Alienware m11x

I figure I should do a good comment on the m11x r2, I have had mine for about a year and a half and have had no problems at all other the some nivida drivers at the beginning and the fact that punkbuster thinks I am cheating in BF:BC2 for having two graphics cards. I have replaced the memory and hdd, but that was the plan from the get go. My hinge is fine, I don't have much of a heat issue unless I use it for hours, and it games great. I guess I also stuck some big 1/2in feet on it to help out with the airflow that have been great too.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
Malor wrote:

They might be voiding your warranty because they're not getting paid as much for the crapware they load as they should be.

The Alienware versions of Dell computers actually don't come with any bloatware which is kind of nice. They are extremely clean right out of the box. I've been really happy with the M11x other than the little problems I complained about earlier and now this big problem. Hopefully this new motherboard fixes it and I can get a year or two out of it after the warranty expires next month. It really is perfect for playing less graphically taxing games (when it's working of course).

Edit: I just remembered that it DID come with Steam pre-installed which is probably the biggest form of bloatware ever considering how much money I spend on Steam. But yeah, there weren't any trial versions of MS Office, antivirus software, or anything like that installed.

Update: I've got a new motherboard in, and it's working! I've been running a 3D benchmark for 15 minutes or so, and I haven't had any crashes. Before it would crash after 1-5 minutes. I'm so happy. *wipes away tear*

So I plunked down on an R3 i5 8gb. It's waiting for me in the US... lordy Saturday can't come fast enough.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

So I plunked down on an R3 i5 8gb. It's waiting for me in the US... lordy Saturday can't come fast enough.

Nice! For future reference, the best forum for finding out information on tweaking games and what not is at notebookreview.com. You can find out how well games will perform and what the best tweaks are on that forum.

To update, my R2 is still running excellent after my little ordeal. In the end, it was all worth it for a screen without permanent keyboard marks. I keep a sheet of paper in between the screen and the keyboard now when closing. That's worked well. I'm afraid to put anything thicker in between the keyboard and mouse because it might put stress on the hinges. Skyrim runs pretty darn well on this thing. I have everything set to high (except no AA) and get 15-60 fps. It's definitely CPU limited as low graphical settings don't do much to help the fps. I could probably get better performance if I overclocked it and used throttlestop, but since it runs okay, I haven't bothered.

Rats, I didn't even feel like I double clicked that "Post comment" button. Ah well.

Thanks Tuffalo--I think you've mentioned notebookreview like three times now (but I've probably asked about as many times as well). Looking forward to testing it out, and I may have to pick up Skyrim after all the filthy enabling going on at GWJ...

Hey Tuffalo, have you figured out a way to activate numlock? A google search finds very little info about this, other than a notebookreview forum post suggesting it isn't possible.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Hey Tuffalo, have you figured out a way to activate numlock? A google search finds very little info about this, other than a notebookreview forum post suggesting it isn't possible.

I haven't needed it, so I haven't checked. I don't think there is a way to bind numlock to a key. Maybe you could set a macro to numlock? I don't know what software you would need to be running.

yeah I won't need it often, but sometimes I need to enter ® and ™ for work stuff. Guess I'll just pull up the charmap, no big deal.

arise... so now the Nvidia has announced the 640m, I am looking forward to Alienware sticking that thing in the R4. according to reviews of the Acer Aspire M3, this thing is a pretty significant upgrade over the 540m while using less power and creating less heat.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

arise... so now the Nvidia has announced the 640m, I am looking forward to Alienware sticking that thing in the R4. according to reviews of the Acer Aspire M3, this thing is a pretty significant upgrade over the 540m while using less power and creating less heat.

