Sandy Bridge-Based Alienware M17x Notebooks Get Pictured, Benchmarked

As CES 2011 is approaching at a pretty fast speed, we're starting to see more and more Sandy Bridge – related leaks hit the web, the latest we've come across being related to Intel's mobile platform, powering three Alienware M17x notebooks, and doing a pretty grand job of it too.

So, within a post on the NotebookReview forums, one user has posted several photos and screenshots taken from Chinese website ChipHell, portraying not only the aforementioned notebooks, powered by various Intel Sandy Bridge mobile CPUs, but also some system benchmarks, providing us with some very interesting information regarding the kind of power we should all expect from these things.

So, according to what we can see in the leaked photos, it seems that the first Alienware system comes equipped with an Intel Core i7 – 2630QM CPU, running at 2GHz, accompanied by 4GB of RAM memory and Intel HD Graphics.

However, despite relying on built-in graphics, the system still manages to attain a pretty impressive score, namely 15940 3DMarks points in 3DMark 2006.

Next in line comes a portable system featuring Intel's Core i7-2720QM CPU running at 2.2GHz, also accompanied by 4GB of memory, but now featuring a discrete graphics card, namely the also yet-unreleased AMD Radeon HD 6900M series, this version managing to attain 20155 points in 3DMark 2006.

Last, but certainly not least, comes an Alienware system built around the Intel Core i7-2820QM processor running at 2.3 GHz, and featuring 4GB of memory and an NVIDIA GTX 460 card, which helps it to attain 16957 3DMark 2006 points.

These leaked photos and benchmarks paint a very cool picture of what we can expect from these future gaming monsters, but there's still one thing that sort of puzzles us, namely the choice of video cards.

Sure, going for the yet-unreleased, and certainly more powerful AMD Radeon HD 6900M is certainly a good idea, but why settle for GTX 460M, when the 480M would have been a much more suitable solution?

Oh well, guess that only Dell will be able to answer this question when they decide to officially unveil these Alienware M17x refreshes, probably also around CES time as well.