alienware-m11x posts

Dell's Alienware unit has gotten lots of great reviews, including one here at Big Download, for their M11x laptop. Today Alienware has revealed two big upgrades to the M11x that are being included as options. First, the M11x now has options to put in an Intel Core i5 or i7 processor in addition to the previous Core 2 Duo processor. Putting in either the i5 or i7 processor will naturally raise the starting price of the notebook although we have been told that the i5 processor still keeps the m11x at below $1,000.

The other major update is Nvidia Optimus, the new technology that will allow people who use the M11x laptop to switch between the integrated graphics and the laptop's Nvidia GT 335M graphics chip automatically if they are playing, say, Left 4 Dead 2. Previously switching between the two was done manually by hitting the F6 button.

What would be the perfect PC gaming laptop? For us it would have to be cheap, portable, able run all of our games at a solid frame rate on high graphical settings, all while keeping a solid battery life. Dell's Alienware division has come up with a gaming PC that, while not perfect, is certainly about as close as we have seen a gaming laptop get.

We are talking about the Alienware M11x which was first announced by Dell at the Consumer Electronics Show back in January and officially launched a few weeks later. Alienware let us take the M11x for a test drive and, in summary, we can say that we are seriously thinking of buying one of our own for our own gaming PC needs for travel, LAN parties or if you just want a way to play PC games on the couch.

When Dell and its Alienware unit announced the Alienware M11x gaming laptop at CES last month we were genually thrilled. The promise of a small-ish laptop (11 inch display and 4.5 pounds) that could run even high end PC games well would seem to be the Holy Grail. Now comes word that the product is available for sale at Dell's online store.

The starting price for the product is $799. That gets you a PC with a Intel Pentium SU4100 at 1.3GHz and a 2MB Cache, a NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M grahics card with 1 GB of RAM, 2 GB of RAM memory and 160 GB of hard drive space. You can choose to upgrade the processor, memory, hard drive and a few other features but that will increase the price, of course. At the moment it looks like Dell is prepping to ship the first Alienware M11x out the door in the first week of March. We may have to see if we can get our hands on this puppy.

[Via Engadget]

We've heard rumors in the pipeline that Dell's Alienware unit was going to make a new product announcement at CES and the company didn't disappoint. During their CES press conference, Dell announced the Alienware M11x, a netbook-style laptop that's designed for PC gaming.

Our sister site Engadget reports that the Alienware M11X will have an 11.6 inch screen and run under the NVIDIA GT335M graphics chip. Dell claims the netbook can run Crysis at 60 FPS and Modern Warfare 2 in 30 FPS. Battery life is supposed to be two hours in dedicated graphic mode and 6.5 hours running under intergrated graphics. The netbook will be available later this spring and priced at under $1,000.

Dell also announced hardware refreshes for their other Alienware laptops the M17x and the M15x models. The M17x now has Intel Core i7 processors available. They also announced the 23 inch Alienware OptX AW2310 monitor which supports Nvidia's 3D Vision technology.