Yeah, that'll be nice. Plus, with an Ivybridge CPU, you could run many games on that and save power while traveling. My R2 is still running great after my previous issues. It still runs basically every game, so I won't need to upgrade until it bites the dust (which will hopefully be in a year or two). Keeping a piece of paper in between the keyboard and screen when closed has kept me from getting permanent keyboard marks on the screen. It also seems to help keep the oils off of it that collect on the keyboard.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

arise... so now the Nvidia has announced the 640m, I am looking forward to Alienware sticking that thing in the R4. according to reviews of the Acer Aspire M3, this thing is a pretty significant upgrade over the 540m while using less power and creating less heat.

Hawt. My R3 is doing just fine as well, for the time being; I found a control panel setting that I had missed, which seems to have fixed several games which were running at 4-5 fps on low settings. Now I'm running ME3 near max settings, and it's beautiful and smooth.

Tanglebones wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

arise... so now the Nvidia has announced the 640m, I am looking forward to Alienware sticking that thing in the R4. according to reviews of the Acer Aspire M3, this thing is a pretty significant upgrade over the 540m while using less power and creating less heat.

Hawt. My R3 is doing just fine as well, for the time being; I found a control panel setting that I had missed, which seems to have fixed several games which were running at 4-5 fps on low settings. Now I'm running ME3 near max settings, and it's beautiful and smooth.

Mine will run ME3 pretty good as well. With max settings but no AA, I get 20-60 fps with an average of 30 or so which is playable. The fps doesn't dip so much if I actually plug it in.

I almost always set up a profile for games in the Nvidia control panel to make sure the Nvidia GPU is chosen. Doesn't seem to catch the non AAA titles very well.

Tanglebones wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

arise... so now the Nvidia has announced the 640m, I am looking forward to Alienware sticking that thing in the R4. according to reviews of the Acer Aspire M3, this thing is a pretty significant upgrade over the 540m while using less power and creating less heat.

Hawt. My R3 is doing just fine as well, for the time being; I found a control panel setting that I had missed, which seems to have fixed several games which were running at 4-5 fps on low settings. Now I'm running ME3 near max settings, and it's beautiful and smooth.

Yeah I've been very happy with my R3 as well. Battlefield 3 is mostly playable even, though I'm not so picky about framerates so I imagine others might feel differently. But overall it's great. What setting did you change in the control panel that helped?

edit: would also be interested to know if any of you overclock, and whether it makes a difference. I've tried bumping mine up to 800mhz with EVGA's precision tool, seems to cause a fair bit of improvement in BF3 though I haven't looked at the actual numbers to know for sure.

Chairman_Mao wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

arise... so now the Nvidia has announced the 640m, I am looking forward to Alienware sticking that thing in the R4. according to reviews of the Acer Aspire M3, this thing is a pretty significant upgrade over the 540m while using less power and creating less heat.

Hawt. My R3 is doing just fine as well, for the time being; I found a control panel setting that I had missed, which seems to have fixed several games which were running at 4-5 fps on low settings. Now I'm running ME3 near max settings, and it's beautiful and smooth.

Yeah I've been very happy with my R3 as well. Battlefield 3 is mostly playable even, though I'm not so picky about framerates so I imagine others might feel differently. But overall it's great. What setting did you change in the control panel that helped?

edit: would also be interested to know if any of you overclock, and whether it makes a difference. I've tried bumping mine up to 800mhz with EVGA's precision tool, seems to cause a fair bit of improvement in BF3 though I haven't looked at the actual numbers to know for sure.

I overclocked the CPU and used throttle stop on my R2 for awhile. I don't do it anymore because it decreases the battery life a bit and I use the laptop on the go mostly. The R2 can be very CPU bottlenecked in some games, so it definitely bumped the FPS up a few.

Looks like Alienware is phasing the M11x out.

Wonder if that means they'll have a bigger screen ultrabook to replace it sometime soon? I know there have already been some with Nvidia graphics in addition to Intel's better integrated solution.

Sad, I hoped to see a new model with the 640m and Ivy Bridge. I think that combo could have been amazing.

TheGameguru wrote:

Ugh... I would love a new M14x with the 650M but I'm gonna have to hold out for the refresh model with Sandy Bridge..

