Alienware’s signature alien-stamped aesthetic is oft-criticized as garish, but the M17x’s black exterior and customizable lights mean that the machine is really only as flashy as you choose to make it. The sturdy, tank-like 18 is the heaviest laptop in our roundup at 10.6 pounds, and isn’t exactly lap-friendly. Alienware’s impressive array of lighting options — customizable backlighting, email notifications, and lighting setups that respond to in-game events — have always been a draw for gamers, and you can read our full review for more details. The keyboard is a little cramped, but very responsive, and the touchpad works without issue. Aside from being overly reflective, the 18.4-inch, 1920 x 1080 resolution display has bright colors and deep blacks. Without a subwoofer, the 18’s audio is a little light on bass, but the speakers still deliver crisp sound without distorting the audio.
Design
Alienware 18 Back ViewAfter using the same design for the past few years, Alienware decided to overhaul the look of its notebooks. Called the Epic design, it retains the company's distinctive brand identity, but looks a bit fresher.
Gone is the black, soft-touch lid, in favor of a silver-colored anodized aluminum. Two light bars extend diagonally from the lower corners toward the middle of the lid, with a glowing alien head at the top middle.
Playing games on the Alienware's 18.4-inch, glossy 1920 x 1080 display is like going to an IMAX theater. The screen is so massive that it simply envelopes you. When watching the "Man of Steel" trailer, we felt as though were actually flying from Krypton to Smallville. Colors, from the black of space to Superman's red cape, were rich and saturated, and were detailed enough that we could see the individual pores on Henry Cavill's face.
It’s easier to see pixelation in text, vector art or high-resolution still images, than in fluidly-animated game graphics. If you want a great gaming experience and a minimum of motion sickness, framerate matters more than pixels. If the Alienware 18 were designed for photo editing, or CAD, we might say the resolution is too low for the panel size and viewing distance. As this is a laptop engineered from the ground-up for gaming and gaming alone, we think Alienware struck the right balance.
When playing "World of Tanks," we felt as though we were on the actual WWII battlefield. We loved the way the sun glinted off the metal turrets and bathed the war-ravaged towns in afternoon light.
Gaming Performance
With dual Nvidia GTX 780M GPUs -- each with 4GB of DDR5 memory -- in SLI, it was expected that the Alienware 18 would blow past every graphics and gaming benchmark we threw at it.
If you combine all gaming benchmarks, you can see that the SLI system improves the performance by around 40%. This is not bad but not overwhelming either. For comparison, the significantly less expensive Radeon HD 8970M CF (only 9% slower on average) showed a performance increase of 33%. However, Nvidia also offers the better driver support. Contrary to the One K73-3S, there were almost no problems with the Alienware 18 (crashes, graphic issues, performance drops...).
Even on more demanding games, the Alienware 18 barely broke a sweat. On "Bioshock Infinite," the system averaged 80 fps at its native resolution and with graphics at their highest setting. That's about twice as high as the MSI GT70 (44 fps), as well as the category average (35 fps).
And when you can turn all the eye candy on, boy do games look gorgeous. Every whisp of smoke, tree leaf and ripple in water looked incredible when playing "World of Tanks." And with its massive 18-inch screen, we were completely enveloped in the action.
Here, the lighting effects also came into play: Because there is a profile for "World of Tanks," all of the lights would change to orange, green or blue depending on the situation, or flash red when our tank was hit or destroyed. It helped take the sting out of losing -- somewhat.
Processor
The processor is a high-end model based on Intel's latest Haswell architecture. Packing a quad-core 2.8-GHz Intel Core i7-4900MQ overclocked to 3.4GHz; 32GB of DDR3L 1600MHz RAM; a 512GB SSD; and a 750GB, 7200-rpm SATA 6GB hard drive, it's fair to say the Alienware 18 is the most powerful notebook we've reviewed to date.
On PCMark 7, the Alienware 18's score of 6,199 topped that of the MSI GT70 (6,025), and was about 3,000 points higher than the desktop average (4,325).
