Alienware "GAMERS PARADISE"

Now, it's clear that Alienware parent Dell stacked the deck by sending us a system configured with nearly every high-priced upgrade possible. The Alienware 18 starts at $2,099, and can be ordered with either Windows 7 or Windows 8. Our review configuration included an upgraded Intel Core i7 processor, a 512GB solid-state drive (SSD)/750GB hard drive storage combo, two Nvidia GeForce 780M graphics cards, and a whopping 32GB of RAM, possibly the first time we've tested a laptop with that much memory. The cost? A budget-breaking $4,249.

And for that healthy investment, you get enough power to play games such as the brand-newBattlefield 4 from EA at the highest "ultra" settings at the system's 1,920x1,080-pixel native resolution. (Although, with higher-res screens coming to smaller laptops now, is it too much to ask for a Retina-style display on a gaming rig?)

If you're looking to spend this kind of money on a gaming laptop, rather than building your own desktop, the choice is often between a big brand such as Dell's Alienware, or something from a boutique PC maker such as Origin PC or Maingear. A closely configured Origin 17-inch laptop costs about the same, and the biggest choice you'll have to make is whether you go for the custom design and chassis quality only a big company such as Dell can afford to develop, or the boutique-level hands-on customer service and overclocking you can get from a smaller PC gaming specialist.

Despite my love for small, slim, sleek laptops, the massive 18-inch screen won me over, and the Alienware 18 is a great way to take advantage of the current PC gaming renaissance we're experiencing right now. You really have to load on the expensive configuration options to make the system shine, but if you have the budget, a fully tricked-out Alienware 18 is an impressive gaming monster that manages to not look too much like a "gaming" machine.

	Alienware 18	Alienware 17	Toshiba Qosmio X75-A9278
Price	$4,249	$2,699	$1,899.99
Display size/resolution	18-inch, 1,920x1,080 screen	17-inch, 1,920x1,080 screen	17.3-inch 1,920x1,080 screen
PC CPU	2.8GHz Intel Core i7-4900MQ	2.7GHz Intel Core i7-4800MQ	2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700MQ
PC memory	32GB 1,600MHZ DDR3 SDRAM	16GB 1,600MHZ DDR3 SDRAM	16GB 1,600MHZ DDR3 SDRAM
Graphics	(2) 2GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 780M	4GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 780M	3GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 770
Storage	512GB SSD + 750GB HD	256GB SSD + 750GB HD	256GB SSD + 1TB 7,200rpm hard drive
Optical drive	BD-ROM	BD-ROM	Blu-ray/DVD writer
Networking	Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0	Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 4.0	Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n wireless, Bluetooth 4.0
Operating system	Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)	Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)	Windows 8 (64-bit)

Design and featuresA thick, matte black slab that recalls the space obelisk from "2001: A Space Odyssey," this system is so massive that its form even overwhelms Alienware's typical kitschy light show. Closed, it absorbs light, not quite blending into the background, but as unassuming as a $4,000 gaming laptop can be. Make no mistake, however. This is still a thick, heavy, black laptop with colored lights and an alien head logo on the back of the lid, but it feels very high-end in the hand, with rock-solid construction and a soft-touch finish.

A laptop? Technically speaking. Portable? Only in the broadest sense of the word. The Alienware 18 weighs a back-breaking 12.3 pounds without its bricklike power cable, and 15.5 pounds with it. At 2.3 inches thick, it feels as if the keyboard and touch pad are hovering over your desk rather than resting on it.

That issue creates one of the major ergonomic problems I had with the system. The lid itself is thick, so the keyboard sits 1.75 inches above the table, versus less than a quarter of an inch for many slim laptops. For gamers who spend a lot of their time with fingers poised on the WASD keys, that can mean your arm and wrist are raised at an awkward angle. If you need a refresher on computer ergonomics, you generally want your keyboard and mouse setup lower down, so that your elbows are at a 90-degree angle or lower.

