New Alienware M15x announced & hands on

Alienware today announced the new M15x with mobile Core i7 CPUs and a single GTX 260M GPU - a shrinked M17x. We already got some benchmarks and first impressions on this gaming notebook.

The design of the Alienware M15x is clearly a smaller version of the already available M17x. Differences are

• 15.6" glare type display with either 1600x900 or 1920x1080 (Full HD) resolution. Should be Wide Gammut as the M17x one
• one GT 240M or GTX 260M graphics card, not switchable as an Intel chipset is used
• Intel Core i7 Q720M - Q920XM CPUs. The new quad core mobile Core i7 CPUs can be found in this gaming rig and should provide plenty of calculating power
• Only one Harddisk, default a 7200rpm HDD, optional bigger sized and SSDs (from Samsung)
• smaller an lighter (14.88"x12.15"x1.92") starting at 9lbs with 6 cell battery

We already hat the possibility to get a quick hands on on the new gaming rig from Alienware. The first impression on the laptop is as good as with the M17x. It looks just like a smaller version and also has the same high built quality. The Aluminium body still is nice to touch and looks good.

The review unit had the Full HD screen which produced nice vivid colors. The maximum brightness in the middle was measured with very good 260cd/m2. The brightness distribution was also good with a minimum of 221 cd/m2 in the top left corner. The blacks were measured at 0,44 cd/m2 which leads to a good maximum contrast of 600:1. All in all the screen looks really nice (if you like glare displays) and should be well suited for the gaming tasks.s

The performance of the Alienware m15x should be quite impressive. We got some benchmarks of the preproduction unit and the combination of the Core i7-820QM compared with the Nvdia GeForce GTX 260M deliver impressive scores for a 15" model.

Here are some results in detail (but remember because of the pre-production status these scores may change):

3D Mark Vantage
The Alienware M15x should reach about 5700 points in the performance presets. The best laptop with GTX 260M reached about 4900 points up to now (Asus G71GX). With entry level presets about 18300 points should be reached. Quite impressive for a GTX 260M.

The CPU Score of 12400 is also quite impressive, as the QX9300 in the M17x scored "only" 11979 points. 

PC Mark 05

According to Alienware / Dell the system should scroe about 7750 points, which would a bit below the M17x (9615 points). Still this means it would perform on par with the Lenovo Thinkpad W700 (7792 points).

Because of the high end components (and no switchable chipset graphic card), the battery runtime wont be sky high. About 3 hours in Mobile Mark 2007 should be reached according to Alienware.

The system noise should be relativley low, as the M15x uses the same technique as the M17x (which proved to be quite silent for a DTR notebook). Still because of the lacking chipset graphics, the Office noise should be louder.

The system should be able to order on the Alienware / Dell homepage from tomorrow on. The prices start at 1399 Euro (3 GB RAM, GT 240M, 720MQ, 250 GB HDD) and can reach levels of over 3000 Euro when configured accordingly.

Source: Hands On & Press Release