Ever since desktop computers became popular, people have been looking for the ultimate gaming machine. Many models came and many of them perished. One such brand that has managed to with stand the test of time and has been applauded by the geeks time and again is the Alienware. It has always manufactured computers that were built for the ultimate and mean gamers. Whether you talk about desktops or laptops, alienware’s products have always come first often proving that even dedicated gaming consoles like play station and xbox don’t come even close to it when the matter concerns gaming. Just last week one of our friends bought an alienware 17 inch gaming laptop, we politely asked him to lend it to us for a couple of days so that we can review it. We promised him that we won’t stretch it to the limits during our testing but we didn’t keep it. Let’s see how it fared in our testing scenarios.
Features:
As you look at it for the first time, it appears as it was indeed designed by aliens. The whole design is so futuristic, sleek and clean with metallic glossy finish. We would say that it is very aesthetically pleasing. We kept staring at the trademark alien head logo for at least half an hour, yes it is that good indeed.
Coming to the technical specifications, it features the best processor available in the market for consumer based computers; we are talking about the Intel i7 processor. And it’s not just any other Intel i7 processor; it is the 4th generation updated processor that clocks at 2.4 GHz. Some people always argue and say that there are other things to look for in a computer, well for them we have some news, alienware 17 comes with 16 GB of DDR3 ram, yes sir it is 16 GB. And on the top of it you have a 2 GB Nvidia GTX gaming card as a dedicated graphics processing unit. In our view, we don’t think that there is any game in the market today that cannot be played on this machine.
The moment you press the power button, this laptop races to complete the booting process. We think that amongst the windows operating system based laptops; alienware 17 has the least booting time. Alienware 17 also derives its speed from the solid state drive. It comes with an inbuilt 256GB solid state drive. Of course you have the option of including a spare larger capacity SATA disk for storage purposes, the SSD drive is meant only for system usage. The performance of the system will be best when you use the SSD for installing the windows and other programs on your machine and the leave rest of the data for the SATA disk or any other external hard disk that you might posses.
Pros:
- Latest processor, there is nothing better than 4th Gen i7 processor.
- 16 GB DDR3 RAM, much more than you’ll ever need, at least in the current year.
- Very futuristic design.
- Inbuilt SSD for faster performance.
Cons:
- Very heavy, all that hardware that goes in to building the ultimate machine makes it a heavier machine too.
- Really expensive, this is not meant for average Joe, this machine is for the super geeks.
Verdict:
If you love gaming and if you have the money then hell yeah, go for it. If you love gaming but you don’t have the money then probably you should stick with the play station for the moment.
This review was written by Kent Douglas, he is a system designer at dell’s research and development labs and has been writing shopping reviews on laptops for more than 5 years now.