Alienware M14x Gaming Laptop Review
Alien Command Center and Experience
Alienware's Alien Command Center software suite has been bundled with their M series of notebooks for a while now and the M14x also sports this package. There are three primary sections of the Command Center: AlienFX, AlienTouch and AlienFusion.
Alien Command Center - AlienFX
Alien Command Center - AlienTouch
Alien Command Center - AlienFusion
Alienware M14x Windows Experience Rating
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Alien Command Center - AlienFX
AlienFX allows you to control the 9 lighting zones of the M14x that we spoke of earlier. As you can see, a jog wheel is available to select colors from for each of the zone individually if you so choose. The keyboard area has four divided zones itself, which could come in handy for certain gaming situations and key-mapping functions.
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Alien Command Center - AlienTouch
AlienTouch allows you to adjust the sensitivity of the multi-touch capable touchpad area. We're pretty thankful for this functionality as we often find ourselves accidentally bumping the touchpad on some machines, sending our cursor into a frenzy and wreaking havoc on the desktop.
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Alien Command Center - AlienFusion
AlienFusion is where you control the machine's power plan and there is a fair bit of granularity here, with control of things like PCI Express link power under certain power profiles. There are three preset power profiles (Balanced, High Performance and Power Saver) or you can create your own custom profiles. Regardless, AlienFusion goes above and beyond simple Windows Power profile settings and really lets you dial the machine in at the power settings that make the most sense for you.
Alienware M14x Windows Experience Rating
Finally, before we dig into the benchmark numbers, here's a quick look at what Windows thinks of the M14x. With a total available score of 7.9, the M14x scores rather competitively versus other 14-inch machines in its class. The lowest subscores here are listed as the graphics and hard disk tests, though a 5.9, for notebook-built components in these areas is still respectable. Next, let's look a bit deeper into performance with a few full-fledged benchmark datapoints.
