Having USB slots on both sides is welcome, and the two headphone jacks are a nice touch as well for multiplayer gaming. The M11x does not have an optical drive. Puzzlingly, the M11x comes with a Windows 7 restore disc. Does it play? Yes it does. In tamer situations it approached FPS, and I only saw it dip below 30 or 40 once or twice for a few frames.
Wolfenstein ran well, around FPS for the most part; unfortunately on the small screen a lot of texture detail is lost. We'll let you draw your own conclusions. The ability to install games off disc without having to plug in a USB-connected external optical drive would be nice, but most modern gamers using Steam preinstalled on the Alienware or other downloadable software probably never touch discs most of the time anyway.
Though we don't often use DisplayPort, it can't hurt to have it. The 1. It offers a close-to-CoreDuo experience, but in the wake of faster Core i3 and i5 processors, it's a little less impressive. In our benchmark tests, the M11x falls far behind a Core i7 M15x at multimedia multitasking, but stays close to similar laptops such as the Asus UL50VT.
On the M11x the SU processor is overclockable to 1. The M11x also has "hybrid graphics," meaning that with the press of a Function key the laptop will switch between its GT M GPU and less powerful but more battery-friendly integrated graphics, letting the M11x either be battery-conservative or a gaming workhorse.
The switch causes the screen to black out for a few seconds, but otherwise is painless and doesn't require logging out or quitting programs. Still, you have to remember to switch, and the hybrid-graphics indictor icon isn't exactly prominent. Sadly, the M11x lacks newer on-the-fly Optimus graphics-switching technology recently announced by Nvidia, which would have been perfect on the M11x, but we have to admit that once you know how to do it, graphics-switching is easy.
The M11x ran Unreal Tournament 3's benchmark test at On the other hand, it can't hold a candle to a "dedicated" gaming laptop such as the M15x, which ran about double the frame rate. We'd best call the M11x a machine that's built to handle most games pretty well, but you shouldn't expect this to be a shrunken-down version of a super-powered rig. At its price, however, it's a pretty good setup. In other anecdotal game tests, Batman: Arkham Asylum got a little choppy at times, but was impressively playable.
Just Cause 2's open landscapes and zip-lining were smooth and detailed, rarely stuttering. The mainstream-level native resolution of the display helps keep you from pushing the GPU too hard. The M11x also outputs to external monitors at up to 1,x1,pixel resolution. We tried gaming at that size, and though some older games worked well, such as UTIII, others began to get pretty choppy. We'd recommend sticking to 1,x pixels for best results. With its included six-cell battery, the Alienware M11x ran for 3 hours and 25 minutes using our video-playback battery drain test, with Nvidia graphics turned on.
That's better than we expected, although it should be noted that this was a test using only video playback: actual game playing would drain the battery much faster. The M11x features a battery-saving mode with discrete graphics turned off, and in that mode battery life should fair much better, more like dual-core ULV thin-and-lights we've tested previously. In recent memory only the Acer Aspire Timeline TZ , which lasted minutes 8hrs, 43mins , can better this.
We were also particularly impressed with the thermal performance of the system. Naturally, the fan spun up during games, but never did it get uncomfortably hot or outrageously noisy. Given the size of the machine and performance it offers this is an impressive feat. Arguably the Alienware M11x is the first true gaming laptop.
Not only can it play games well, it can be used on the move just like any normal laptop — more so than most, in fact, as its battery life is among the best in the market.
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How we test laptops Unlike other sites, we test every laptop we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. Used as our main laptop for the review period.
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