Full Review - Testing
Use and Testing Once we arrived at the desktop we were surprised, and pleased, to see zero icons. That’s right – zero. Since Alienware is owned by Dell we figured we’d see Trend Micro PC-Cillin, Google Desktop and all the usual bloatware suspects, but we were wrong. Kudos to Alienware for giving gamers what they want: A clean desktop with no bloatware. As it turns out, there are some pre-installed apps, but they are useful and include Nero Essentials and Cyberlink PowerDVD – that’s it. General Windows Performance We ran PCMark06 Vantage to determine overall system performance and the system scored 4,057 – top marks, pretty much. In fact, the only higher score we’ve seen in this test was the 4,604 score achieved by the SLI-powered Dell XPS M1730. Gaming performance During gaming, the fans spin up quite a bit and are clearly audible and a bit loud. Stil, that’s always been the case with gaming notebooks so it’s hardly a surprise. Also, you should plan on hooking the m15x up to a set of good speakers if you don’t want to use headphones, because the onboard speakers don’t generate nearly enough volume and have zero bass response.
The m15x comes wrapped in a soft case that would come in handy while traveling, though it’s very slim and designed to protect the exterior from scratches, not from an accidental drop or other physical damage. We pulled it from its casing and plugged in its large power brick and booted it up. The boot time was an average 1 minute and 10 seconds.
How good is a Ferrari for getting groceries? It’s a similar situation here, where Windows Vista performance was superb at all times, especially during everyday tasks, which is not surprising. The m15x uses a 200GB 7,200rpm hard drive with 16MB of cache, and given the speed of the processor as well as well as the presence of 4GB of RAM (of which 3GB are seen by the operating system, which is Vista Home Premium) it’s an understatement to say it runs well. Its Windows Experience Index is 5.0, which is quite high, especially for a notebook.
Even though it lacks a second GPU for SLI action, the m15x is still packing the fastest mobile GPU available – NVIDIA’S 8800M GTX, which has 512MB of memory. It scored a lofty 9,287 in 3DMark06, which is excellent. We also played a bit of Crysis, and were able to run the GPU-crushing first-person shooter at a decent 1024x768 with all details set to high. We also loaded up Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and were able to play at the panel’s native 1920x1200 resolution, which proved fantastic. 
If you’re going to be gaming, consider headphones or external speakers to drown out the fan noise.
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by Tarso on May 12, 2008:
“It all sounded great but I bought this machine with the exact same configuration and honestly I deeply regret it! I paid over $4000 for a machine that is giving me blue screen errors every single days. I have spent over 10 hours with their tech support, and...” More...