Alienware Laptop

[Mercutio]

In yet another example of the "What were those Vomit-box engineers thinking", I had the opportunity to play with an Alienware "Gaming Laptop" last week.

It wasn't a very long play-session, however.

The guy who owned it was proudly displaying SiSoft Sandra scores when I noticed his P4/3000 was running @ 533MHz and had hyperthreading somehow disabled.

On the plus side, it had a DVD-R drive and an "upgradable" Radeon 9600Pro.

Also noted that it had a P4 sticker on it, not a P4M. And that you could fry an egg on the underside of the chassis.

But mostly I noticed the 16.5 minute-at-full-charge battery life. That's 16.5 minutes if you weren't doing anything. It took a full 3 hours to recharge - I thought it wasn't charged - but nope, 17 minutes after it was unplugged its display went black.

Wow.

I thought maybe it was old. Nope. Early xmas present.

You know, at some point, why not just give up and get a small desktop? Or at the very least, save the space a battery would take up with some better cooling or something.

 

[The JoJo]

Poor fella. I hope he's happy.

How much does that "thing" cost compared to a "better" laptop?

 

[blakerwry]

At that point it's basically a portable computer. It almost needs to be plugged in constantly... a little better than a shuttle X-PC because of the built in screen.

 

[Mercutio]

Poor fella. I hope he's happy.

How much does that "thing" cost compared to a "better" laptop?

$3500.

No, seriously.

XPC + 3GHz CPU + 1GB RAM + 19" LCD still comes to maybe half as much.

 

[Tannin]

17 minutes! That is simply appalling.

PS: I'm sort of toying with the idea of getting one of the new Toshiba laptops with the 17 inch screen. Nice!

 

[ddrueding]

Every holiday season I'm bombarded with people wanting to buy a friend or relative a laptop. I was able to convince 50% of them otherwise this year.

1. Save 50% of the cost
2. Get 15-50% more speed (even this beast laptop doesn't have a raptor)
3. Upgradability
4. Better screen
5. 9,000,000% less likely to be stolen

Laptops are as unnesessary as SUVs to 90% of their "target market" :x

 

[zx]

17 Minutes! Why don't they just forget the battery! It'll make a lighter laptop at least! Some people don't need a battery anyways. But then, that thing costs 3000$! Man...

 

[Mercutio]

I've been brought another Alienware notebook to play with. This one is a P4/3200 with an x800 Mobility Radeon in it.

I can't figure out what kind of Alienware notebook it is, because there are at least five different kinds that are marked "Area 51" and this piece of shit doesn't match any of them.

It weighs, and I am not kidding at all, 20lbs including its power pack. I'm guessing 4lbs. of that is heat sinks.

More hilarity: It has six DDR SO-DIMM slots.
The integrated IDE controller is a Promise chip of some kind; none of my prepared images will boot on that thing.

It has dual drive bays for both hard disks and DVD drives.

But the only DVD drive in the system is broken and the OS won't start, so I'm having to pull that drive.

... which necessitated removing every other component save the battery and one of the fan covers from the system, including the screen.

Battery life? Well, this thing probably didn't do too badly. I think it'll run for about three minutes if I just turn it on and let it sit. I think it might make it to ten minutes if I could get it in to an operating system and turn on some power management.

Why the fuck do people buy these things?

 

[ddrueding]

LAN parties. It is easier than breaking down and bringing your entire gaming desktop. That battery life might be enough to move from one table to another without shutting down.

 

[Handruin]

Yup, i'd agree with ddrueding...LAN parties and convenience.

 

[Mercutio]

The guy who brought it to me is an Oracle consultant. He carried this thing on planes with him. Near as I can tell the only games he ever played were solitaire and freecell.

Acer has better product documentation than Alienware, and that's saying something.

 

[Handruin]

Some people buy what make them happy and they do so uninformed. These products generate you revenue which is a nice thing.

 

[Mercutio]

So, OK, somebody puts a gun to your head and tells you that you have to recommend a laptop for gaming. The gun is loaded and you do not have any action movie Kung Fu moves.

The gentleman with the gun is not amused by suggestions that you buy a gaming desktop and a decent tablet, either.

 

[ddrueding]

Alienware it is. I suppose you could go with a workstation-grade Lenovo, or the 17.3" XPS, but if they want a gaming laptop, then they really want something that looks like a gaming laptop. That would be the thing with the alien head on it.

 

[CougTek]

Alienware it is.

Did you read the beginning and half of the thread? I would probably go for a Dell XPS myself. Alienware has been bought by Dell several years ago, but the Dell XPS laptop seem to be better compromise between 3D performance, battery life and price. Try to chose one with a low screen resolution, so you can opt for a weaker graphic card (and therefore a better battery life). The 1366x768 affliction probably reached even gaming laptops these days.

