The 14-inch gaming laptop is in just about every vendor's repertoire, while 15-inchers are a step up, and just slightly harder to seek out. At 17.3-inches, the gaming laptop enters even more niche of a category, catered to by a few boutique brands and even fewer mainstream manufacturers, like Toshiba and HP.
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An 18.4-inch laptop, however, is a relative ghost. When a notebook gets to be so large it requires a rolling luggage bag to haul around (and costs as much as a downpayment for an apartment) it better be something truly special. The Alienware 18 is just that - for $4,166 (about £2,434, AU$4,443), that is.
Featuring dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 880M GPUs - Nvidia's most powerful mobile graphics chips - and a blazing fast Intel Core i7 processor, the Alienware 18 is the muscle car of mobile gaming rigs fitted with two turbochargers. For all of this graphical might, the unit Alienware sent to TechRadar costs a depressing amount of money. The hardware spec is hot enough to make any PC nerd faint, but is this the pinnacle of laptop gaming as we know it?
Design
Like the rest of the redesigned series of Alienware notebooks, this 18.4-inch beast scored a makeover since the Alienware 18x released two years ago. The Dell-owned company has moved away from gaming platforms that look like trapezoids and instead has adopted a more angular look with rounded edges.
The new look is modern, accented with sleeker lights, and much more pleasing to look at from the front than the automotive grill aesthetic from years past. Rather, the new design resembles a space ship - in fact, a curious onlooker commented the machine looked like just that while I took photos for this review.
On top of the updated looks, the Alienware 18 has a few other premium niceties, including an aluminum-clad lid and magnesium alloy base. The interior of the laptop is also lined entirely with a soft-touch rubbery material, a comfortable place to rest your wrists for extended gaming sessions.
Put all together, this gaming machine is one such meticulously crafted piece of hardware that it closes flush without any gaps. You won't find a single misaligned panel on the laptop even with all the intricate body lines integrated into the laptop's body armor design. This perfection even extends to the notebook's ports, which are all fitted with metal bands. Alienware's attention to detail is truly something to behold.
Around the back of the laptop are two massive exhaust vents. Flip over the laptop and you'll find over a third of the Alienware 18's footprint isn't a plain old panel but an expanse of mesh for the laptop's three intake fans. There nothing understated about the Alienware 18. It's a machine ready to run all the latest games better than any other laptop out there and look good while doing it.
Failure to launch
While the Alienware 18's dual GPU setup lends it unprecedented amounts of gaming horsepower, it does not come with the option switched on by default. At first, the laptop performed struggled to run the latest games at max settings with only one GPU. Luckily, after a quick peek at the Nvidia control panel and a few clicks later, everything was fixed. It's an easily correctable problem, but one that new owners should be mindful of when they pull their rig out of the box.
Another thing users will have to check under the hood is the touchpad's gesture controls. For some unknown reason, scrolling also comes disable, but not two fingered pinching or rotating. It's an odd quirk, and it's unfortunate, because the Alienware 18 sports one of the best touchpads you can ask for on a laptop.
When it comes to weight and size, the Alienware 18 is in a class of its own compared to its closest competitors, the Origin EON17-S and Alienware 17. The 18-inch unit tips the scales at 12.06 pounds while measuring 17.97 x 12.90 x 2.26 inches (W x D X H). If that sounds big on paper, the laptop is so enormous in real life it could double as an oversized buckler for LARP battles.
By comparison, the Alienware 17 looks like a kid, nearly an inch smaller in every respect at 16.3 x 11.8 x 1.8 1.9 inches. If the size discrepancy wasn't a big enough difference, the smaller Alienware also weighs a considerably lighter 9.15 pounds. The lightest and most compact of the three, at 16.2 x 10.9 x 1.8 inches and 8.5 pounds, is the Origin EON17-S.
Here is the Alienware 18 configuration given to TechRadar:
Spec Sheet
- CPU: 2.9GHz Intel Core i7-4910MQ (quad-core, 8MB cache, up to 3.9GHz with Turbo Boost)
- Graphics: 2x Nvidia GeForce GTX 880M (16GB GDDR5 RAM); Intel HD Graphics 4600
- RAM: 16GB DDR3L (2x 8GB at 1600MHz)
- Screen: 18.4-inch, 1920 x 1080 WLED TrueLife Display
- Storage: 256GB mSATA SSD; 1TB HDD at 5400 rpm
- Optical drive: Slot-loading, dual layer Blu-ray reader
- Ports: RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet IPv6, 4x USB 3.0 (one with) PowerShare), Mini DisplayPort, HDMI 1.4-out/ 1.3-in, 7-in-1 media card reader, 2x audio out ?-inch ports (one for inline mic headset), line-in microphone ?-inch port (5.1 analog audio output), Kensington security lock
- Connectivity: 802.11ac dual band Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 4.0
- Camera: 2MP webcam, 1080p video
- Weight: 12.06 pounds
- Size: 17.97 x 12.90 x 2.26 inches (W x D x H)
What we have here is an extremely tuned up version of the base Alienware 18, equipped with two of Nvidia's biggest mobile GPUs totalling up to a Titan-slaying 16GB of video memory. Normally this configuration would also come with a 512GB Samsung 841 SSD, but the Dell unit sent to TechRadar was equipped with an older LiteON 256GB SSD (an option that's no longer available). Despite the mismatched storage drive, these two different parts are nearly on par, with similar write and read speeds.
