14 DAY TRIAL // Dell's Alienware-branded gaming laptops are getting updated now that 2012, and the many new hardware components brought by it, are here or almost upon us.
We'll first get the absentees out of the way, or the one absentee anyway: Alienware M11x, the 11.6-inch gaming ultraportable.
While Dell updated the M14x, M17x and M18x, the M11x wasn't even mentioned, which might suggest that its end is nigh, because of the impossibility of adding an optical drive, among other things.
Too bad. With the size of a netbook and the performance of a gaming machine, it has been doing pretty well for itself.
At any rate, the other Alienware systems have been upgraded, and since we have already covered the M18x, we are going to look just at the M14x and M17x this time.
One thing worth mentioning is that all of the laptops have 6 GB of RAM by default, while the upper limit is of 16 GB on the M14x and 32 GB on the M17x.
In case people have forgotten (and the names aren't enough to suggest it), the M14x measures 14 inches in diagonal while the M17x has a 17.3-inch LCD.
Graphics options have been added as well, with both NVIDIA's 6 series and AMD's 7 series graphics processing units making a stand.
Even PCI Express 3.0 is present, along with 3 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, Creative's Sound Blaster Recon3Di, Klipsch-tested speakers, THX TruStudio Pro certification and support for 7.1-channel surround sound via HDMI 1.4a.
Furthermore, there are some new storage options that customers can go for, including mSATA SSDs for caching purposes.
That is to say, while an HDD still holds most of the data, a solid-state drive of 64 to 128 GB is used for initial writing, as well as system files. This allows for faster boot and overall higher performance. What's more, the whole caching process is automatic. Go here to see all the specs and the heart-stopping prices.