 

[Mercutio]

HP has its Envy line. MSI and Asus make, I dunno, something or other. I imagine I could go find a generic Compal design decent specs from SagerNotebooks...

I've had exactly zero positive experiences with Alienware. Ew. Ew ew ew.

 

[ddrueding]

If you want a gaming laptop, image is a higher priority than performance. That means nothing is better than an Alienware.

 

[LunarMist]

Isn't the Alienware made by Chinese with Intel CPUs/chipsets? Nothing alien about that.

 

[ddrueding]

You guys keep focusing on substance. There is nothing substantive about trying to game on a laptop.

 

[CougTek]

Isn't the Alienware made by Chinese with Intel CPUs/chipsets? Nothing alien about that.

Some big-black-eyes-Chinese look like aliens.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not going to recommend an Alienware laptop to anyone.

 

[Santilli]

Did you get a chance to actually run a game on it?

I'm really wondering if it blows up when used under the stress created by long time gaming.

The concept of a gaming machine, that will survive long hours of useage, is certainly an interesting concept.

Get over the battery life, and see what the thing does, plugged in, and gaming.

 

[Mercutio]

Understand that the first posts in this thread are eight years old.
But in the time since, I've yet to have a positive interaction with an Alienware machine.

What I ended up telling my customer is that I can't recommend a laptop for gaming. There simply isn't a sane middle of the road option that doesn't come with huge compromises.

It turns out his son was looking at an Asus notebook that had Intel HD2000 graphics but was somehow being marketed as a gaming system. Since even blindly flailing around with a credit card in the laptop aisle at Best Buy will result in something at least as good for gaming as that, I don't think it matters all that much.

I did try to explain that things with Radeon or nVidia graphics will result in a better gaming experience, but when I looked, almost all the machines with Radeon graphics were low-end AMD CPUs with an integrated Radeon 4250; not much of an improvement.

 

[CougTek]

What about the Asus G74SX-XA1? 1300$, 1080p 17.3" screen, i7 2630, GeForce GTX 560M 3GB, 12GB RAM and 750GB HDD. No idea about the battery time (it's an 8-cell battery). The keyboard is illuminated. Only weights 4.28lbs if what I read on a merchand's site is true. The only thing that's missing is a Blu-Ray burner (only has DVD-RW). Doesn't seem half-bad for a gaming laptop.

 

[ddrueding]

What about the Asus G74SX-XA1? 1300$, 1080p 17.3" screen, i7 2630, GeForce GTX 560M 3GB, 12GB RAM and 750GB HDD. No idea about the battery time (it's an 8-cell battery). The keyboard is illuminated. Only weights 4.28lbs if what I read on a merchand's site is true. The only thing that's missing is a Blu-Ray burner (only has DVD-RW). Doesn't seem half-bad for a gaming laptop.

That does sound really good, but it is $1600 on Amazon. Still a good deal I think, though I'm not familiar with ASUS' recent laptop build quality and remember it being an issue a few years ago.

 

[Mercutio]

Asus

Supposedly, Asus rates very highly for reliability but I've a truly nightmarish time sourcing batteries and fan assemblies for them. It's not a brand I really gave any serious consideration.

 

[CougTek]

No Asus, no Alienware, no Nvidia, no this, no that... You're making this quite hard, harder than it has to be in fact.

 

[CougTek]

AnandTech's review of the G74SX laptop. The conclusion is positive.

 

[Mercutio]

I won't absolutely say no Asus or nVidia for someone else. If I'm going to give a personal recommendation, I'd prefer that it be something I'd actually, you know, be comfortable recommending.

 

[CougTek]

You have to take gaming laptops like potatoe chips. None are good for you, but some are less bad than others. Make that clear to your clients.

 

[LunarMist]

Dan Quayle lives...

 

[Mercutio]

Make that clear to your clients.

Yeah. My end statement was "I won't recommend anything but this is what you should look for."

 

[CougTek]

Dan Quayle lives...

I did not follow his career much. What's the link to Dan Quayle for?

 

[LunarMist]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdqbi66oNuI&feature=related

 

[Handruin]

Watch out Lunar, he'll come break your monitor if you tease him about spelling potato.

 

[Mercutio]

Coug already displays better habits for English spelling and grammar than the overwhelming majority of Anglophones on the internet. Let he who is without occasional typo cast the first stone.

 

[Handruin]

Coug usually does toss the proverbial stone.

 

[Mercutio]

Yes but it's covered in cheese curds and brown gravy, in the way of his people.

 

[Handruin]

Mmmm, cheese curds and brown gravy.

 

[LunarMist]

Watch out Lunar, he'll come break your monitor if you tease him about spelling potato.

Monitor? I thought he only broke the computers proper.