Shane McGlaun01 June 2009, 3:00 PM
New Alienware m17x is the first Allpowerful gaming notebook that starts at a reasonable price. But will we get the good price in Oz too?
Over the last few weeks, Alienware has been easing gamers with dark images and
cryptic riddles about a new gaming notebook dubbed Allpowerful. Now, the cloak of secrecy is finally tossed from the Allpowerful machine and the details are known.
Apparently, the Allpowerful isn’t a notebook on its own, but a marketing campaign (yawn) that is part of the Dell subsidiary's push to expand its reach from nine countries to 35. The machine we have seen in those dark images is the
new M17x. The rig gets a new case design replete with lots of lighting. While it's not mentioned, I would bet you could adjust the lighting to a color of your choice, which is a feature that Alienware has been offering on its notebooks for a while.
Above: Alienware Allpowerful m17x Gaming NotebookStarting price for the rig is $US1,799 ($AU2235) and that price isn’t all that bad considering the hardware the base machine sports - though with the current model m17x costing
$4968.51 (including a $300 discount!) we don't have high hopes for the new model's price when it hits our wide brown shores. That is unless Alienware realises that few people are going to shell out that much cash in these tight economic times, even with the $900 Kevin bonus burning a hole in their pockets.
For your cash, you get a single NVIDIA GeForce GTX260M GPU, an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 CPU at 2.4GHz, 4GB of RAM, and a 250GB 7200rpm hard drive. Power for the machine is via a 9-cell battery and a slot loading DVD drive is integrated. In addition to the GTX 260M GPU the base rig also gets an NVIDIA 9400M G1 GPU supporting Hybrid Power for times when you don’t need the power gulping discrete GPU to fire up.
You can count on fully optioned machines costing much more money than the base unit with GPU options up to dual GeForce GTX 280M GPUs in SLI, 8GB of RAM, Blu-ray, and a 17-inch screen with an optional resolution of 1920 x 1200. Storage can be upped to 1TB with RAID options. As you expect from any gaming laptop, it's not particularly portable. PC World reports that the rig is 40 x 32 x 5.4 cm and weighs 5.3KG -- more than the cabin baggage allowance on some airlines.