The Alienware M11x first hit headlines in January at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. Even without testing the unit, we could see that there was some real potential in the component selections. ASUS already showed us with their UL series that overclocked CULV processors can easily cope with most modern games, provided they have a GPU that is up to the task. The UL series uses GeForce G210M graphics cards, and while they’re substantially faster than any current IGP solution, they still struggle with running many games at anything more than low/minimum detail settings. A faster GPU is necessary for higher quality settings, but where exactly does the bottleneck shift from the GPU back to the CPU when we’re dealing with overclocked CULV? The M11x looks to answer that question by going with a rather potent GeForce GT335M.

Like the G210M, the GT335M supports DirectX 10.1 functionality and is built on a 40nm process technology. That’s where the similarities end. The GT335M bumps the SP count from the 16 in the G210M all the way up to 72 SPs, providing much more computational power; similarly, the memory interface is 128-bit instead of 64-bit. The actual core and shader clocks on the G210M are slightly higher: 625 core and 1500 shader versus 450 core and 1066 shader on the GT335M; memory speed on the other hand is bumped from 1600MHz to 2133MHz. The result is that the GT335M has 166% more memory bandwidth and 224% more computational power… all with the same overclocked CULV SU7300 (or SU4100) processor as the ASUS UL series.

Of course, the GT335M isn’t the only game in town when it comes to faster mobile GPUs. We recently reviewed the ASUS N61Jv with an i5-430M CPU and GT325M GPU, so that will be an interesting matchup from the performance standpoint. GT325M cuts the SP count down to 48, with a slightly lower shader clock as well, but it has the same memory bandwidth. With 63% more computational performance, the GT335M should be noticeably faster than the GT325M, but GPU memory bandwidth is often the bigger bottleneck on 128-bit GPUs and the N61Jv CPU is substantially faster than an overclocked SU7300 CULV. In games that are CPU limited on the M11x, we’ll see the N61Jv come out ahead (or at least close the gap), whereas GPU limited games should still prefer the M11x. Of course, there’s no getting around the size advantage of the M11x: it weighs less and has a chassis that’s much more portable. Really, there’s no competition for the M11x unless you’re willing to move to a 13.3” chassis. In that case ASUS has the UL30Jc, but that has a G310M GPU (a 2% higher shader clock than the G210M) so it’s still a big step back in terms of gaming potential.

The base model M11x comes with 2GB DDR3, a 160GB 5400RPM hard drive, and a Pentium SU4100 processor. Our test unit bumps the CPU up to the Core 2 Duo SU7300 for $100 extra; considering the only difference is 3MB L2 cache (versus 2MB on the SU4100) and support for VT-x (hardware virtualization), most users will be better off saving the $100 for other upgrades. The 500GB 7200RPM Seagate 7200.4 hard drive, on the other hand, is a very welcome addition. It should offer improved performance relative to 5400RPM drives while still providing a lot of storage capacity. The $150 to upgrade the hard drive is a bit steep, though, considering you can purchase the same drive for $85. Finally, Alienware shipped us a system with 4GB DDR3 (another $50), which brings the total price of our system to $1200. Obviously this isn't a cheap laptop, but if you take the base system and just add 4GB RAM (and clone the HDD to your own HDD/SSD when you get it) you can get everything you need for under $1000.

The short summary of the M11x is simple: it’s the smallest laptop ever made that can still manage to play games. Really. There’s nothing else even close when you get down to sub-14” laptops, and it can outgame many 15.6" and larger notebooks. Not only can it run every current game on the market, but we managed to get 30+ FPS at medium or higher detail settings in every game we tested! That’s the good news. The bad news is that a great design is once again saddled with a mediocre LCD, and Alienware omitted at least one feature that they really need: NVIDIA’s Optimus Technology. We don’t mind manually switching between IGP and discrete GPUs that much (though it was odd to see Dell’s Data Safe Online Backup utility trigger a block a few times—the toaster.exe process); far more important is that Optimus laptops will get better driver support in the future. We already encountered several games that complained about our drivers (for example, Batman and Left 4 Dead 2) and we suspect things will only get worse. NVIDIA has yet to deliver a Verde driver with Optimus support, but that should come in the next release. If you want new drivers for switchable graphics laptops like the ASUS ULx0Vt series and the M11x… well, don’t hold your breath.

