Alienware M18x R2 Specs Revealed (Maybe)

While not exactly on par with the Apple rumor industry, the Dell Lab blog has been on the mark before, so the rumors posted there tend to be interesting (which is usually more than you can say about the Apple rumor mill).

Alienware M18xThe latest rumor pertains to the 2nd revision of the M18x and contains some quite plausible specifications for the soon-to-be-released laptop.

First of all – and this is really a given – the new monster will come with Intel’s 3rd-gen Core (Ivy Bridge) processors and there are three quad core options available including the Core i7-3610QM  (2.3 GHz, 3.3 GHz with Turbo Boost), the Core i7-3720QM (2.6 GHz, 3.6 GHz with Turbo Boost) and finally the Core i7-3820QM (2.7 GHz, 3.7 GHz with Turbo Boost).

There is no mention of an overclocked Intel Extreme(ly Expensive) Edition processor at this point. It’s worth pointing out that behind the vast amounts of hype, the Ivy Bridge processors will not bring any revolutionary performance improvements to the table, but they will offer somewhat better performance while the power consumption remains mostly the same.

What could turn out to be considerably more interesting are the GPU options. According to Dell Lab, dual GeForce GTX 675M graphics cards in SLI mode will be one of the options. This card is a simple rebadge of the GTX 580M, but still the fastest mobile Nvidia card. The other option, however, is for dual  AMD Radeon HD 7970M GPUs from AMD’s latest batch of GCN (Graphics Core Next) 28nm GPUs, which comes with a boatload of shaders (some 1500 or so) and should be considerably faster as well as more power efficient than the GTX 675M/580M. There’s also a third, and likely much more economical option in the GTX 660M, but the Dell rumor guy doesn’t know whether it will be offered in SLI configuration or just as a single card. The latter would be a shame since the 660M is one of Nvidia’s new Kepler-based GPUs.

Apparently, the screen and resolution will stay the same – an 18.4-inch WLED LCD panel with 1080p resolution – so there will be no attempt on a ‘Retina’-type display with ludicrously high resolution, which might have been interesting considering that this is one of few laptops that could actually manage games in 2MP native resolution.

The remaining details are far less interesting and contain the RAM and storage options. All RAM will be of the 1600 MHz  or somewhat faster 1866 MHz variety and the storage alternatives are either 7200rpm hard drives or SSDs in capacities up to 512 GB.

Source: Dell Lab

Jesper Berg
Jesper Berg

Gaming hardware enthusiast since the 80286 era.

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