The four buttons are touch controls for Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Stealth and Binary GFX. The first two are self-explanatory and the idea is that you rest your finger on the symbol for a second and the control toggles on or off as appropriate.
In practice, the touch control is a bit hit-or-miss and you’re likely to end up pressing it unnecessarily hard for what feels like an age. The problem is that touch controls look great but they’re far less practical than simple flick switches that you can eyeball to confirm whether they are on or off.
Stealth mode had us baffled at first as the m15x was delivered with it enabled so the CPU, memory and graphics performance were throttled to save battery life. With Stealth off – would this be Blatant mode? – the performance leapt up to the level that we expected, but the difference in battery life wasn’t as significant as we would have expected.
Battery Life Results
Battery life in minutes
Longer bars are better
The tests also show you really do need to ensure your m15x is plugged into the mains to get the best out of it.
3DMark06 Results
Longer bars are better
COMMENTS
re: aha!, bbbut.,.
Not sure whether you were trying for humour or not, but in case you weren't:
1> Alienware IS Dell nowadays...
2> Alienware also have a twin 8800 capable model (m17x) - but it's an absolute beast compared to the m15x.
Audio
It's Realtek audio - to the best of my knowledge there's no such thing as Intel audio
RE: compares badly
I don't think that Acer compares very well, it's much bigger at 18.4in, the CPU is slower and the graphics card is a 9650M GS so it'll give you about 9000 3DMarks compared to the 15000 of the 8800 GTX. It's not a bad laptop, but if you want the best gaming performance in a relatively small package, the Alienware is the better option.
What's with the plugs?
A tepid games section...
A HDTV love-in thread...
An echoing and self-linking news forum consisting almost exclusively of reposts of news articles.
Likewise, a baby laptops thread populated solely by re-posting of Reg articles...
And a dodgy favicon to boot.
What's with the continual approval of irrelevant and desperate eupeople plugs?
sound
the review mentions a realtek hd audio, but on the alienware site it says its intel... has it changed?
