New Alienware Laptops Available Now

So much for the yesterday’s rumors— the new Alienware lineup is out NOW and Dell is already taking orders. The M14x R2, M17x R4 and the M18x R4 have all been given the Nvidia Kepler treatment as well as lots of other high-end goodies. Unfortunately the M11x appears to have been discontinued.

Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors are not released yet, so for now the laptops ship with Sandy Bridge CPUs, although that shouldn’t have a noticeable effect on gaming performance. The design stays the same across the entire lineup, which is fine by me, but it wouldn’t have hurt if they had trimmed the weight a little.

M14x R2

Although the M11x is still available in its present form it won’t be updated, so the M14x R2 is about to become the smallest member of the Alienware laptop family and it looks like it will remain the most powerful 14-inch  laptop on the planet in the foreseeable future. We were very impressed with the first revision, but with the new model Dell takes the portable performance concept a step further by adding a GeForce GT 650M with 1GB or 2GB of GDDR5. The fastest version of the GT 650M should be roughly on par with the current GTX 560M and is a major improvement over the GT 555M. Compared to the higher-end GTX 660M, the GT 650M also has 384 CUDA Cores and an 128-bit memory bus (and in this case GDDR5 as well), but the GT 650M has lower clock speeds.

The other major update in the M14x R2 is the range of storage options. Other than the usual 7200rpm hard drives and SSD, there is also an option for dual 256GB solid state drives in RAID 0–something that will do wonders for overall system performance, but not so much for your wallet. A regular RAID setup  would not fit inside the Alienware M14x, so this is accomplished by combining an mSATA SSD with a 2.5-inch drive. Said mSATA port is a new feature, and for those who don’t feel like forking over $750 for the RAID 0 setup, there’s also an option for hybrid storage by combining a regular hard drive with an mSATA cache SSD.

M17x R4

The new 17-inch Alienware also looks just like its predecessor, but gets more or less the same treatment on the inside as the M14x R2. However, the M17x R4 is of course more powerful in its base configuration, with a quad-core Core i7 CPU and a GTX 660M. What’s even more interesting is that the laptop is offered with the (still not officially announced) AMD Radeon HD 7970M GPU. This one is from AMD’s corresponding 28nm lineup, with lots of shaders and performance that should be in the absolute top segment. Upgrading to this GPU will set you back $200, while a GTX 675M (a renamed GTX 580M) is $350, so unless you want an M17x R4 with a 3D Vision kit, the AMD cards seems like the natural choice.

As opposed to the M14x R2, the M17x R4 has room to spare for two conventional 2.5-inch drives, meaning that it can be equipped with up to two 512GB SSDs (SATA 6Gbps) in RAID 0. This configuration should be insanely fast and burn a considerable hole in your wallet for $1,800 extra. However, there are considerably cheaper alternatives involving both hard drive RAID and hard drive + SSD cache hybrid storage. The M17x also has four RAM slots and room for up to 32GB.

M18x R2

Alienware’s 18-inch flagship is still available with factory overclocked Extreme Edition Intel CPUs and SLI graphics, but there’s no sign of the rumored HD 7970M’s in CrossFireX. So far there is only an option for dual GTX 675M GPUs in SLI, and the entry model includes a GTX 660M. Unfortunately only the 660M is a Kepler-based GPU and you cannot combine two of them in SLI.

As for the storage options, they are similar to the M17x with the difference that you can also get a triple-drive RAID 0 setup with three 256GB SATA III 6GBps SSDs in RAID 0.

Get the rest of the details Alienware.com