Finally, we should mention that while the M11x technically has an 11.6” chassis, a few aspects of the chassis need mention. First, the M11x is about 1” deeper than other 11.6” CULV laptops we’ve looked at, and at 4.4 lbs. it definitely weighs more. Obviously, Alienware had to pack more cooling capacity into the M11x to keep the GPU and CPU from overheating, but they’re dangerously close to the size of a 13.3” chassis. Look at the LCD bezel and you’ll find a large border, particularly on the top and bottom. The M11x uses an 11.6” 1366x768 LCD, but with a few small tweaks we’re confident they could have put a 13.3” 1440x900 WXGA+ LCD into the chassis. The huge bezel area almost makes us think that they put a smaller LCD in the chassis just so they could lay claim to having an 11.6” gaming laptop. Personally, I would have preferred a 16:10 aspect ratio with a 13.3” LCD—besides, even if this were a 13.3” laptop, it would still be over twice as fast as the nearest competitor in graphics power!

Minor blemishes aside, there’s still no getting around the fact that this is a very capable gaming laptop with a very small footprint. The total performance on tap should be about equal to that of the Gateway P-6831 FX that we praised a couple years ago. The overclocked CULV processor is faster and uses far less power, and the same goes for the GT325M (though the old 8800M did have a memory bus that was twice as wide). Add in switchable graphics and you have a laptop that weighs roughly half as much and lasts two to four times as long on battery power. Join us as we take a closer look at what makes the M11x tick and run it through our benchmark suite.

Alienware M11x Design

The M11x design conveys a futuristic style, with an angled front and rear on the chassis similar to the M17x. Available in either "Cosmic Black" or "Lunar Shadow" (our test system is the grayish "lunar" option), the M11x also has design elements like zoned LED lighting, though there aren’t quiet as many zones as on the larger chassis. You can individually set the various zones to one of 20 colors (including black/off); the zones on the M11x consist of the Alienware logo beneath the LCD, keyboard backlighting, front grille LEDs, the Alien head above the keyboard, and the (barely visible) indicator lights for WiFi and Caps Lock. The keyboard, front grille, and Alienware logo can all be set to a solid color, a shifting color, or blinking (which is just as horrid as it sounds). The color fade effect would be a lot better if it cycled smoothly between the colors; right now, it fades from the first color to the second color and then jumps back to the start color before fading again. Finally, the eyes on the alien head above the keyboard light up for hard drive activity. Note that the alien head on the top of the laptop always glows white (as far as we can tell). If you get the either of the optional Alienware TactX mouse and keyboard, you can also control lighting on those devices via the included AlienFX software. Alienware sent us the TactX mouse with a 5000 dpi laser sensor and braided cable: it looks nice and works well, but it's tough to justify the $100 price tag.

The chassis is made of magnesium alloy with plastic (or at least painted) surfaces and it feels very durable. All of the major surfaces also have a matte finish, the exception being the LCD and its bezel, which is covered by a single sheet of glossy plastic. (Groan….) One nice feature is the large palm rest and touchpad—they’re significantly bigger than most other 11.6” laptops. The battery pack is only accessible if you remove the bottom cover, which is one way Alienware manages to cut down on the size of components while still packing a 63Wh battery into an 11.6" chassis. Thankfully, even with the CPU overclocked you can expect to get upwards of 6 hours battery life (4+ hours of video playback) from the M11x.

Expansion options are reasonable, with three USB 2.0 ports (one powered), a mini FireWire port, and a flash memory reader. Video output options consist of all the major standards: VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort—it’s nice to see two digital video outputs on such a small chassis. Not surprisingly, there’s no ExpressCard expansion slot, and there’s no eSATA either. The sole cooling vent is on the rear of the chassis, and the fan tends to switch between slow and faster speeds quite frequently—unless you’re playing games, in which case the fan spins at high speed the whole time. The maximum noise level from the fan isn’t particularly loud, but if you’re just doing office work or surfing the Internet (even with the discrete GPU disabled), the frequent changes in fan speed are definitely distracting. Dell would have been far better off setting the minimum fan speed a bit higher in order to avoid the need to bump up the RPMs every minute or so.

