couple of random blue dots on it that made the screen look like it had a couple of stuck pixels. The screen was perfect, but if you’ve payed thousands for a notebook, your heart can do without that kind of scare!

Did the old Skullcap lid design put you off getting an Alienware notebook? If it did then you’ll be pleased to know that you can now choose a plainer Ripley design. Which you choose depends on your tastes.

Then there’s the keyboard. Regular readers will know how much I love keys that are back-lit, so the Alienware’s brilliantly lit full-size keyboard with separate numeric keypad is an instant winner. There are three colors to choose from - Fusion Red, Astral Blue and Terra Green. Oh, and the keyboard is also nice to type on, which is a bonus!

The there’s they trackpad. At first I didn’t like this because it was also coated in that rubbery “soft-touch” stuff. At first the finish seemed to offer too much friction and made the trackpad difficult to use. I’m not sure if finger oils overcame the friction or whether the rubbery surface was smoothed out, but the trackpad soon felt fine.

Other external goodies that a worth a few words are the webcam and microphone array, speakers and the fingerprint reader. The 2.0 megapixel webcam is a of acceptable quality (the better the light, the better the image) and incorporates a vertical tilt feature. The sound output from the speakers is immersive and broad enough to accommodate a broad range of gaming (and the volume can be controlled both from Windows and using a small wheel on the right-hand side of the system), while the microphone array offers good multi-directional pickup. The fingerprint reader is nothing new on a notebook but it’s a nice addition.

You also get three USB 2.0 ports, a 7-in-1 card reader, a single FireWire port, HDMI, digital optical, and an eSATA port that also doubles as a fourth USB port. On the front is a dual-layer DVD drive, which is unfortunate because it’s easy to accidentally eject the tray.

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