Alienware m7700 real mobile gaming rig reviewed

WE MANAGED to get one of the nice Alienware high performance gaming notebooks and we wanted to compare two different graphic cards in this machine. This is one of the few notebooks where you actually can change the graphics. We tested Alienware Area 51 7700 notebook packed with a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 550J, 1GB DDR 2 memory, two hard drivers in Raid 0, DVD recorder and some other nice things. We want to mention that the test unit has a 17-inch 16x9 display with a native resolution of 1680x1050 pixels and will make your games look very nice on it.

Alienware m7700 notebook

We will tell you more about this notebook in a separate part but first we want to concentrate on two graphic cards that we managed to test already.

We got the test machine equipped with a Geforce FX Go 6800 graphic card. It actually is a small graphic card module but it is specially designed for this notebook. It's of course buried deep inside the notebook. This card is clocked to 300MHz and is using 1000MHz clocked 256 bit GDDR 3 memory. The card has twelve pipelines and six vertex shaders. It's a PCIe mini card that can be replaced and the module itself is based on Nvidia NV41 chip. It is not very mobile as it uses the desktop core but it's a pretty good performer. Alienware now offers Geforce FX Go 6800 Ultra based on NV42 and clocked 450 MHz core and 1080 MHz GDDR 3 memory but we didn't have this one for our test. The latest Nvidia offering for this notebook is none other than a Geforce GO 7800 GTX powered with 24 pipelines and eight vertex pipes clocked at 400MHz core and 1100MHz memory.

Geforce FX Go 6800 inside laptop, ATI Mobility Radeon X800 waiting

Once we finished Geforce FX Go 6800 test of we unscrewed the machine, took the card out and replace it with ATI Mobility Radeon X800 card clocked at 350 MHz core and 800 MHz 256 bit GDDR3 memory. This card is based on M28 mobile chip and also has twelve pipelines and has six vertex shaders. It's not that hard to replace the graphic module but you need some instructions from Alienware to be on the safe side. Anyway you just need to take four screws from a back side of a laptop take the module out, put a new inside, screw it back and you are ready to rock and role.

ATI Mobility Radeon X800 card

We tested some of our usual games and we did the testing before all the greatest Quake 4, Fear and others got released. We run Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal tournament 2004, Half Life 2, 3Dmark03, 3Dmark05 and of course PC mark 2004 and Sandra 2005 to show the performance of the overall system.

DOOM 3	1024x768	1280x1024
Alienware Area 51 7700 ATI Radeon Mobility XT 800	57.70	41.40
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	69.10	58.80
Far Cry 1.3	1024x768	1280x1024
Alienware Area 51 7700 ATI Radeon Mobility XT 800	58.74	57.54
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	55.01	53.78
Unreal Tournament 2004	1024x768	1280x1024
Alienware Area 51 7700 ATI Radeon Mobility XT 800	138.89	127.82
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	135.80	127.16
Half Life 2	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Alienware Area 51 7700 ATI Radeon Mobility XT 800	34.43	35.01	34.17
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	35.53	35.54	33.70
Half Life 2 FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1680x1050
Alienware Area 51 7700 ATI Radeon Mobility XT 800	34.96	32.83	28.81
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	35.35	34.86	26.67
DOOM 3 FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024
Alienware Area 51 7700 ATI Radeon Mobility XT 800	35.00	24.50
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	48.40	32.40
Composite Figures 3Dmark03	3Dmark03	Game 2	Game 3	Nature
Alienware Area 51 7700 ATI Radeon Mobility XT 800	8667	59.9	49.6	60.8
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	9157	69.1	57.1	51.1
Composite Figures 3Dmark03	Single Texturing	Multi Textur.	Vertex Shader	Pixel Shader 2.0
Alienware Area 51 7700 ATI Radeon Mobility XT 800	1838.6	4099.2	28.8	75.6
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	2775.7	3911.5	25.1	116.5
Composite Figures 3Dmark05	3Dmark05	Game 1	Game 2	Game 3
Alienware Area 51 7700 ATI Radeon Mobility XT 800	3788	17.7	10.3	19.1
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	3667	16.7	10.0	18.8
Composite Figures 3Dmark05	Single Texturing	Multi Textur.	Pixel Shader	VS /VS complex
Alienware Area 51 7700 ATI Radeon Mobility XT 800	2089.6	4740.1	83.8	42.8/36.4
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	2076.0	3934.7	107.1	34.2/28.7
PC Mark 2004	CPU	Memory	HDD	Total
Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800	5100	4903	4027	4893
Sandra 2005 - Alienware Area 51 7700 GeForce Go 6800
CPU	9854
	4025/6937
Memory	4449/
	4455
Multimedia	23976
	32140

Nvidia Geforce FX Go 6800 was dominating Doom 3 testing having a quite nice lead in both Doom 3 with 4X FSAA and 8X anisotropic and without it. It managed to be 10 to 16 FSP faster. ATI Mobility Radeon X800 manages to score thin win in Far Cry 1.3 as it's just three to four FPS faster than Nvidia card. Unreal tournament 2004 is again on Mobility X800 side but the card is winning by not so impressive three FPS on 1024x768 or 0.6 FPS in 1280x1024. Half Life 2 was very tight and Nvidia was faster at 1024x768 by one frame while the sore was tight at 12x10 and ATI won by 0.6 frame in 16x12.

Half Life 2 with 4X FSAA and 8 X anisotropic is on Nvidia side and is winning at first two resolutions. ATI is faster by two FPS at 1680x1050 displays native resolution. Not impressive at all.

Alienware m7700 notebook running Half Life 2 test

When it comes to synthetic benchmarks Nvidia is wining 3Dmark03 overall score and is faster in all games in most theoretical tests. ATI is significantly fast in Nature test but it's surprisingly slow in Pixel Shader as it stays massive 40 FPS behind Nvidia. ATI Mobility X800 is winning 3Dmark05 by just over 100 points and is little bit faster in all of the games. Again ATI is significantly slower in Pixel Shader test but is faster in Vertex Shader test.

PC mark 2004 and Sandra gave some impressive numbers and was indicating that we are talking about very fast notebook. It is more of a desktop machine packed into notebook case but still much more transportable than any kind of desktop. That's why they call it Desktop replacement system as its five kilos heavy and bulky but its easy to take it to the LAN party.

Conclusion
ATI Mobility X800 card was little bit faster in most of the tests. The Mobility X800 stepped up a little compared to Geforce FX Go 6800 but just a little. You still have to bear in mind that there are at least two Nvidia cards Geforce Go 6800 Ultra and Geforce Go 7800 GTX that would definitely outperformed Mobility X800 in most of the tests. Unfortunately we didn't have any of those cards on test. When it comes to mobile gaming both Mobility X800 and Geforce FX Go 6800 will let you play on some decent resolutions and will be good enough to play all the current games.

You won't be able to go crazy on FSAA and Aniso as it will kill your performance. When it comes to notebook gaming machine we think that you should think about Alienware Area 51 m7700. Its fast, it can get hot as all desktop replacement notebooks but will provide top gaming performance on ultra crisp 1680x1050 screen. If you want to get gaming notebook you want to get one of the Area 51 machines as they will give you as much as you need. Still you can go for Athlon based Area 51 in January when it comes available as we all know that recently Athlons are running games faster. Alienware didn't disappointed, it provided top gaming platform in a very nice looking laptop case. If you want a gaming laptop you should consider this one, and we gave you some light about its graphic performance. µ