While the system looks great, there are a few areas where it falls a bit flat (pardon the pun). The keyboard has reasonably sized keys, but they’re packed close together and have a soft feel (which to me feels a bit mushy). My personal “gold standard” is the ThinkPad Classic keyboard, and the M11x keyboard is merely “okay” for long periods of typing. However, we need to be fair: compared to other 11.6” laptops, the keyboard on the M11x is far more comfortable to use. Acer and Gateway for example (1410/1810 and  EC14 respectively) have flat keys that also lack separation and don’t have great action. Here, I find the large palm rest on the M11x makes it clearly superior to other netbooks and ultraportables. The colored LED backlighting also looks fantastic, and it's great for seeing the keys if you happen to be at a dark LAN party. If you like chiclet or beveled keys, you may not like the M11x keyboard much; I find the keyboard fatiguing (outside of playing games), but those with smaller hands and/or narrower shoulders would probably feel right at home. After the Lenovo T410, it's hard not to feel like this is a case of form over functionality. The keyboards are so close to the same size that Alienware could actually fit the T410 keyboard into the M11x—the T410 keyboard is only about 2% larger! Considering this is clearly a custom chassis and keyboard, for better or for worse Alienware chose this specific layout and design over other options.

Access to the RAM, hard drive, and other internal components is via a single large cover on the bottom of the M11x. Getting to the CPU/GPU requires dismantling the chassis, and there's not much point considering the default components. The battery is quite large and takes up most of the back-right section of the chassis; honestly, the only reason the battery isn't easily swapped out appears to be for aesthetic and/or frame integrity concerns. We're not sure how many people will miss the ability to easily swap out batteries on the road, but at least replacing the battery when it gets old won't require too much work (i.e. unlike the newer MacBooks).

Finally, as a gaming laptop one would expect most owners will want to play games on the M11x. It's certainly possible, but without an internal optical drive your options are a bit limited. Either you'll need to get games via a digital distribution service (i.e. Steam, EA Downloader, etc.) or you'll need an external USB DVDRW. We installed most of our games over the network, with local copies on a server, which does bring up another cut corner: Fast Ethernet. It's really quite pathetic to see "cheap" laptops like the Acer 1410/1810T come with Gigabit Ethernet while a "luxury" gaming laptop from Alienware chintzes out and provides Fast Ethernet. When we were installing 80GB of games over the NIC, yes, it definitely made a difference. Really, there's no reason any modern computer shouldn't come with Gigabit Ethernet; it's ubiquitous and cheap, and saving $0.50 by using Fast Ethernet on an $800+ laptop is silly.

There are certainly areas on the M11x that could be improved—most notably the LCD panel—but overall we're quite pleased with the design. It feels reasonably sturdy, looks sleek, and provides many good features. But what most of our readers really want to know is: how well does it run games? We've loaded up our standard selection of games and applications and put the M11x to the test. Interested in the world's smallest gaming laptop? Turn the page and let's get to the real meat of this review.

Performance Preview: Does Overclocking Matter?

Before we get to the actual benchmark results, we thought we'd begin by trying to answer an interesting question. The Alienware M11x—like the ASUS UL series—uses a CULV processor that runs at 1.3GHz by default. We've already done a CULV roundup and came away quite impressed with the platform. CULV laptops can last almost as long as Atom netbooks, and they manage to provide upwards of twice the performance for less than twice the price. The M11x bumps the CULV price up quite a bit, but it adds a potent GPU and allows you to overclock the CPU to 1.73GHz. It does this by raising the FSB from the default 800MHz to 1066MHz (200 base speed to 266 base), just like the ASUS UL series. Curious about how much a 33% overclock gets you? So were we, so we thought we'd begin with a look at the performance increase compared to the stock speed. We'll start with our standard application tests, which are the most likely to show a near-linear increase.

PCMark shows roughly a 15% increase, which is about right considering the HDD and GPU are part of the equation for those suites. Peacekeeper is far more of a CPU specific test, and it shows a 25% increase in performance from the overclock. Cinebench and x264 encoding are both very stressful CPU tests, and again we see very good scaling with clock speed: a 33% higher CPU clock results in 23 to 32% more performance. It's interesting that the single CPU Cinebench result shows a near linear increase with CPU clock speed while the other CPU intensive tests are closer to a 25% increase. More on this in a moment.

Next up let's look at how much gaming performance improves with overclocking. For these tests, we've run two scenarios: we tested the games at the minimum detail settings as well as "high" detail settings. How much of a bottleneck is the CULV processor? Would a faster CPU allow the GT335M to stretch its legs? Let's find out….