Because the chassis is so large, the standard-size keyboard is set well back from any of the edges. The front lip is especially sharp, angled at more than 90 degrees, and I found my forearm resting uncomfortably at the edge because of both how far back the keyboard was placed and the extra height of the system.

Aside from that, the keyboard and mouse will be familiar to anyone who has seen the current-gen 14-inch and 17-inch Alienware systems. The large keys are tapered slightly at the top to avoid accidental keystrokes. They have a satisfying depth and the large Shift, Control, and other keys often used in PC gaming are placed well for in-game use. A row of user-definable shortcut keys is just to the left of the keyboard, and full number pad is to the right.

The backlit touch pad is a good size, and keeps separate physical left and right mouse buttons, rather than using a newer clickpad-style surface. But for gamers, it's probably a moot point, as you're likely to use an external mouse for all your serious gaming.

As is expected from Alienware, the chassis lights up in all sorts of interesting ways, with a backlit keyboard, the Alienware logo, a light-up alien head on the back of the lid, and a few more zones. All of these can be controlled from the Alien FX control panel, a software app that allows you to choose from preset themes or create your own, with different colors for each backlit zone. As on the 14-inch version we reviewed recently, the touch pad is fully backlit, can glow in any of a couple of dozen colors, and lights up when touched.

If you're investing in an 18-inch laptop, the display is one of the things you're going to be the most interested in. In this case, it's a 18.4-inch display, with a full 1,920x1,080-pixel native resolution. The IPS display is glossy (while the Alienware 14 we tested had a matte display) but it wasn't overly reflective, as long as you're willing to shift around or turn off any offending lights. Playing games pushed all the way to 1080p resolution is stunning, especially games with a lot of eye candy. Unlike some of the smaller gaming PCs we've seen recently, you won't feel the need to connect this to a bigger external display. Note that, unlike the vast majority of new laptops, this is not a touch-enabled display.

One issue with the 18-inch screen is that 1080p may not be enough for the highest-end gamers any more. Smaller, less expensive systems, from the MacBook Pro to the Lenovo Yoga 2 to the Toshiba Kirabook, all have higher resolutions, up to 3,200x1,800 pixels. It might push the limits of the mobile CPU/GPU combo to allow greater resolutions, but if you're going high-end, and willing to spend more than $4,000, it could be something you'd want.

Alienware 18	Ports and connections
Video	HDMI and Mini DisplayPort
Audio	Stereo speakers, (x2) headphone, (x1) microphone jacks
Data	3 USB 3.0, SD card reader
Networking	Ethernet, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth
Optical drive	BD-ROM

Connections, performance, and battery

Even though the system includes both HDMI and Mini DisplayPort outputs, I suspect you'll rarely want to hook it up to an external display. You also get multiple audio outputs that can handle 5.1 audio. There are only three USB ports, so a gaming keyboard, mouse, and maybe an Xbox 360 game pad will eat those up quickly.

The Alienware 18 is a very flexible system when it comes to possible configurations. The base $2,099 model isn't exactly going to set your world on fire, with an Intel Core i7-4700MQ processor, dual GeForce 765 GPUs, no SSD, and only 8GB of RAM. On the other hand, you can get a nice SSD/HDD combo and 16GB of RAM, and make your major investment in two GeForce 780M GPUs for around $3,500. Check the configuration options carefully, as Dell/Alienware always seems to be deeply discounting one upgrade or another on a rolling basis.

When you're running a 2.8GHz Intel Core i7-4900MQ CPU with 32GB of RAM, and the high-end video cards suggested above, you pretty much know what to expect from application performance. Frankly, even a PC that costs a quarter as much as this one probably has more than enough computing power for your day, even if you're a heavy multitasker, so at some point, it's just about bragging rights. If you're the type of user who really needs this much CPU/RAM horsepower, there's probably a new silo-style Mac Pro in your future. It's worth noting that, as with most other dedicated gaming laptops, heavy workloads cause the internal fans to kick in, and they are just plain loud.

