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Alienware M18X hands-on review
THE INQUIRER was at Dell Technology Camp in London today where the Alienware M18X got its first outing, so we took the opportunity to see what this high end gaming laptop has to offer.
Looks-wise the Alienware M18X oozes style, class and great build quality. It has a stunning 18.4in full HD screen with 1920x1080 resolution. You can guess that this makes the laptop enormous in size and it is very heavy. If you don't mind lugging around 7kg then you're certain to impress people with this bit of hard core gaming gear.
The stunning display uses an LED backlight and provides a lot of screen real estate to play your favourite titles on or watch films. You'll obviously want to use a USB mouse for some games, especially first person shooters like Call of Duty, but the touchpad is nice and responsive for general use if you haven't got a mouse plugged in.
The keyboard on the M18X is eye catching in an attractive yet hypnotising way. There's a full sized numeric pad next to the main keyboard and the backlight can be customised and even change colour in-game, to represent your characters health for example.
We found it comfortable to game with one hand on the keyboard and one on a USB mouse and found that we hit the keys we needed intuitively without problems. The only reservation we have is that the bottom portion of the laptop is rather on the chunky size, which could prove an annoyance for your arms over long periods of use.
Performance is something that the Alienware M18X has in abundance and then some. With the dual graphics cards, a Sandy Bridge Intel Core i7 CPU overclocked to 4GHz and large amounts of RAM this gaming beast found rendering fast-paced action in Call of Duty: Black Ops on full detail settings easier than a walk in the park.
We're not sure if it can play Crysis though. µ
Tags: Hardware
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I agree that 1080px vertical is a shame, 1920x1200 is much better, however the manufacturer makes their decision based on a cos vs. benefit analysis. 1080p is well publicised and advertised as being the greatest screen format ever so from the point of view of the vast majority of consumers they're getting the best there is. 16:9 ratio video is common these days and the panels made for HDTVs are mostly in that format. Due to volume of production screens in this ratio are probably significantly cheaper than 16:10. So in short, benefit: 'It's 1080p, you can watch your HD films, TV or blu-ray at full resolution on it'. Cost 'It's common therefore relatively cheap.
For 1200px vertical, Benefit: 'You get 120px vertical more than pretty much anyone else (Does the average consumer really care?)' Cost: 'Quite a bit more(I imagine)'
Why do you say 1200 is the vert res? Also unless you are in on the design decisions you making comments in the dark.
Why do these manufacturers insist on using that idiotic 1080px vertical resolution rather than the correct 1200px resolution that they should?