The lack of scaling with most of the games is a bit surprising. We figured the GT335M would need a lot more than a CULV processor to hit its stride, but overall the CPU doesn't appear to be a major bottleneck. At lower detail settings, the 33% overclock averages a 12.5% performance increase, with Left 4 Dead 2 showing the largest improvement. Higher detail settings moves the bottleneck more to the GPU in most titles, so the average increase is less than 10%. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, and this time Left 4 Dead 2 shows nearly linear scaling. It may be that the extra particle effects and geometry are to blame, but there is a definite difference and the game goes from 33FPS to 44FPS. Also note that in some of the benchmarks, we are using built-in performance tools that often score a bit higher than what players actually see in real gameplay.

But why aren't we seeing better scaling? Despite what Alienware states on their web pages, according to CPU-Z (and the benchmarks) the overclocked CPU isn't actually running at 1.73GHz. CPU-Z always reported a CPU speed of 1.60GHz when overclocked (266MHz bus with a 6x multiplier) whereas the multiplier is 6.5x (1.30GHz) at the stock bus speed. Perhaps Alienware is limiting the overclock slightly to keep heat output in check, which would explain why most of the gaming results didn't increase quite as much as we had hoped. If the CPU is indeed running at 1.6GHz instead of 1.73GHz, the overclock is only 23% instead of 33%. Even if the overclock isn't quite as high as advertised, though, it's still definitely good for performance.

But what about drawbacks from overclocking? How much battery life, for example, do users lose by running the CPU at a higher clock speed? We tested battery life (with the IGP enabled and the GT335M disabled) at both stock and overclocked settings. Below is the increase in battery life users can get by running the CPU at stock speed.

In low usage scenarios (idle or doing simple office tasks), the overclocked CPU sucks down quite a bit more power. In that case it might be worthwhile to disable the overclock, as 26% more battery life is very significant. In more demanding tasks like surfing the Internet and watching movies, running the CPU at stock doesn't help as much. The reason idle scenarios benefit so much is because the M11x doesn't allow dynamic frequency switching (SpeedStep) when the CPU is overclocked, so it runs at a constant 1.60GHz—twice as fast as the 800MHz speed the CPU sits at when idle and not overclocked. Still, since enabling/disabling the overclock requires a full reboot along with entering the BIOS to change the setting, we'd guess most users will simply leave the system overclocked and not worry about it. In our worst-case battery life test (x264 playback), the M11x delivers upwards of four hours of playback time, and the Internet test lasts over six hours; you'll really need all-day mobility before battery life becomes a major concern.

Now that we've given an overview of what happens with overclocking, let's get to the actual benchmark results. We'll report the best-case result for all of the tests, which means we ran the M11x overclocked for the application and gaming benchmarks, and for battery life tests we disabled the GT335M and ran the CPU at stock speed.

M11x: Ultraportable Gaming Goodness

For the gaming tests, we’ve standardized on a comparison at 1366x768 and minimum detail settings, but the M11x can obviously do better than that. We'll include results at Medium (gold), High (red), and Very High (orange, where applicable) settings to show just how far the M11x can go before frame rates start to choke. Given the specs of the M11x, the closest competition in terms of performance comes from the ASUS N61Jv, which we've colored black for comparison.

There's no problem running games at minimum details and the native 1366x768 resolution—and in fact the GPU could easily handle the 23% megapixel increase of a 1440x900 LCD. Medium detail gaming is also plenty fast, with Far Cry 2 and Crysis: Warhead being the only titles to dip near the 30FPS mark. Move to High settings and Crysis is no longer playable, which is hardly surprising considering it can tax even the fastest desktop GPUs. Far Cry 2 and DiRT 2 also fall below 30FPS (barely) at High/Very High settings, while Empire: Total War and Stalker: Call of Pripyat flirt with 30FPS. Batman has no problem running at maximum detail settings, provided you leave off PhysX and antialiasing, and the same goes for Mass Effect 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. In general, you'll want to run games at Medium to High detail settings to get fluid frame rates.