The 512GB Samsung 841 SSD in the Alienware 18 was also equal to the task, duplicating 4.97GB of multimedia files in 19 seconds, for a rate of 267.9 MBps. That's more than twice the category average of 106MBps. The MSI GT70 had a speed of 463 MBps, but that's because its two 128GB SSDs are configured in a RAID array.
As it runs 64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium, and not Windows 8 -- something we're thankful for -- the Alienware 18 takes a little longer to boot.
The Alienware took 3 minutes and 40 seconds to match 20,000 names and addresses in OpenOffice -- 20 seconds faster than the GT70, and more than a minute faster than average.
Keyboard and touchpad
Alienware’s keyboard layout is very close to the US standard, with full-sized arrow keys and a full numeric keypad that MMORPG fans will adore. Another very welcome addition is a row of six programmable macro keys along the left-hand edge, and four more above the numeric keypad.
A standard touch for Alienware, the ‘S’ key has a little raised marker to help gamers locate the WASD cluster, just as ‘F’ and ‘J’ have markings for touch-typists on standard keyboards.
As part of the redesign, the 3.9 x 2.25-inch touchpad on the Alienware 18 is now completely backlit, as opposed to merely being outlined in light.
Key travel is as deep as we’d expect from a laptop – i.e. not very – but that can work well for gaming where quick response is required. Keys have a clear tactile ‘click’ at the point of activation, and we didn’t notice any problems with ghosting during gameplay.
Audio
Alienware 18 AudioThe Alienware's stereo speakers pump out a serious amount of quality sound. When we cranked Daft Punk's "Derezzed," it felt as though we were in a club. From the higher notes to the thumping bass line, the 18 reproduced the electronic tones with bone-rattling fidelity.
Games, too, benefit from the audio. The roar of the cannons and the grumble of our diesel engines in "World of Tanks" had a real visceral quality.
Alienware uses a 2.1 system, which was designed in cooperation with Klipsch. It consists of two speakers (front of the case) and a subwoofer (bottom). The sound experience of the high-end notebook comes close to the Asus G750JH, but cannot quite keep up with the quality of the MSI GT70H.
Rating on Windows 7
Heat
The temperatures are somewhere between average and good. Let's start with the surface temperatures. We measure 32 degree celsius during idle; the One K73-3S (HD 8970M CF) was almost 4 °C cooler in our review despite its compact construction.
It is a similar situation under load. While the Clevo barebones warms up to 31-32 degree on average after one hour maximum load with the tools FurMark and Prime95, we can measure 35 degree and 34 degree for the Alienware 18; the maximum value is 41 degree. However, the overall temperature development is very modest and even longer gaming sessions should not be a problem.
Battery life
Gaming sessions with the 18-inch notebook only last for an hour. However, the mobility is probably not the deciding factor for most potential buyers since the Alienware 18 was designed as a desktop replacement.
Even if you can use it under perfect conditions with minimum display brightness and activated energy-saving features, you will have a hard time exceeding a runtime of 3.5 hours. Two hours DVD playback and 2.5 hours web browsing are also mediocre at best (medium energy saving).
Note: You can also use the integrated graphics card (longer runtimes) if you restart the notebook via Fn + F5.
Battery runtime
Runs period
Idle (without WLAN, min brightness) 3h 23min
WiFi Surfing 2h 26min
DVD 1h 54min
Load (maximum brightness) 1h 04min
THE VERDICT
Alienware offers the most powerful, well-made gaming laptops on the market — but you'll pay a premium for them. If you want a machine that isn’t likely to struggle with next year’s AAA titles and are willing to pay the price, then the M17x is an extremely flexible and delightfully customizable option. If you’re looking for an even more powerful laptop and a screen bigger than 17 inches — though at that point, you should probably consider building a desktop — check out Alienware’s M18x, which features dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 680M GPUs and an 18.4-inch screen.
Battery life is a short 2 hours 20 mins with the GeForce card, although there’s a clickable icon on-screen that allows you to switch to the integrated graphics on the fly to preserve battery life. It does run warmer than some of its rivals, pumping a steady stream of warm air out through the large vents at the back of the chassis. It never became uncomfortably warm, but you’ll need to keep the back of the laptop clear in order to ensure good ventilation.
