Alienware M17 Gaming Laptop product reviews

The Alienware laptop by DELL is a great piece of kit. The box is sturdy enough to use more than just for housing your new toy from factory to you. It has nice foam padding and a flip top design that closes up securely enough to be possibly the best transportation protection you could get.

So who would buy this? Retailing from anywhere from $3250 to $5000 these are not cheap machines and at the end of the day they are just a highly specced laptop. The niche in the market is this exact point. You can't build your own laptop like you can with desktop machines so this is the only way to truly have a beast of a machine that you can customise upon order.

I was impressed from the moment I opened the case and saw how it was designed. Then turning the laptop over you can see that it has a deployment date (flash date of manufacture) but not just on a sticker, these laptops have a brushed aluminium plate. Also on this plate is the model name and in their own type font a word I can only guess says Alienware. Also on the plate is the basic specs of the processor and video card.

Staying on the bottom there is a plethora of laser etch printed logos and one that caught my eye was the Klipsch audio one. As I was to find out later, the audio is definitely a big thing. Around a third to a half of the bottom is vented with metal mesh or slots that allow maximum air flow around the vital internal components, the video memory and fan the i7 and its fan and cooling system. You can buy water cooling kits for these so if you want to overclock the already well specced laptop so the performance you buy can still be improved upon.

One of the great things about these laptops is how the 20 colour rainbow or other 13 customisable colour schemes can be applied and how they look on the laptop in use. The laptop can be set up to cycle through a series of colours and effects or just display one or two across its 10 lighting zones. Alienware has partnered with several gaming developers and has developed 60 custom profiles for game titles.

The 17.3" in 1080p looked amazing. Great sharpness in displaying text and also fast moving images such as sport, including a super punchy depth to its visuals when playing Team Fortress 2. You Tube was also great to watch with virtually only the lag in caching and starting the video to wait for. I opened several video windows and they were all open and running when I selected each one except one that had not downloaded enough to start yet. Closing them all was a breeze, they all vanished straight away.

The hard drive is a solid state device, SSD meaning that there is virtually no lag, zero moving parts and space wise that is also a huge plus. The memory is superfast 16 gig DDR3 running at 1600 MHz, whilst the graphics is sporting 4 gig of DDR5. Whew! If you want a side by side comparison or a shoot-out of specs complete with boastable benchmarks, Google is your friend. This is my take on this machine as a normal end user and there is no point in re-inventing the wheel. This machine has been out 6 months at the time of writing and the benchmarks will all be 6 months old now.

Audio wise the Klipsch Audio speakers did more than an impressive job at filling the lounge with sound. It has an inbuilt Dolby assist called Dolby's Home Theater v4. With this you can select from different profiles. I had to turn it down when gaming as initially it was too loud haha. The usual way over the F keys to increase and decrease works fast, it isn't a slow progression you can go from quiet to booming in about 2-3 seconds.

The keyboard feels fast and responsive. Soft touch keys swathed in black, underlit with the colour system just looks and feels great. I was able to quickly type in and the inclusion of the number pad on the right. The touchpad has all the latest tablet features such a pinch zoom, two finger scroll etc and spans about 4 inches across.

Battery wise this laptop lasted around 4 hours for me in normal browsing and web use. When I did some gaming that dropped to around an hour before needing the power supply, The Power supply has a blue ring around it which is very useful for seeing that there is actually power there. In the past I have had to feel the brick, listen to it, unplug and plug the cord to see the crack to know there is power present. With this you can simply look at the blue light. Nice touch. It is a whopping 12.5 amp draw power supply which is the thirstiest I have ever seen as far as current consumption goes. It has 4 nice bobble feet that keep it stable on the desktop with no chance of it sliding around due to moving the cord.

The inbuilt webcam is a nice 2 megapixel one providing great visuals for skype and selfie shots. Most laptops settle with the 640 x 480 variety. You can also use this to log in by having it recognise your face and automatically log in with your password. I did not use this function as I did not want it storing my details but I did see that it works really well right up to the point of saving you. Along the sides of the laptop is the BluRay loading slot, USB 3.0 ports x2, HDMI in and out, audio connections, security lock, mini display port, a great 9 in 1 card reader and Gigabit LAN.

The weight of this laptop and the price puts it in the market as a gamers machine. You are not going to buy this to use it on the way to work using public transport or in a cab. It is meant for going from one LAN part to another and gaming at full resolution with all the settings turned up. Because of this I can appreciate what it is and what it is not trying to be. It isn't trying to be a gaming machine that a corporate will use as his work machine. Sort of bridging that divide. It isn't the sort of thing you would carry between meetings and connect to a projector to show this months fiscal figures for toothpaste sales. It is a balls out beast of a gaming machine.

I give it a solid 9 out of ten and remove one point purely on the price. If it wasn't a laptop you would never be able to ask this much for a like for like spec'ed computer.