What about the GT325M paired with a much faster CPU? The N61Jv routinely outperforms the M11x at low detail settings, but that's hardly the target market for either laptop. We did a second comparison with both laptops running at "reasonable" settings—the target was to go as high as we could on the M11x while maintaining 30FPS. We chose Very High for Batman and Mainstream for Crysis; we used Medium for Empire: Total War (High wasn't supported on the N61Jv with the current Optimus drivers), Far Cry 2, and DiRT 2; Stalker is run at High + Enhanced DX10 lighting; and finally we maxed out the settings on Left 4 Dead 2 and Mass Effect 2. Note that we disable antialiasing on all of these tests; we feel AA is great when you have a fast enough GPU, but few laptops are at the point where you can run High Quality settings and still have enough GPU performance left for AA.

With the above settings, the M11x manages to outperform the N61Jv in every test except for Far Cry 2—and we should note that FC2 at High/Very High does run faster on the M11x, but we skipped that setting in order to stay above 30FPS. We mentioned earlier that the two GPUs have the same memory bandwidth but the GT335M has 63% more shader processing power. Stalker: Call of Pripyat makes the best use of the extra shader performance, with most of the other titles close enough that the difference isn't particularly important. Of course, considering the N61Jv is a 16" chassis we again have to question why ASUS didn't give us a bit more GPU power. And likewise, we can only scratch our heads about the lack of Optimus Technology on the M11x.

Acceptable Application Performance

For general applications, the GPU is less important and so the M11x is going to end up quite a bit slower than many other "midrange" laptops. We should see about the same level of performance as the ASUS UL50Vf, with slightly better scores from the 7200RPM hard drive. That's the theory at least. As noted earlier, the actual overclock appears to be 1.60GHz instead of 1.73GHz, which means the UL50Vf is clocked 8.3% higher and should outperform the M11x except in cases where the faster HDD and/or GPU come into play. We've colored the N61Jv black and the UL50Vf gold for ease of comparison in our application benchmarks.

As expected, the M11x ends up beating the UL50Vf in some tests and trailing in others. It's 25% faster in PCMark05 (mostly from the GPU result, it appears), 7% faster in PCMark Vantage (GPU and HDD), but around 10% slower in the CPU-limited tests of Peacekeeper, Cinebench, and x264 encoding. Again, it's odd that Alienware would limit the multiplier to 6x when overclocked but then claim to have a 1.73GHz CPU. Note also that in overclocked mode, the various power saving CPU functions don't seem to kick in—CPU-Z reports the processor running at a constant 1.60GHz instead of dropping to a 4x multiplier when idle.

Does any of this really matter? In terms of getting acceptable application performance, not really: practically any dual-core CPU will be fast enough for general computing, and if you're doing 3D rendering or video encoding you should be using a different tool. (NVIDIA would of course recommend Badaboom with CUDA for video encoding, and we admit that it's quite speedy on the GT335M.) If on the other hand you believe in truth in advertising, Alienware needs to update the BIOS or update their web page. We'd also like to see SpeedStep functioning with the overclocked CPU, as we've seen that work on the ASUS laptops.

Our final stop will be the 3DMark results. Yes, they're synthetic and we've already looked at gaming performance. For those that like to see the numbers, though, we've included them as usual. The M11x makes short work of the ASUS UL series, with scores that are anywhere from 50% to 220% higher. 3DMark Vantage shows very close to linear scaling with the shader processing power of the GT335M compared to the G210M. (The M11x also manages to run Vantage at Performance defaults (but 1280x768 resolution) with a reasonable score of P3217, if you're wondering.) The N61Jv matchup is a bit more sensible, with the M11x leading by 7% in 06, 18% in 03, and 32% in Vantage… but oddly it trails by 7% in 3DMark05. Now you know why we take 3DMark results with a large dose of skepticism; the 3DMark results are only truly indicative of 3DMark performance.

Still Great Battery Life

With all the gaming performance on tap, and despite the lack of Optimus Technology, the M11x still manages to deliver great battery life results. Alienware puts an 8-cell 63Wh "Prismatic" battery in the M11x, which is quite large for an 11.6" chassis. Even better is that Alienware manages to keep the chassis looking clean, as opposed to designs like the Dell 11z where the large 6-cell battery juts out the bottom. We calibrated the LCD for ~100nits as always and found that a brightness setting of 60% (three steps down from maximum brightness) gave us the desired result.

