FRAMINGHAM, 10 NOVEMBER 2008 - Alienware continues to impress me with its powerful notebooks, and this year's Area-51 m15x notebook is no exception. The 15.4-inch notebook includes the very powerful NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GT graphics card (unheard of for 15.4-inch notebooks), and Intel Core 2 Extreme processors to give you a great gaming experience, but also for high-powered multimedia applications such as audio and video editing.
The 7-lb. notebook includes a choice of Windows Vista (Ultimate or Home Premium) or XP Professional, choice of hard drives (up to 500GB SATA at 5400 RPM, up to 320GB SATA at 7200RPM or 128GB Solid State Drive), a removable second hard drive available with Alienware's Smart Bay (lets you hot-swap a drive out), and choice of optical drives (ours came with a Blu-Ray HD drive). The system includes integrated Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n) and Bluetooth, as well as a Gigabit Ethernet wired port. High-end audio includes two speakers with 7.1/5.1 digital high-def audio (8 channel), and auto-sensing headphone and microphone jacks. The notebook includes three USB 2.0 ports (I would have preferred a few more), an IEEE 1394b port and 7-in-1 media card reader (Secure Digital, Memory Stick, MemoryStick Pro and MMC ).
A very hip feature is the AlienFX lighting application, which lets you customize the hardware colors (backlit keyboard, the alien head logo and other areas on the notebook) to fit your own mood.
With all of the advanced features and technologies, the price on this notebook can get pretty steep quickly, so I'd recommend getting this for only the very best rock star power gamers on your holiday list.
Cool Yule Rating: 5 stars
Price: Starts at US$1,299
