Alienware Corp http://www.alienware.com
Aside from Yoda in Star Wars, you rarely see green aliens in science-fiction movies anymore—these days, the color is more often applied to machines. Enter the latest Alienware gaming laptop, the Aurora m9700 ($3,934 direct), and its fresh coat of metallic cyborg-green paint. The gaming rig will likely attract tons of attention, or at least turn everyone around you, uh, "green" with envy. And if that's not enough, its SLI nVidia graphics will tear apart all the latest 3D games.
The m9700's metallic-green paint job is not for everyone. From my perspective, if I can't draw a crowd with my poor gaming skills, I might as well do it with a funky color. The black portions of the case clash with the green a little, but Alienware's signature alien emblem brings the whole design together. And now that the company has joined forces with Dell , I'm hoping eventually to see the m9700 with the same lights that surround the Dell XPS M1710 (Core 2 Duo).
Like the XPS M1710, the m9700 features a bright, 17-inch screen that carries a full 1,920-by-1,200 (1080p) resolution. Unfortunately, it also weighs as much as the M1710, tipping the scales at 9.3 pounds. That said, most gamers will have no problem lugging the m9700, instead of a desktop, to their local LAN party. Its keyboard is great for punching in commands and text-chatting, though I found the touchpad a little unresponsive and the mouse buttons somewhat noisy.
I was a little disappointed when I realized that the m9700 has a single-core AMD Turion 64 processor, as the dual-core AMD Turion 64 X2s are available. The 2.4-GHz ML-44 is still a pretty good chip, but when you're dropping $4,000 on a laptop, you tend to expect the latest and greatest components. The XPS M1710 has already gone through a first-generation dual-core chip, and it's now sitting pretty with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. SYSmark 2004 SE scores for the m9700 reflect the slower processing speed if you're doing anything besides gaming.
Thankfully, gaming does not take a hit at all. The m9700 surpassed the Editors' Choice XPS M1710 on 3DMark05 tests, scoring 14 percent better at 1,024-by-768 resolution and 30 percent higher at 1,920-by-1,200. How did the m9700 do it, you ask? SLI graphics—or, in this case, dual nVidia GeForce Go 7900 GS chips. Because it has two graphics cards working together, the m9700 also did really well on our Doom 3 and Splinter Cell benchmark tests. Its Adobe Photoshop CS2 scores showed no signs of slowing down, thanks to its 2GB of system RAM. Video-encoding scores did take a hit, though—the m9700 took 12 minutes to finish our Windows Media Encoder test, compared with 5 minutes for the M1710 (Core 2 Duo). There's also the problem of battery life. Odds are that gamers will be plugged in most of the time, but if you have to work on the move, the m9700's 1 hour 36 minutes battery life might make you reconsider.
So which laptop would I choose if it came down to the Alienware Aurora m9700 or the Dell XPS M1710 (Core 2 Duo)? Though the m9700's design and SLI graphics are all I would need if gaming was my first—and only—priority, the M1710 offers a more complete package, thanks to its 2.3-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 CPU, the fastest mobile processor available to date.
Alienware Aurora m9700
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