Hardware Revisited: Alienware M18x Gaming Laptop

An aspect of most hardware reviews that's always missing is the prediction of how durable a piece of equipment is unless the thing falls to pieces while it's in use. With that in mind I thought it was time to revisit a piece of hardware I reviewed back in 2012, but have been using since late 2011. That piece of hardware is the Alienware M18x.

The casing of the unit has held up extremely well, even under heavy use. I travel a lot with this thing even though it weighs a ton and it has suffered it's fair share of knocks and toddlers slamming the screen down, and the only evidence of it's use is a small nick out of the paint. (See picture below.) I've done my best to minimize exposure to dents or scratches during transit, to the extent that I hunted down a (second-hand) official Alienware shoulder bag made specifically to accommodate the oversized nature of the laptop. The laptop picks up the typical amount of finger prints and dust, but the overall look of the machine is almost flawless.

Nick circled for clarity.

On the subject of dust, I opened the casing to take a look at the insides and was actually surprised to see very little in the way of dust build-up. Experience with cleaning desktop CPU towers had me ready for the worst since the M18x been in a house with a family of seven, two dogs and two cats. I'm sure every M18x owner will have a different experience depending on the overall dust levels in the environment.

Over the last couple of years, there was a period where a number of the keys, including the space bar, were pried off by "little fingers." Besides stopping my heart and the initial, "Ohgodnononostop!" there was no problem popping the keys back on the keyboard after figuring out how the little metal arm mechanisms clicked back into place.

When I first started playing PC games with the M18x, I was curious about how it would handle games even a couple of years out and, hooray! I get to do just that.

With the games I played during my first review included Batman: Arkham City and Saints Row: The Third and I was really impressed with how those games looked with the settings turned up relatively high. Because of the AMD card (AMD Radeon HD 6720 with 2 GB of GDDR5) in the machine -- an error from the original review where I noted a GeForce card -- Physx (a feature that increases the physics of a game) tends to make things run slowly or choppy relative to how they handle when it's turned off, but over the last couple of years I've played many, many games on the rig and I've been consistently impressed with how things run.

But, and you knew this was coming, I recently found out I'd been doing it all wrong.

The keyboard surface picks up the usual amount of dust. And the
keys are surprisingly easy to pop back onto the board!

For this review I was drilling down into some options I thought I seen before but discovered that there's this thing called "power management." This is a set of options that can be tweaked so that if you're running on battery power the screen automatically dims or turns off completely after a couple of idle minutes but there's more to it. Inexplicably for two years I've been using "balanced" power management when the unit is plugged in, which basically means it's throttling back the speed of the machine because trying to conserve power. Suddenly it made sense that some games seemed to overshoot when it automatically detected my hardware and picked the best settings, and I would get some slowdown and some weird hitching. Based on the hardware, yes, things should have been optimal but I found I had to tweak things to get it just right. Low and behold, set the power management to "foot to the floor! No emergency brake!" and, geez, everything moves that much faster.

Remember: Set your power
options to "High Performance."

I thumbed through a half dozen games, especially Batman: Arkham Origins, Battlefield 4, and Saints Row IV (which I remembered had overshot my hardware capabilities), and, man, the games perform much better on my settings! Incredibly so! Played with the automatically detected "optimal" settings and the games scream along and look even better.

I was impressed with the graphics all over again but it also depressed me that I'd overlooked something so basic for so long. Possibly the only downside with the machine running at capacity is that the fans really kick on now, but since I play with headphones 95% of the time that hasn't proven to be a problem. Even then, I think the fan noise is only noticeable now because I didn't really hear it before.

Just running down some other observations in no particular order:

• One of the USB ports can be a little finicky when comes to detecting anything that's inserted.
• The Blu-Ray drive stills works great.
• The HDMI in, which I've made extensive use of since we stopped using our TV, still works just fine.

After two years and the way it's held up -- and in my case, got better with age thanks to my low IQ -- it's great to see that such an expensive piece of gaming hardware two years old remains relevant and hasn't succumbed to obsolescence. For $2,000 for the base model, I don't think you should expect anything less but with PC hardware one never can tell if what's state of the art today will be able to handle the games of tomorrow. Let's see where it sits in 2015 but in 2013 it's still humming right along and matching wits with the latest software.

- Aaron Simmer
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