Alienware

Holdon Tight · 22 May 2011 at 22:33

Just about to order the M11x. Any opinions?

Alienware of course

littlepuppy · 22 May 2011 at 22:52

I have the r2 and love it so can deffo say if you have researched and like the look of them, I could not give you a good reason not to invest

Although I do prefer my thinkpad keyboard!

scrlk · 22 May 2011 at 22:59

I think the M11x R3 is coming out soon, thought about holding off?

Holdon Tight · 22 May 2011 at 23:11

any idea of what improvements?

rippling · 23 May 2011 at 07:51

the r3 is out and starts at 899 the r2 is 499 now , i was in same boat but i just thought an 11 inch screen is going to be to small for me , the m17x is just to big to carry round all over the place which left me the m14x , the m14x is around same price as the m11x r3 because you will have to spec up the r3 , and the m14x has a bettef gpu and cpu as its quad core m11 is only dual , hope this helps....i have a wait time of round 2 weeks for the m14 ....

oweneades · 25 May 2011 at 14:48

simonholden said:
any idea of what improvements?

The major changes the R3 has over the R2 are:

- Sandybridge based dual core processors (i5 - 1.4GHz turbo to 2.3GHz, i7 1.5GHz turbo to 2.6GHz).
- Nvidia GT540m 1GB (i5) or 2GB (i7)
- Inclusion of USB3.0 (1 port)

In general it also has better battery life than the R2 thanks to the SB processor and is quicker "out of the box".

The line is blurred a little once you start overclocking the R2. With a high enough FSB overclock and by using throttlestop the R2 (i5 or i7 versions only) can basically match the R3 for pure CPU performance. A quick GPU overclock can also bring the 335m up to the same level as the 540m.

There are also reports that the R3 is suffering from thottling (processor) and issues of the fan running at high speed randomly.

Overall the R3 is an improvement over the stock R2 (especially the one that is still for sale) but is not really any faster once you start playing around with the system properly. The 540m isn't really much quicker than the 335m either so in GPU limited scenarios there is barely anything in it.

Please note the R2 that was being sold up until very recently (and may still be being sold) comes with either the U5400 or i3 330UM processors. Both of these are quite frankly terrible. Neither has Turbo boost and thus do not perform anywhere near their i5/i7 or even overclocked R1 brethren.

I own a tweaked and fettled R1 (soon to be pin modded up to 2GHz) so if you have any specific questions let me know.