Put all together, this configuration will run users $4,166 (about £2,434, AU$4,443). It's an insane amount of cash to drop for any gaming laptop - essentially a first round of new car payments. The good news is that, for all your hard earned cheddar, Alienware also includes one year of phone support, plus in-home service should anything go awry.
Keep in mind the same amount of money could buy an AMD-powered Alienware 17 for $2,449 (about £1,457, AU$2,644) and still leave enough money to spare for two extra gaming monitors and some peripherals. Alternatively, completely decking out the Alienware 17 with an even faster Intel Core i7-4910MX processor, triple SSD setup for 768GB in storage, a single Nvidia GTX 880M, and the same amount of RAM would run you $4,350 (about £2,545, AU$4,630).
A similarly specced Origin EON17-S with a single 880M graphics card and dual 500GB SSDs (for 1TB of flash storage) would cost buyers $4,282 (about £2,505, AU$4,558).
With two top-tier GPUs and nearly the best mobile processor Intel has to offer, the Alienware should have the hottest graphical hearth ever put inside a laptop. As with desktop cards, adding on another GPU into a machine does not instantly mean double the performance. If anything, it's closer to a third more power, but the Alienware 18 still put up some of the best benchmark results I've ever seen.
Benchmarks
- 3DMark: Ice Storm: 156,702; Cloud Gate: 24,757; Fire Strike: 8,323
- Cinebench Graphics: 115.83 FPS, CPU : 722 cb
- PCMark 8 Home: 4,170 points
- PCMark 8 Battery Life: 1 hour, 57 minutes
- Bioshock Infinite: (1080p, Ultra): 111.84 fps; (1080p, Low): 291.57 fps
- Metr Last Light: (1080p, Ultra): 26.67 fps; (1080p, Low): 109 fps
The Alienware 18 lives up to its legend and tallies up an amazing 8,323 points in the 3DMark Fire Strike test. This is hardly a fair fight, but these marks are more than double that of the AMD-equipped Alienware 17, which only scored 4,727 points with its Radeon HD R9 M290X chip. The EON17-S put up a bit more of fight, scoring 5,444 points with its single GTX 880M GPU.
It's also clear that the higher-clock-speed CPU gives the Alienware 18 an extra edge. Alienware's big kahuna completed the Cinebench benchmark with a stellar performance, thanks to its Core i7-4910MQ chip. By comparison, the Intel Core i7-4700MQ tucked inside the smaller Alienware only tallied up 627 cb, and the i7-4810MQ-equipped EON17-S fared just slightly better with marks of 684 cb.
In terms of real-world gaming, all this power let me run Metr Last Light at an almost playable 26.67 fps with all the graphical settings turned up. (Last Light, of course, tends to kick the crap out of gaming laptops no matter how powerful the GPU is.) Having two video cards allowed the Alienware 18 to pull ahead whereas the Alienware 17 only managed to render the game with a stuttery 14.33 fps on high, and the EON17-S averaged 18 fps.
The Alienware 18 also performed handily; rendering both Wolfenstein: The New Order and Grid Autosport at a silky smooth 60 fps with maxed out settings. Assuming that games don't take a sudden graphical leap in the near future, the dual Nvidia parts should be able to keep up with the latest games for many years to come.
Short fuse
The dual video card system also (unsurprisingly) completely decimates battery life. The Alienware clocked in just a few minutes short of the two-hour mark in the PCMark 8 battery test. With regular use, the 18-inch rig only lasted for 2 hours and 11 minutes with the AlienFX lights show turned on, 17 tabs opened in Chrome, Spotify piping though the laptop speakers, and a short "work break" session of Transistor. The EON17-S takes the crown for the longest battery life with a still stunted 2 hours and 46 minutes. The Alienware 17 also lasted a tiny bit longer than its bigger brother, at 2 hours and 15 minutes.
Switching over to the Intel chip's integrated graphics extends battery life on the Alienware 18 to a stingy three hours - just enough time to stream a movie on Netflix. Just don't expect to do much more than that. Even with a blazing fast Core i7, the laptop began to hitch with 20 image-heavy websites loaded into Chrome's cache.
Keyboard cat
In TechRadar's last run in with an Alienware machine, the keyboard left much to be desired, with an awkward raised platform due to the Alienware 17's own height. This time around the Alienware 18 raised the keyboard even farther up, but I found it to be a bit more comfortable. This is thanks to the the laptop's palm rests being so large that they act as a secondary desk. I still had to prop my wrists up and over the rig's tall frame to hit the keys, but it's not as painful an experience as we had with the Alienware 17.
