Benchmark an Alienware??

[Radicus]

Just wondering, has anyone benchmarked an alienware laptop?
I'm most curious about its 3Dmark03 scores. just wanna see how they compare to my PC, and if there a good investment.

[zeradul]

Alienware laptops aren't ever a good investment, if you are looking for an investment in a gaming laptop. A Dell will be nearly as good for half the price.

A homade PC is the way to go though for games....

[Radicus]

Yes, a desktop is better for gaming. But I'm also looking into it for other reasons, like watching movies on the road, playing games, that sort of thing.

[zeradul]

Yea, thats fine, I'm just saying that Alienware isn't anything special... Dell can go toe to toe with them and smoke them in price, and be better quality in the long run...

[Radicus]

Thanks for the info. I'll look into dell. One thing I notice about alienware though, is that you can swap vid cards out of them.
Isn't that pretty inovative?:D

[Radicus]

Ok, I just looked on Dell's website. There flagship laptop is a lot more that Alienwares mid range model, which has a 3.4P4 as opposed to AW's 3.0. But how much of a difference is that going to make? AW's midrange nb comes with a 70gig HDD as opposed to dells 60gig. The mid range AW comes in at around $2500, The dell comes in at around $3600, with no uprages. I'd say the AW is the better deal.

[The__tweaker]

Wether you get a 3 or 3.4 isn't that important as both is more than enough for gaming and your other tasks. It's the videocard area you must look at and then decide. :)

[minibubba]

you might want to consider looking into a toshiba, which will probably be cheaper than either the Dell or AW (and probably more reliable)

What you should be looking at is the diplay and video card (and RAM) that comes with it. It wont do you much good to have the fastest mobile cpu if it doesn't have a good gpu to back it up :2cents:

You may also want to look into the company that AW bases thier laptops on, although i can't remember what they are called. There is a thread on it around here somewhere....

[Black Rain]

From what I've seen, the toshiba laptops are really good. Do they still make the water cooled model, cause from what I read/saw about them, they were the only P4 laptop I would buy.

But don't take my word for it, I'm not the biggest laptop fan, and IMO the P4's only stopped being a joke after they went to the 533 fsb models.

But really, the most important thing for games is the video card its not much use if you have a P4 3.4 if the vid card is a 16mb p.o.s..

I tried checking alienwere's site, but had a few problems and so I'm unsure of how you can change the video card and what slot it would go in (AGP, PCI, PCI-X, Manu's format?). But if you can swop the v/c in the alienwere, and you'r sure of getting newer cards in the future, then alienwere!

[Soulburner]

For a laptop I would take a Centrino chip anyday over a high end 3Ghz processor. Despite being clocked at only 1.6-1.8Ghz, its going to be almost just as fast and consume half the power. A high end laptop is only going to last for an hour or two tops when gaming off the battery.

Either that or AMD's new competing A64 mobile. It works very similar to Intel's Centrino, and will clock itself down when not being used.

Also make sure you get one with R9600 graphics.

[Radicus]

Thx for all the excellent info guys! I've decided that a laptop is just a luxary that I don't need atm.

So, I went ahead and decided to get a new rig, based on the AMD 64 3200+:D