Alienware M18x Intel Core i7 2630QM 2.0GHz (2.8GHz w/Turbo Boost review: Alienware M18x Intel Core i7 2630QM 2.0GHz (2.8GHz w/Turbo Boost

While 17-inch desktop replacement laptops with decent gaming performance are easy to find, if not exactly common, to truly move into the realm of mobile home entertainment center, there's nothing like an even-larger 18-inch screen. We've recently seen both 18-inch multimedia laptops (the Acer Ethos 8951) and 17-inch hard-core gaming laptops (the Origin EON17-S), but the new Alienware M18x combines the best of both worlds in a powerhouse 18-incher with the muscle for serious gaming.

8.2

Alienware M18x Intel Core i7 2630QM 2.0GHz (2.8GHz w/Turbo Boost

The Good

The new <b>Alienware M18x</b> is built around a stunning 18-inch display, with copious configuration options for killer performance, including overclocked CPUs and dual video cards.

The Bad

The M18x starts expensive and goes up from there, and for that kind of money, we expect a better design than the aging Alienware dorm-room chic.

The Bottom Line

Alienware again pushes the boundaries of laptop performance (and price) with high-end parts and a great-for-gaming 18-inch screen.

Of course, that kind of hybrid doesn't come cheap, and the M18x starts at $1,999, while our tricked-out review unit added up to $5,071. For that you get a quad-core Intel Core i7-2920XM CPU, dual Nvidia GTX 580M GPUs, and an impressive 16GB of RAM. At the lower end of the price scale, you're paying more for the brand name and custom chassis than anything else; this is clearly a go-big-or-go-home kind of laptop (Alienware's 11-inch M11x, in contrast, is really designed to present well at its under-$800 starting price).

Related links
• Origin EON17-S review
• Acer Aspire Ethos AS8951G review
• Alienware M11x review

The huge screen makes a surprising difference over slightly smaller 17-inch ones, and if you're eschewing a flat-screen TV in a den, dorm room, or vacation home, the M18x can be an all-in-one entertainment center, especially as it has a separate HDMI-in port for your game console, cable box, or other device.

The biggest drawback, beyond the heart-stopping prices, is the Alienware design itself. Despite making small evolutionary jumps over the past several generations, this is still a big black box with a glowing alien head stuck on the back. It's what we call dorm-room chic, and for $5,000, it's not wrong to expect something a little more sophisticated.

Beyond that, it's been tremendous fun to pull out every high-end PC game release from the past year and run them through the M18x's giant screen with the graphics settings cranked to high.

At first glance, one thing stands out about the Alienware M18x: it's big. Really big. At a bit over 17 inches by 12 inches, this will have a massive desktop footprint. And, weighing nearly 13 pounds without the chunky AC adapter, it's not easy to pick up and lug around with you, even from room to room. For something that big and hard to hide, at least we can say the most eye-filling part of it, the back of the lid, is a non-gaudy matte black or red (ours was red). Planted right in the middle, however, is the ever-present glowing alien head logo. It's an important part of the Alienware brand to be sure, but after going virtually unchanged for several years, it may be time for a new, more upscale-looking treatment.

The same goes for the slablike body. With its jet-black interior and glowing keys and logos, there's a bit of an '80s neon-powered vibe, including the backlit grilles on the front lip, which always struck us as vaguely automotive, in a muscle-car, Knight Industries Two Thousand kind of way. Worse, those front grilles are cheap-feeling plastic, which is at odds with the excellent construction of the rest of the chassis. For $5,000, you should expect an absolute minimum of plastic on your laptop body.

The familiar Alienware FX lighting and settings control system is still here. It lets you set the color for the backlit keyboard and the other light-up parts of the system, including the logo, front grilles, and touch-pad border. The same software package also provides a fairly comprehensive power control suite, which offers more-detailed options than the basic Windows power settings, as well as a tab for touch-pad control options, including horizontal and vertical scroll zone setup.

The keyboard has a more traditional tapered key design, rather than the wider, flat keys most laptop makers are partial to these days. Alienware has previously said that for the core gamer audience, the tapered keys provide more space between the individual letters, making it better for first-person shooters, which make heavy use of the WASD keys. There is also a row of customizable quick-launch buttons, of the same size and style as the letter keys, which can be assigned to apps, macros, or other functions, and multiple sets of assignments can be stored and recalled. It's pretty handy if you're always searching for your favorite keyboard shortcut.

Multimedia keys, including volume control, are set along the top edge of the keyboard tray. They're in the cut-out key style, rather than individual buttons or a touch-sensitive strip. It works fine, but we always like the volume controls to be extra large, especially for quick adjustment while gaming.

The single best feature of the Alienware M18x is probably its 18-inch screen. These monster displays are few and far between, although we did just see one with the Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G. The M18x's screen is big and bold and looks great, although the resolution is exactly the same as the 17-inch Alienware: 1,920x1,080 pixels. If you think about it, classic tube televisions up until about 10 years ago were most commonly 19-inch sets, so this laptop's screen is nearly as big as what used to be a living room TV.

