The M14x is 1.5 inches thick (whereas most ultraportables are about 0.5 inch thick) and it weighs 6.5 pounds, not counting a 1.3-pound power block. Though the M14x’s specs put it somewhere between an all-purpose laptop and an ultraportable laptop, it’s much larger and thicker than an average ultraportable today. In our tests the laptop managed 5 hours, 3 minutes of battery life-not far behind the Aspire S5’s 5 hours, 28 minutes. The M14x also has very good battery life, considering that it’s a gaming machine at heart. These numbers indicate that the M14x is a powerhouse. The Aspire S5, in contrast, topped out at 19.1 fps and 44.5 fps, respectively, at the same settings. In our Dirt 3 graphics tests, the M14x behaved like a true gaming machine, sustaining frame rates of between 82.8 frames per second (at high quality settings, and 1920-by-1080-pixel resolution) and 186.5 fps (at low quality settings, and 800-by-600-pixel resolution). In other words, the Aspire S5 boots up and resumes from sleep much more quickly than the M14x does (the S5’s startup time in our tests was 12.3 seconds, versus 24.2 seconds for the M14x), but that doesn’t mean the Aspire S5 is more powerful overall.Ī better way to identify the M14x’s computing strength is by assessing its gaming performance. However, the Aspire S5, like all Ultrabooks, comes with a speedy solid-state drive that helps it boot faster. For example, the Acer Aspire S5, a sleek 13.3-inch Ultrabook with a Core i7-3517U processor, rolled up a WorldBench 7 score of 195. These days, competing ultraportables are speedier and more powerful than ever, despite being slim and light. In PCWorld’s WorldBench 7 benchmark tests, the M14x earned a very good mark of 143, meaning that the M14x was 43 percent faster than our reference model, which carries a second-generation Intel i5-2500K processor, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card.
#ALIENWARE M14X R1 ALIENWARE SOFTWARE WINDOWS 7#
The M14x runs the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.
#ALIENWARE M14X R1 ALIENWARE SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#
The M14x also features a Killer Wireless-N a/g/n Wi-Fi card with Bluetooth 4.0, a DVD-RW drive, and Alienware’s Command Center suite of software (including AlienFX, which allows you to change the lighting scheme). Our review unit, priced at $1454 (as of August 20, 2012), as configured, sports a third-generation Intel Core i7-3610QM processor, 8GB of RAM, a 750GB hard drive, and a discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics card. Like many more-typical ultraportable laptops, the M14x has a 14-inch screen, but it’s chunkier and more powerful than the other computers in its category. As a result, the Alienware M14x is now the entry-level Alienware laptop, which Dell recently refreshed with an IvyBridge processor and a new graphics card. When Dell refreshed its lineup of Alienware gaming laptops earlier this year, it discontinued the littlest of the bunch, the 11-inch Alienware M11x.