Alienware Aurora mALX: Six-toed gaming ninja
A gaming laptop that can smack a desktop PC about the face with a wet kipper? Why, that'll be the Alienware Aurora mALX
When the folks from Alienware came to visit us last week, knees buckling beneath the weight of an enormous rucksack, we guessed they were about to show us something special.
Inside the sack was the Alienware Aurora mALX -- a laptop that does for gaming what anabolic steroids do for sprinters. It has a great spec, but before we fired up a copy of Battlefield 2 we had to stop and gawk at its bold design.
Alienware has clearly been hiring youngsters with disciplinary problems to spray its laptops with interesting pictures. This one has a funky purple, black and green paint job that changes colour when you look at it from different angles. It's also been painted with what looks like the feet of a six-toed mutant ninja in sandals.
Beneath the fancy paint, the mALX chassis is the same old Clevo M590K we've seen used by countless other laptop companies. It's big (19 inches), but not very clever. Considering Alienware has just launched a new set of desktop chassis designs, a set of new laptop cases would have been nice.
Still, the mALX's specification is very solid. It has a 19-inch screen, uses a pair of Nvidia GeForce 7900GTX graphics cards that each have 512MB of RAM, a 2.4GHz AMD Turion ML-44 CPU, and even comes with a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 SZ PC Card sound card for full-on surround-sound gaming.
Alienware was kind enough to leave us the ginormous backpack the mALX came in, and inside we found quite a few goodies. There's a set of Alienware headphones, an Alienware ALX Polo shirt, as well as a Razer Diamondback gaming mouse and the showpiece -- a metal box containing… a mouse pad. Now you know where your money goes when you buy an Alienware.
The Aurora mALX is available to pre-order from the Alienware Web site for £2,398. We're off to review it right now. -RR
Update: See a full review of the Alienware Aurora mALX in our Reviews channel.