Alienware M11x Ultra-Light Gaming Notebook Review

Name: Alienware M11x Ultra-Light Gaming Notebook Review - Page 4
Brand: Alienware

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, April 13, 2010, 01:00 PM EDT

Next, we ran a trio of games on the Alienware M11x, using the system's native resolution of 1366x768 with all in-game quality options set to their maximum values. Anti-Aliasing (4x) was enabled in all three games, and in L4D2 and ET:QW 16x anisotropic filtering was enabled as well.

Performance with L4D2, H.A.W.X., and ET:QW

Gaming Performance

In all three games, the M11x put up perfectly playable framerates. Lowering the anti-aliasing or in-game options would have resulted in even higher performance, but the GeForce GT 335M seems perfectly capable of maintaining playable framerate's at the M11x's native resolution with high quality options enabeld.

Battery Life

Power Performance

The Alienware M11x offers excellent battery life, considering its relatively powerful internal components. Using the Intel IGP, we tested battery life at over 5 hours and with the discrete NVIDIA GPU we got over 3 hours. These tests were run using Battery Eater Pro's "Real World" option. We should also point out, however, that in actual use, we were able to get just a shade over 2 hours gaming on the M11x (on-line play with L4D2) and using it daily for just browsing the web, doing e-mail, etc. resulted in much longer than 5 hours, though it's tough to quantify and actual usage vs. idle time.

Tags: Dell, Notebook, GeForce, Gaming, Alienware, portable, M11x

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com