I assume you mean Ivy Bridge?

Ugh... I would love a new M14x with the 650M but I'm gonna have to hold out for the refresh model with Ivy Bridge..

doh edit.

M11x is off the main sales page on alienware.com, but it's available if you click on the the products tab at the top of the laptops landing page. Guess it'll be available till they sell out...

Turns out peeps are flashing Alienware M17 laptops with the Nvidia 580M to a 675M with a custom BIOS.. you get some overclock to see some performance gains but Nvidia is clearly re-badging and taking advantages of some efficiency to crank up speeds.

Hoping for some clear benchmarks from a reputable site on the Alienware M14x R1 with a 555 and an M14x R2 with a 650

Is it worth it to wait for Ivy Bridge paired with a gtx 6xxm or is the performance gain minimal compared to Sandy Bridge with a gtx 5xxm?

I know it will be cooler and more efficient, but in raw power, how significant of an upgrade is this for 1080p gaming?

heavyfeul wrote:

Is it worth it to wait for Ivy Bridge paired with a gtx 6xxm or is the performance gain minimal compared to Sandy Bridge with a gtx 5xxm?

I know it will be cooler and more efficient, but in raw power, how significant of an upgrade is this for 1080p gaming?

Anandtech looks at mobile Ivy Bridge.

Maingear is making something just like the M11x called the Pulse. I sure would like to know why Alienware pulled it. I sure love mine because I barely notice it's in my bag.

I think perfect for me would be one of the ultrabooks with one of the new Nvidia chips at a 13" screen size. But I'll probably just settle for using the onboard graphics and not worrying about current gen games too much.

Be warned.. anyone buying an Alienware laptop.. Nvidia has rebadged 5 series as 6 series GPU's. AMD has now released the 7970M and it completely destroys the rebranded 675M yet Alienware is charging $200 more for the "upgrade" to the 675M.

I'm waiting for the M14x to get Ivy Bridge and hopefully an AMD 7800 mobile GPU.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Maingear is making something just like the M11x called the Pulse. I sure would like to know why Alienware pulled it. I sure love mine because I barely notice it's in my bag.

Sager is also making an 11", the NP6110. Also badged as the Clevo W110ER. Sounds like it should be almost everything the next gen M11x could have been, except it's lacking a back-lit keyboard. I hope Maingear's has that.

So my r2 has finally bit the dust. I loved that laptop but it is now DOA. It won't post or anything... Time to find a replacement with hopefully a better screen.

I have been looking and I am thinking I like the look of the Sony S Series 13P. I has a slightly larger screen and a higher resolution with a nice processor and a nvidia 640m LE with 2gb. Any thoughts? How does the 640m LE hold up with modern games?

MonoCheli wrote:

So my r2 has finally bit the dust. I loved that laptop but it is now DOA. It won't post or anything... Time to find a replacement with hopefully a better screen.

I have been looking and I am thinking I like the look of the Sony S Series 13P. I has a slightly larger screen and a higher resolution with a nice processor and a nvidia 640m LE with 2gb. Any thoughts? How does the 640m LE hold up with modern games?

According to Notebookcheck.net the 640m LE is on par with the 555m, so it should definitely be more powerful than the M11X R3's 540m, which I have and find runs most modern games reasonably well at medium settings. However it may be bandwidth limited if it's paired with DDR3 memory, especially when running at a higher resolution.

Do you want something the same size as the M11x? Might want to check out Clevo's W110ER--it comes with full powered mobile processors and the 650m for about the same price as the M11x was, and I've read it runs BF3 very smoothly at high settings. Some of the resellers offer matte screens as well.

edit: this review says the Sony does quite well with games, however:

the comments also mention something about a BIOS mod you can use to unlock higher speeds.

Oh don't tease me

When I ask whether the M11x will see a successor, Frank Azor suggests it's a possibility. "The 11-inch was very disruptive," he says. "We want to be disruptive again."