The best-case results will give you typical CULV run times: over 4.5 hours of x264 playback, 7+ hours of Internet surfing, or just shy of 9 hours of idle battery life. If you don't like fussing with the BIOS, we suggest you run the M11x at the overclocked setting all the time; you still get over four hours of x264 video playback, 6.5 hours of web surfing, and 7 hours of idle battery life. Try that with any other "gaming" laptop and you'll likely end up disappointed. Relative battery life puts the M11x just slightly behind other 11.6" CULV laptops (Acer 1810T and Dell 11z) and on par with the Gateway EC54. Again, we really like switchable graphics and Optimus, as it allows users to get the best of both worlds… except Optimus appears to be the way of the future since you get better driver support (at least that's what NVIDIA is saying right now—we'll confirm when we see the next public Verde driver).

Of course, if you want to play games without plugging in—which means using the GT335M, naturally—you're going to get significantly less battery life. We conducted a gaming battery life test as well, with the CPU overclocked. The M11x managed just over two hours (126 minutes) before shutting down, though it did provide the same great gaming performance in the interim. If you need to play games for 90 minutes or less on your daily commute, and you don't mind the strange looks on the faces of your fellow passengers, the M11x will provide a nice outlet. However, it works better for gaming if you have ready access to an AC outlet, in which case the battery is just a safeguard against losing your progress with the power goes out.

Once Again, the LCD Fails

Finally, we have the LCD quality results. As mentioned in the introduction, the large bezel makes us think Alienware should have stuck a 13.3" 16:10 display into the chassis. The M11x may have an 11.6" LCD, but the chassis is about the same size as a 13" laptop. Also, we're not fans of glossy LCDs—I have mirrors in my bathroom if I want to check my hair! Considering the price premium on the M11x (the model we tested will sell for around $1200), there's really no excuse for a sub-par LCD… and sub-par it is.

We really think the minimum contrast ratio any modern laptop should deliver is 500:1, and the M11x achieves about half of that. The color accuracy is average at best (though we have yet to find a standout laptop LCD in terms of color accuracy), and the color gamut is a disappointing 44% of Adobe RGB. ASUS put a great LCD in their Eee PC 1001p, and they did the same for the G73J (review forthcoming). If you're making a budget laptop and you want to cut corners on LCD quality, we understand that, but there's no way you can bill the M11x as a budget offering. The keyboard, chassis, GPU, and overall design are all clearly the result of some good engineering and component choices. Why does the LCD always get the short shrift!? Since this is a TN panel, viewing angles are similarly disappointing, particularly the vertical viewing where a slight shift of your head or the screen results in a dramatic color shift.

Alienware M11x: (Mostly) Good Things in a Small Package

The M11x is a very impressive piece of engineering in so many respects, and it's easy to like much of what Alienware has done. That they stuffed this much gaming performance into such a small chassis is sure to delight mobile gamers. The problem is that Alienware also overlooked some very obvious features that should have been part of the M11x. Let's recap.

We like switchable graphics, as it lets us have our (gaming) cake and eat our (battery life) cake at the same time: tasty! However, NVIDIA's Optimus Technology launched in early February and suddenly made switchable graphics taste like last week's stale leftovers. Switchable graphics is still a step up from discrete-only solutions, but when NVIDIA beats their driver drums and says how much easier it will be to update NVIDIA graphics drivers on Optimus laptops, we can only conclude that switchable solutions are not likely to get updated drivers more than once in a blue moon. Don't believe us? Just go out and try to find an updated NVIDIA driver for the ASUS ULxxVt series. Granted, the situation isn't bad yet; despite warnings from a couple of games in our test suite, we didn't encounter any problems. What will happen in a year or two, though? We can't help but be concerned.

The LCD panel is another clear oversight by the bean counters. I can excuse a cheap, low contrast panel on a sub-$900 laptop that provides competitive gaming performance (i.e. the ASUS N61Jv), even if I don't like it. Sure, the M11x starts at $800, but as soon as you add 4GB RAM and a decent HDD you're looking at $1000+. A better LCD panel probably would have bumped the price up another $50, but the price increase would have been well worth the cost. We're also ho-hum on the keyboard feel; it's not bad but it's not great either.

Finally, there's the question of timing. CULV with overclocking showed itself to provide decent performance (even if the overclock is to 1.6GHz instead of the advertised 1.73GHz), but Arrandale CULV should be hitting the streets shortly. That would give users a dynamically "overclocked" CPU courtesy of Intel's Turbo Boost technology. Instead of a static 1.3GHz or 1.6GHz, the i7-640UM could run at 1.2GHz to 2.27GHz without ever rebooting or entering the BIOS—plus it would have the other performance enhancements of the latest Core architecture. We don't know if CULV Arrandale chips will actually be as frugal as current CULV offerings, but we're anxious to find out!