The 5.1 speakers are bigger and louder than what you'd find on most laptops, but they still never got especially heavy, a victim of the physics of smallish speakers. They'll do for basic gaming and movie watching, but we had a much more immersive experience while gaming with headphones on.

Even more so than the Origin EON17-S, the M18x loads up on the ports and connections. Like the Origin, it has plenty of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, along with eSATA support, but it also pairs its HDMI output with a separate HDMI input connection. That's a great idea if you want to use the screen as a secondary TV display, and at 18 inches, it's certainly big enough to be your main display in a dorm room, den, or vacation home. Our system also included a wireless display antenna (but not Intel's WiDi version) and a Vizio-branded receiver that plugs into your TV via HDMI. This $262 add-on worked fine, but the associated software control panel, which we've seen before, is clunky and not intuitive.

The customization options available are wide-ranging, and your M18x can start at $1,999 or go well past our $5,000 review unit. The base configuration CPU is already a Core i7 2630QM, which is a good sign. For an extra $975, the top CPU option is an overclocked version of our Intel Core i7-2920XM. GPUs scale up to dual Nvidia GeForce 580M cards (a $1,200 upgrade), but AMD is also available with two Radeon HD 6990 cards for $500. The base config includes a single Nvidia 460M.

In our performance tests, the Alienware M18x was, not surprisingly, an impressive piece of hardware. It was the only gaming laptop to come close to the Origin EON17-S we recently reviewed, which had an overclocked version of the same CPU, as well as an overclocked single GPU. The two systems traded places in our tests, but both are about as fast as laptops can get right now.

But, you're probably more interested in gaming, which is the main selling point of an Alienware system. We tossed in a few high-profile recent games, including Metro 2033, Dragon Age II, Street Fighter IV, and Civilization V (we're literally still waiting for the 10GB file of The Witcher 2 to finish downloading). All the aforementioned titles played smoothly at the full 1080p resolution, with the graphics details set to the highest settings (Metro 2033 could get a little chunky in places, however).

The M18x ran Metro 2033 at 1080p at an average of 29.7 frames per second, which is impressive, as that particular test can be brutal at the highest settings. The Origin EON17-S actually ran the same test at 39fps, thanks to its aggressively overclocked parts. The easier Street Fighter IV test ran at 59.7fps on the Alienware at 1,920x,1080 pixels. While gaming laptops may still be a step behind the highest-end gaming desktops, our overall gaming experience on the M18x was nothing short of awesome.

Juice box
Alienware M18x	Average watts per hour
Off (60%)	0.61
Sleep (10%)	1.48
Idle (25%)	44.16
Load (05%)	111.93
Raw kWh number	209.6
Annual power consumption cost	$23.79

In terms of battery life, even unplugging the M18x to walk it closer to your television in order to use the wireless HD capabilities is a roll of the dice, depending on how long the movie or TV show you plan to watch is. In our video playback battery drain test, the M18x ran for 1 hour and 56 minutes. That's not the worst we've ever seen from a desktop replacement, but other 2011 models have shown impressive gains in battery life, thanks to Intel's current line of efficient CPUs and Nvidia's Optimus graphics switching. This SLI model doesn't turn off the GPUs automatically as needed; to do that requires a button combo and a reboot. Still, we don't expect this system to spend much time away from a wall outlet.

Alienware includes an industry-standard one-year parts and labor warranty with the system, which also includes in-home service. Upgrading to a three-year plan will cost an extra $299, and several other options are available for purchase, including an "advanced care" plan, which is $418 for three years, and includes accidental damage protection. Support is accessible through a 24-7 toll-free phone line, an online knowledge base, and driver downloads.

Metro 2033 (in fps)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

1,366x768, High, DX11, AAA, 4X AF

1,920x1,080, High, DX11, 4X AA, 16X AF

Origin EON17-S

49 

39 

Alienware M18x

46.7 

29.7 

Toshiba Qosmio X775-3DV78

37.7 

23.5 

Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G-9600

9 

5.3 

Find out more about how we test laptops.

System configurations:

Alienware M18x
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-2920XM; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; (SLi) 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 580M (x2) + 64MB (Dedicated) Intel HD 3000; 750GB Seagate 7,200rpm (x2)

Origin EON17-S
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 2.5GHz Intel Core i7-2920XM; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 580M; HDD #1: 500GB Seagate 7,200rpm + HDD #2: C300-CTFDDAC128MAG 128GB SSD

Acer Aspire Ethos 8951G-9600
Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit); 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-2630QM; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 1GB Nvidia GeForce 555M; 750GB Seagate 5,400rpm

Toshiba Qosmio X775-3DV78
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-2630QM; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 1.5GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 560M; HDD #1 - 500GB Seagate 7,200rpm + HDD #2: 750GB Toshiba 5,400rpm

Dell XPS 17 3D
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) w/ SP1; 2.0GHz Intel Core i7-2630QM; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,333MHz; 3GB Nvidia GeForce GT 555M; 500GB Seagate 7,200rpm