The real test of a gaming laptop is, of course, games. Only the biggest gaming laptops can fit in dual video cards, allowing two GPUs to work together to boost frame rates (Nvidia calls that type of setup SLI). We ran a pair of 4GB GeForce GTX 780M cards, giving us a top-of-the-line mobile experience, times two

Whatever badly-written television comedies will have you believe, PC gaming is not exclusively the domain of basement dwelling shut-ins. In fact, both casual PC gaming and organised eSports are only becoming more and more social. Just look at the global phenomenon of BarCraft, where StarCraft fans get together to watch – not even play, but watch – live webcasts of competitive matches. At a bar.

When PC gamers get together to play, however, there’s a common impediment: carting around a full-sized gaming PC, monitor and keyboard is a logistical challenge. If you don’t own a car (or the gaming session involves ingestion of fermented beverages and you wish to avoid driving), upgrade that to ‘logistical nightmare’. Don’t doubt, it’s still commonly done – many companies sell special bags or slings designed to carry around your desktop PC and monitor, while some gaming PC cases have integrated handles for portability.

The obvious solution is a laptop, but there’s usually a big compromise involved. If you play something likeStarCraft, XCOM or Minecraft, you’ll probably be okay with any decent high-spec ‘personal’ laptop. Even a high-spec Ultrabook might do you. However, FPS players wanting to fire up the latest Call of Duty or Battlefield title will generally have to turn the graphics right down from what you could manage on a desktop.

Before you jump in: yes, true ‘hardcore’ competitive gamers turn most graphical settings right down anyway, because all of those super-realistic explosions and clouds of smoke are distracting as a hyperactive unicorn at the abattoir. We’ll ignore those players: if you’re that hardcore, you probably know exactly what you do and do not need out of a gaming PC.

So. For those gamers who do want to dial all of the settings up to eleven, but don’t want to carry a thigh-high tower case and 23-inch monitor when attending LAN events, you have massive laptops like the Alienware 18.

In review: Build

The Alienware 18 is not ‘portable’ like an Ultrabook, or even like a conventional laptop. It weighs 5.47kg (give or take, depending on configuration). It’s 58mm thick – that’s as thick as some smartphones are wide. It has an 18.4-inch screen. It’s huge. However, it’s a whole lot more portable than a tower case, external monitor and keyboard, and there’s the sell.

Intimidation: Alienware's AlienFX lighting may be largely pointless, but looks amazing.

As with all of Alienware’s designs, the 18 is elaborately decorated with sharp edges, imposing black ventilation grilles, user-controllable ‘AlienFX’ lighting and the company’s trademark alien-head logo on the lid. Take that, Apple fans, with your smooth rounded corners and glowing fruit.

We found the build on the Alienware 18 sturdier than previous generations – despite the showy style, the build feels exceptionally solid and not at all plasticy. The same is true of its smaller sibling, the Alienware 14 (review to come).

Over a third of the 18’s baseplate, and two-thirds of its rear, are made up of fine metal grilles for air circulation. It has a tendency to heat up whatever’s below it – if the size isn’t indicative enough, this is not a laptop you would actually use on your lap.

Keyboard and touchpad

Alienware’s keyboard layout is very close to the US standard, with full-sized arrow keys and a full numeric keypad that MMORPG fans will adore. Another very welcome addition is a row of six programmable macro keys along the left-hand edge, and four more above the numeric keypad.

Six programmable macro keys are well-positioned to the left of the keyboard.

A standard touch for Alienware, the ‘S’ key has a little raised marker to help gamers locate the WASD cluster, just as ‘F’ and ‘J’ have markings for touch-typists on standard keyboards.

The keyboard is backlit with Alienware’s controllable AlienFX lighting, as is the touchpad (both pad surface and buttons).

Key travel is as deep as we’d expect from a laptop – i.e. not very – but that can work well for gaming where quick response is required. Keys have a clear tactile ‘click’ at the point of activation, and we didn’t notice any problems with ghosting during gameplay.

The touchpad is large and responsive. It would be fine for playing something non-twitch-based like Civilization V or XCOM (we tested it with the latter), but come on – you have an 18-inch laptop, of course you’re going to carry a mouse around with it.

