Hardware Geeks

More and more notebook PC users want to game on their notebooks, and they don’t want to just play WOW or Solitaire, they want to place games like Crysis, Stranglehold and Flight Simulator X, something you can’t do with an ordinary notebook.

For the past two years or so we have seen more and more OEM’s like Toshiba and Lenovo enter the notebook gaming market and while their products, like the Toshiba X205 and the Lenovo Y30, are great powerful machines Alienware has hit another home run in the Notebook for Gamers Niche with their Alienware Area 51 m15x notebook PC. 

When I first got the Alienware Area 51 m15x notebook PC, I posted some un-boxing photos and what I neglected to mention then I will mention now is when I first saw the machine in all of its glory I felt as if I were holding a Mac in my hands. Its design and feel reminded me of my old iBook just bigger. The system comes with a Silver Skullcap Design or Ripley Design.  (Click here to view both designs) But as soon as I saw the Alien Head on the case, I knew I wasn’t holding a Mac, I was holding Alienware.

Another really cool thing about the design was that underneath the system was a metallic label with Hardware Geeks engraved on it. I thought that was a nice touch, it adds to the whole experience of getting a machine like this.

Before I continue with the review, here are the system specs for the machine:
Monitor: 15.4” WideUXGA 1920x1200 LCD (1200p)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 2.8GHz 6MB cache 800MHz FSB
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium SP1
Memory: 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SO-DIMM at 677MHz
Hard Drives: 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache and 500GB external drive
CD Drive: 2x Dual Layer Blu-Ray Reader
Connectivity: Intel Wireless 4965 a/b/g/Draft-N

As you can tell by the specs the system is fully loaded, but the specs don’t give you the whole picture. The Alienware m15x has something called a SmartBay. The Blu-Ray drive is located in this SmartBay reader, which can also be removed to insert an extra battery that gives you an additional 2 hours of battery life, or an additional hard drive up to 500GB.  There is no longer a need to carry an additional external drive around that may not match your system-- Alienware has thought of it all.

When I open the system up for the first time, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was greeted by a nice high def widescreen with a black bezel, a large touchpad with one button, and a funky looking keyboard. Funky as in cool.

So I powered up the system and she booted up really fast, there wasn’t a “Please wait while we install additional software” message like on some HP machines. It went straight to the login window. I clicked on “Hardware Geeks” the name they set up on the machine and I was on my desktop in seconds. Everything loaded fast oh and guess what NOTHING NOT EVEN A DROP OF CRAPWARE just my Recycle bin was on my desktop and nothing was pre-installed.

So with nothing was pre-installed, with the exception of a trial for Microsoft Office 2007, I decided to open up the Office trial since it was the only program installed and being a daily user of Microsoft Word, Excel and Outlook I decided to test out how it would handle my day to day normal use.

Microsoft Word loaded quickly and Outlook loaded just as fast, I even used Outlook daily for nearly a month on the machine allowing my inbox to retain all of the emails it downloaded, and it still loaded quickly, on some of my other notebooks Outlook would sometimes take ages to load when there were a lot of emails in the inbox.

I then installed PCMark Vantage and 3Dmark Vantage, and ran their benchmark test 5 times each.  The average score for PCmark was 4823 and for 3DMark it was 3790.
Those of you who are not familiar with PCMark and 3DMark, PCMark messures how well a system can handle day to day work loads and 3DMark messures how well a system can handle gaming. The scores generated are HIGH (meaning good) for a notebook PC.

I then decided to install Crysis, and as many of you know Crysis is a resource intensive game, and 99% of all notebooks on the market right now can’t probably run Crysis correctly. Heck some desktops can’t even handle Crysis at all. So I think installing Crysis and seeing if the m15x can handle it is a legitimate test of power. Because honestly benchmarks shouldn’t be the only test you perform on a machine.

So Crysis is installed and I fire up the game, as typical everything loads perfectly up to the menu. Then it just crapped out on me. I downloaded some updates for the game that I forgot to install and fired it up again, set the settings to HIGH and it loaded. There I am falling out of a airplane when my parachute fails.

If I were playing on my HP Pavilion tx2000 or my dv6000 with High Settings like the game would probably be so laggy I wouldn’t be able to play it or the systems would just freeze. While there was a TINY bit of lag with everything set high, I was able to play the game and enjoy it.

I did have to lower the graphics settings a bit for it to handle game play perfectly.

During game play the system didn’t get as hot as I thought it would, while I wouldn’t place it on my lap while I was playing Crysis (afraid of burning my nads) I doubt it would of burned me if I had.

Being able to play Crysis on this machine really got me thinking, probably wouldn’t take much to be able to play Crysis with everything high and no lag what so ever. AMD has some really cool Hybrid Graphics and APU’s coming out who knows with Alienware excellent design and AMD’s APU we may be able to play Crysis and burn a DVD at the same time.

Since the system has a high-def screen, and has an optional blu-ray player, I watched a few blu-ray movies and it was beautiful, even though the screen is 16:10 and you get the blackbars th picture was amazing. The sound quality from the speakers was also really good too, and with the built in bluetooth streamed music from my phone and used the speakers on the mx15 to listen to it.

So there you have it, the system can handle your day to day work load, system hungry games like Crysis, and deliver great sound and picture quality during movies.

But power isn’t the only thing the Alienware Area 51 mx15 has to offer, it has LIGHTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The keyboard is backlit (and I also have to say one of the most comfortable and nicest feeling keyboards around), the touch pad also has a light that goes around it, the quick controls above the keyboard lights up, the Alienware name lights up and a light pipe around the monitor lights up. Oh and lets not forget the Alien head on the back of the monitor lights up.

You can customize the lights to any color you want or disable them altogether, the system comes with a Lighting Control program that lets you control all the lights easily. Check the video below for a quick demo.

The system also comes with software to help you manage the battery life of your system. I ran a little test and you will get about 3 hours with extended battery at High Performance and 5 and a half hours when the system is set to Power Saver.

Overall the system is great and I am depressed that I have to send it back to Alienware, and it hurts inside that I don’t have $5,000 to buy it.  The system is so great that we have awarded it our 5 Start Kick Ass Award and 5 Star Editors Choice Awards for August 2008. No other products will receive those awards for the month of August.

The system has a starting price of $1499 and is available only at

There is also a 17” version of this notebook called the m17x, also available now at Alienware.com.

Post Tags: gaming  alienware  area-51  dell  reviews  mx17  mx15 

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