From Wired.com
LAS VEGAS — Dell has managed to pack an entire Alienware gaming rig into a tiny, 11-inch notebook body, and it kicks ass. It will also cost less than $1,000.
Regular readers will know I’m a Mac user. Normally, no matter how good a PC might be, if it doesn’t run the Mac OS I’m not interested. The Alienware M11X is the first machine to tempt me to the other side.
Dell decided not to bother with a heavy, power-thirsty CPU. Instead, the M11X is tricked out with a Core 2 Duo and hardware to push graphics. The NVIDIA GT35M can be switched in and out, so you can pick the internal graphics hardware for your e-mail and a 6.5-hour battery life, or fire up everything for two glorious hours of on-the-go gaming on the 720p, 1366 x 768 screen.
The M11X even goes one better than the MacBook Pro, which has a similar GPU-switching trick, but requires a logout to do it. When I asked Alex Gruzen, Dell’s VP of consumer products, if you had to restart the machine to change modes he smiled. “No, you just hit a switch,” he told me, “it takes about two seconds.”
I took the machine for a spin. On battery power, the M11X was running Modern Warfare 2 at full tilt, with almost everything turned on, at 30fps. It looks gorgeous. Kick up the volume and the sound thunders, crisp and clear, from a pair of speakers under the front edge, and when you pick it up and flip the thick but compact body over, there is even a glowing red light inside the fan-hole. Classy.
So nice is the output that, through the press conference, there was a Star Trek game running onstage on a big screen. We all assumed it was powered by the huge Alienware desktop next to it. It turned out that it was powered by the little M11X, which outputs via HDMI, DisplayPort or VGA.
It’s probably the best netbook you could buy, and it comes in at under $1,000.
Read more at http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/smoking-hot-alienware-notebook-11-inches-and-1000/
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