The backlit touchpad is a nice touch.

Display

The 18.4-inch non-touch display has a glossy finish – we preferred the far less reflective matte finish on the Alienware 14, which doesn’t appear to be an option on the 18. However, if you tend to stick with stereotypes and play in a completely darkened room, the glossy finish does look great when there are no external light sources for it to reflect.

The resolution is 1920 x 1080, giving roughly 120 pixels-per-inch. That’s actually kinda low, when you consider how close you sit to a laptop screen due to the built-in keyboard. However, it’s a fine balancing act. Raising the resolution would make for a sharper display, but also decrease in-game framerates by adding a bunch more pixels to the equation.

It’s easier to see pixelation in text, vector art or high-resolution still images, than in fluidly-animated game graphics. If you want a great gaming experience and a minimum of motion sickness, framerate matters more than pixels. If the Alienware 18 were designed for photo editing, or CAD, we might say the resolution is too low for the panel size and viewing distance. As this is a laptop engineered from the ground-up for gaming and gaming alone, we think Alienware struck the right balance.

Unfortunately we didn’t have the Alienware 18 long enough to run detailed display tests – we were focused on extra gaming tests. Colours seemed accurate to the naked eye, contrast was good and animation was fluid – we wouldn’t endorse it for photographers or image editors without those detailed results, however. As a display for gaming, we weren’t at all disappointed.

Specs

As with most of Dell’s products, the Alienware 18 comes in a variety of user-modifiable configurations ranging from NZ$4,999/AU$3,499 upwards to the pricing of our model and beyond to the moon.

Our model, stamped ‘P19E001’ on the base, shipped with a 4th Generation (Haswell) Intel Core i7-4900MQ processor, with 4 cores, hyperthreading, 8MB cache and a clock speed of 2.8-3.8GHz. Backing that up was 32GB of DDR3L-1600 RAM, the most we’ve had in a laptop to date.

Graphics is where it gets a little nuts. NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 780M is a powerful mobile graphics card. Our Alienware 18 had two of ‘em, with 4GB of dedicated GDDR5 graphics memory, in SLI (NVIDIA’s multi-graphics-card setup). That proved more than enough to run contemporary games at high quality settings, at the screen’s native 1920x1080. More on performance later.

Storage – again, in the specific model we tested – was a 256GB mSATA SSD configured as the boot drive, with a 7200RPM 750GB hard drive for secondary storage. We installed all of our benchmark applications and test games to the SSD – the hard drive was not used in our testing at all.

The Alienware 18 includes a slot-loading Blu-ray reader/DVD writer, useful for installing retail boxed copies of games.

Finally, Alienware makes good use of the thick build by including a slot-loading Blu-ray reader/DVD writer. With most mainstream PC games still available on DVD, that’s a useful thing to have on a dedicated gaming laptop. New Zealanders might find this slightly more of a plus than Australian customers – limited broadband data caps and download speeds can make the retail-boxed edition of a game slightly more attractive on the south side of the Tasman.

Performance

In raw CPU terms, measured by our usual set of synthetic benchmarks, the Alienware 18 performed well. In fact, it gave the best performance we’ve seen from a laptop in tasks like data compression, software-based rendering and photo manipulation. Its one weak point was video transcoding, as the dedicated rather than on-chip graphics solution precludes the use of Intel’s Quick Sync video transcoding engine.

None of those synthetic benchmark results are particularly relevant to the Alienware 18, however. It’s a machine built with one purpose in mind: gaming.

What left us with raised eyebrows was the performance we saw in real-world gaming tests. 83.5 frames-per-second at ‘Ultimate’ quality in Tomb Raider (2013). 109fps at ‘Very High’ in the original Crysis. 111fps at ‘High’ inMetro: Last Light. 79fps on ‘Ultra’ in Saints Row IV. There is no clearer way to illustrate the results than simply listing those average framerates.