Perhaps with better power saving features and Turbo Boost, an updated M11x with an i7-640UM, i7-620UM, or even an i5-520UM would manage to stop the fluctuating noise levels. At present, the M11x oscillates between "silent" (<30 dB) and "I'm here" (36 dB) modes, even when sitting idle. It's irritating at best to have the fan kick on for a minute and then shut off for a minute; we would much rather have an in between mode where the system stayed at 33 dB whenever idle (or close to it). At least temperatures remain good, with the entire surface (top and bottom) staying under 37C (100F) even during stress testing.

Balanced against all of our complaints we have the fact that no one else offers anywhere near this level of performance without moving into the 15" or larger notebooks. Core 2 Duo may be yesterday's (well, 2006's) news, but it can still keep up with a midrange mobile GPU in most games. As we discussed in the Gateway P-6831 FX review a couple years ago, a "balanced" gaming notebook does a lot better with a moderate CPU and a fast GPU than it does with a fast CPU and a moderate GPU. The only competing laptops in terms of performance are going to need something like the GT330M, GT240M, GeForce 9700M GTS, or a faster GPU. Finding laptops with those GPUs for a reasonable price is fairly easy—the ASUS N61Jv is one example, and the Sony VAIO VPCCW22FX/R is another—but the VAIO is the smallest reasonable competitor we can find and it still has a 14" chassis and significantly less battery life.

That's the second winning element of the M11x: great battery life when you don't need the discrete GPU. Forget about Atom (unless you just need a slow $300 netbook); CULV designs offer great battery life and reasonable performance. With the GT335M, the only tasks that really don't work on the M11x are CPU intensive highly-threaded tasks like 3D rendering and video encoding. The final feather in the cap of the M11x is the overall design. Not everyone likes a flashy laptop, but gamers and technophiles are sure to appreciate the sturdy chassis and zoned lighting. The touchpad also works very well, and while it doesn't support all the latest multi-touch features, it does have ChiralMotion scrolling (swirl your finger to scroll) and pinch zoom. With the large touchpad surface and comfortable palm rest, the construction is definitely a net positive in our book.

Let's summarize by putting it this way. The M11x design and construction on their own are worthy of a Gold Editors' Choice award… or at least they would have been five or six months ago. The bar is a bit higher now, and the lack of Optimus Technology immediately causes us to demote the M11x to the silver level. Unfortunately, the LCD is also disappointing, which drops the M11x down to a bronze. The cost is somewhat high, fluctuating fan noise levels are annoying, and CULV Arrandale laptops should start showing up any time now. That makes us waffle on the bronze award, and going back to Optimus we have serious concerns about long-term driver support. Ultimately, we feel the M11x has tons of potential but can't quite capitalize on the current market. It deserves an honorable mention, and those of you who like smaller form factors can promote it back into the Editors' Choice range. For the rest, it's this close (holding fingers just slightly apart) to greatness.

We gave the ASUS UL80Vt a Silver Award late last year, and frankly the M11x is superior in every way (except price and LCD quality). However, we've received a few emails since our review asking about driver updates; to date the most recent UL80Vt drivers are ~6 months old. Alienware isn't ASUS, but our—admittedly cloudy—crystal ball tells us to expect more of the same. The UL80Vt only has an entry-level GPU, so driver updates aren't as critical; the M11x on the other hand is clearly a "gaming laptop", so it deserves—no, it needs—better support. Now that NVIDIA has Optimus Technology, they're more than happy to point out the flaws with their old switchable graphics (probably in part because AMD is still using a similar solution). Switchable graphics costs more money for the manufacturer, is more difficult to validate, drivers are harder to coordinate, and you have to deal with blocking applications and manually switching. We think AnandTech readers are perfectly capable of dealing with the manual switching—and at times I actually prefer being able to control which GPU I'm using (and I'm sure Linux users prefer the switchable design as well)—but if you choose to jump on the M11x bandwagon, my advice is to be prepared for a lack of driver updates. If you're in no hurry, here's hoping Alienware can release an updated M11x that adds the missing ingredients sooner rather than later.