However, those who have used real mechanical keyboards with a rainbow of Cherry MX switches will be immediately put off by the mushiness of the Alienware 18's keys. The Dell-owned company prides itself on having an embedded keyboard, and it does offer some very deep travel. But ultimately, the keys were too soft for my liking.
Strainingly bright display
One other thing that makes Alienware's biggest offering a notable upgrade from its 17-inch model is a glossy-finished IPS (in-plane switching) screen. The Alienware 17 we tested earlier this year came with a matte-finished TN (twisted nematic) panel, and the blacks on the Alienware 18 were noticeably darker the instant I saw the screen.
Still, it's not the best-looking IPS panel out of the box. Colors lack any real pop without calibration. In dark playing environments, the display's overly bright backlight is blinding even at lower settings. It's a strain to look at for extended periods, and washes out the blacks a bit.
Finally, at 18.4 inches, this panel also pushing the limits of how sharp 1080p appears when viewed up close. I can't see the individual pixels unless I stare intently into the display, but a screen of this size demands a larger pixel count than 1920 x 1080.
Bundled software
Storage space is precious on a gaming laptop, and Alienware has thankfully kept the bolted on software to a minimum. The Windows 7 Home Premium install only comes with a few Alienware-branded tools and they're all packed tightly into one small, unintrusive control panel package.
- AlienFX: This program allows users to customize the 10 distinct color zones on the Alienware 18 from the power LED, keyboard, to all the external strip lights.
- AlienTouch: Aside from the usual Synaptics touchpad options, Alienware has included its own software to fine tune the touchpad's sensitivity and disabling the input device when plugging in a mouse.
- AlienFusion: Essentially Alienware's version of power preferences, except with a fancier user interface.
- AlienAdrenaline: Allows users to create profiles for games, including unique AlienFX color schemes, toggling off extraneous applications and auto running any third-party VoIP clients.
- Alienware TactX: Macros! Every gamer needs them, and this built-in program will let users set their own personalized keystrokes and share them online as well.
The Alienware 18 represents the pinnacle of mobile PC gaming. You'll be hard pressed to find another laptop that can deliver the same amount of performance - let alone one of the same size or that supports dual video cards. One of the few boutique manufacturer-made laptop frames capable of a SLI setup includes Digital Storm's aptly-named Behemoth. Otherwise, there are a few other lesser known brands, like Sager here in the states and 3XS in the UK, that will build a system with a dual GTX 880M setup.
We liked
Having 16GB of video ram split between two video cards in a laptop is bonkers. But I can't say that it does not produce results. Normally, I have to spend the first couple of minutes playing any game tuning it for the right balance between fidelity and frame rate. With the Alienware 18, I felt confident setting everything to "ultra". It's liberating to that know your machine can run almost everything at a full clip, and it better for the scratch.
The Alienware 18 is a statement of high-performance inside and out, with looks that are unique to Alienware's line of machines. There's no way that this rig will be ever mistaken for an oversized workstation or regular laptop. Yes, some of the lights and extra plastic are a bit superfluous, but I must hand it to Alienware for its meticulous craftsmanship.
We disliked
Though there are plenty of things to commend the Alienware 18 for, it isn't perfect. Gamers want to buy a high-end laptop because it will work straight out of the box, and the 18-incher fails in this regard. I had to dive into the settings to enable SLI, a key feature and main reason for buying a machine such as this in the first place. Annoyances also extend to the screen and touchpad. After a week with the machine, I feel Alienware's inputs could use a bit more polish.
The laptop's gargantuan size also makes it nearly impossible to carry without a special-made backpack. After dragging the unit around in a duffel bag - the only thing I had that could fit it save for some rolling luggage - for a just a few hours, I never wanted to take it out ever again.
It's power needs also make it practically unusable for anything other gaming. Beyond the short battery life, the gaming machine's equally massive power brick requires large amounts of voltage, enough to cause sparks to shoot out of every outlet I plugged it into. On one occasion, I was not even able to draw power from a public powerstrip due the the Alienware's extreme energy demands. This is the definitive desktop replacement laptop. (Outside of bringing it to LAN parties and gaming competitions.) And it costs over four grand - that cannot be overstated.
Final verdict
More so than the Alienware 17 and Origin EON17-S, or any gaming laptop in existence, users should think long and hard before picking up an Alienware 18. There are just far too many more affordable and sensible options out there. For roughly the same price, you can build a desktop around an Nvidia Titan part (or two even) and still have enough leftover to build a beastly gaming machine.
At half the price, both of these listed competitors serve up more than enough graphical horsepower to play most games out today. You might have to spend your first moments in-game toning down the settings for the optimal experience, but a more affordable option will leave you with more money in the bank to spend on monitors, peripherals, Doritos or whatever else tickles your fancy.
source:Tech4Geeks
But those still dead set on getting the most amped up Alienware 18 configuration won't be disappointed. Save for a few easily fixable issues, this 18-inch gaming rig can plow through just about any game you can throw at it. The Alienware 18 remains one of the world's most powerful gaming laptops, but at a prohibitive price.
source:Techradar
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