In simple terms, there was nothing we could not play on the Alienware 18. There was nothing in our test suite that we could not play at its highest settings. Unfortunately we were unable to get Max Payne 3 running (a Steam backup-restore issue, confirmed unrelated to the laptop itself), which might have offered some resistance. However, the performance in Tomb Raider (2013) and Metro: Last Light were particularly telling, both fairly demanding titles.

Futuremark’s 3DMark 11 ranked the Alienware 18, based on the company’s globally collected results, as much closer to a ‘gaming desktop’ than ‘gaming laptop’. It scored almost double the highest results we’ve seen from any laptop to date.

The power supply, like the laptop itself, is massive.

Another point of difference to other gaming laptops we’ve tested is the Alienware 18’s ability to run graphically-demanding games at playable framerates while running on battery power. Most gaming laptops simply revert to the performance of ‘normal’ laptops when the power cable is pulled, regardless of how many ‘maximise performance’ settings you tweak in Windows or the graphics drivers.

There is a huge framerate drop when unplugging the Alienware 18, to be sure: at ‘normal’ quality we saw just 21% the framerate (of mains power) in Tomb Raider (2013), and 37% in Crysis. As we started with such high framerates, though, that still works out to averages of 55 and 60fps respectively, with minimums of 49 and 31fps. Not ideal, but completely playable.

Battery life was less than 60 minutes of Crysis (used for that test primarily because of its in-game laptop battery gauge), which reinforces the ‘mobile desktop’ use case.

The battery on the Alienware 18, while able to sustain gameplay, is more like a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) on a desktop: it stops the laptop from crashing when someone trips over a power cable at the LAN event you’re playing at, unplugging everyone sitting in your row. Given that such an event has occurred at every LAN I’ve been to, ever, the battery is neat to have.

You would not use the Alienware 18 to game on a trans-tasman flight, however. Even if it didn’t blow away your carry-on weight allowance and promise to collapse your tray table, it just doesn’t have the stamina.

Connectivity

Four USB 3.0 ports allow for a good collection of peripherals to be plugged in without a hub, with two ports on the left and two on the right. That’s useful for a wired or wireless gaming mouse, set up for either a left- or right-handed user (never underestimate the importance of port placement).

Dual headphone ports are useful at LAN events. Note the AlienFX strip-lighting between the black upper and silver lower sections of the case.

A dedicated microphone socket allows for analogue gaming headsets (i.e. those that don’t connect via USB), and there are two headphone sockets: good for LAN use where everybody is wearing a headset and you want to share a YouTube clip with a friend. We do wish there was an optical output for super-high-end gaming headsets such as those made by Astro Gaming, to get the best sound quality possible.

An HDMI port serves as either output for an external screen, or an input to use the Alienware 18’s massive display as a monitor. Great if you’re at a LAN with both your laptop and console, and don’t want to bring a separate screen for the latter. There’s also a mini DisplayPort connection for higher-resolution screens than HDMI can drive – given the graphical prowess of the Alienware 18, that’s well worth having. Though we ran all of our benchmarks at the native 1920x1080, the results suggest that you could easily drive a 2560x1440 or similarly high-res display at playable framerates.

Gigabit Ethernet, optional 802.11ac ultrafast Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.0 round out the connectivity. If you don’t opt for an 802.11ac-capable model, you still get 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. Gamers tend to prefer wired connections for gameplay anyway, so the Ethernet port is the real critical point.

Overview

The Alienware 18 is a laptop that walks like a gaming desktop. Downside? It’s going to cost you about twice as much as a gaming desktop of equivalent performance. Upside? It’s going to be much less than half the size.

Unless you are one of the world’s few professional gamers, Dell’s Alienware 18 is a luxury item. It is a Lamborghini of Laptops, a Porsche of Portables.

If you can afford to drop five, six grand on a gaming laptop, we thoroughly recommend this one – it’s not going to disappoint you. You’re going to feel like you got your money’s worth.

Just remember to keep paying your gym membership, or you’ll have a hard time carrying the Alienware 18 around.

Price:NZ$6,996/AU$5,140 (configured as tested)

• 1 unit :1000$
• 2 unit :1500$
• 3 unit :2000$