Dell Alienware M11X Laptop Review

The Alienware M11X certainly delivers an intense gaming experience with the Nvidia GeForce GT 335M GPU - so you can dominate wherever you may go. The 1GB GDDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 335M is a laptop graphics card for middle class gaming notebooks however, so something we would not expect from Alienware.

It features 72 cores and therefore a hell of a lot more than the 48 cores of the GT 330M. Compared to the GTS models, the GT 335M does not support GDDR5 - a type of high performance dynamic random-access graphics card memory designed for applications requiring high bandwidth.

CPU choices

One of the best things about the Alienware M11x is that the faster, bigger and better CPU, the Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 is not an optional upgrade and comes as standard. However, if you wish to save £40 you can opt for the Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor ULV SU4100 with 1GB less RAM.

You can also choose to have an i5 or i7 processor in your M11x - with the better processor obviously costing more. You can also customise your M11x with up to 8GB of RAM. Our customised M11x featured 8GB RAM, an i7 processor and a stunning Windows Assessment score of 5.9.

Difference between M11x and M11x MLK

The difference is simply that the M11x comes with a Intel® Pentium® Dual Core Processor ULV SU4100 whereas the M11x MLK comes with the faster Intel® Core™ i5 520UM or Intel® Core™ i7 640UM.

Dell Alienware M11x: shiny and sleek!

The keyboard is compact. Most people won't mind this but if you intend to buy this for your grandfather for his word processing, think again. The keyboard buttons themselves feature Alienware's font style and seem durable. The trackpad is highly responsive and the mouse buttons and chunky and satisfying to press.

One thing to note: no optical drive

Considering that the M11x is a gaming laptop, the only thing we can criticise with the Alienware M11x is that there is no CD/DVD drive within the laptop itself.

When you consider laptops such as the tiny Vaio TZ11 can include a CD/DVD drive, you're amazed that the M11x is missing one. At the same time, that would only add to the weight and you can buy an external CD/DVD drive for £60 straight from Dell.

3D performance

The 3D performance of the GT335M lies somewhere between the GT240M and the GTS 250M. However, the GPU is fast enough to display and support some rather demanding modern games like Modern Warfare 2 and Need for Speed Shift.

These games will be barely playable in high details and so you may have to lower your standards to medium details to play the game fluently. Nonetheless, older games such as Doom or Quake 4 will run in high details fluently. The GeForce® GT 335M GPU takes advantage of accelerated GPU features in Windows® 7 and built-in NVIDIA® PhysX® technology enabling hyper-realistic game play. Furthermore, the GeForce® GT 335M GPUs let you fully enjoy the new visual capabilities and features built into Windows® 7. Experience a new class of GPU-accelerated video and image processing applications built with Microsoft’s new DirectCompute API.

Similar to the other GeForce 300M cards, the GT 335M offers Purevideo HD to accelerate the decoding of HD videos. Furthermore, CUDA and DirectX Compute allow the usage of the cores for general computing such as encoding videos and digital photography.

Alienware colours

When you order your Alienware you can choose what colour you'd like the backlights to be. This colour features behind all of the keyboard, the Alienware logo and behind the speakers. You can customise the colours in the Alienware Customisation software which lets you set the lights to be any colour you want. You'll find yourself wasting a lot of time playing with all the pretty colours.

720p perfection

The 720p HD 11.6” LCD display offers great detail in everyday computing and when playing your favourite games. The Alienware features a HDMI port video output to connect to a large-panel external display.

The Dell Alienware M11x comes in a custom Alienware box

The 1.3MP webcam and digital microphone lets you broadcast across the web, while wireless capabilities keep you up and running constantly and you wouldn’t want the gaming to end right when victory is at hand, that’s why the M11x delivers a long battery life while running amazing graphics. In our tests until the battery ran out, the M11x lasted 5 hours and 23 minutes.

Lightweight, easy to use, cool colours and highly customisable. Quite simply, a stunning machine. Had they integrated an optical drive, the Alienware M11x probably would have received 10 out of 10.