i am saving up, and so far i havent seen anything near as good (in terms of performance/looks) - maybe this is the machine to prove vista is actually ok?

would love to hear from some owners?

As a alienware owner i have nothing but praise for them usually, but its about time they found a solution to the naff sound cards they chuck into their laptops.

It not only has basic playback problems, such as if you press pause on a video or audio track, when you resume playback you will get White Noise blast out until you rewind a second or two, when everything comes back to normal. Very inconvinient!!

The sound quality is pretty shocking as well, HD is definetly not an accurate description. I use the system for true HD audio recording 96khz via a Digidesign 002 rack unit, simply pluggin an audio source into the onboard sound card results in a horrible recording useful for nothing, other than maybe dictating?

I end up using external sound cards the whole time so i forget how useless it is until i take it mobile and get a reminder that i didnt want!.

Anyone used an PCI Express audio cards that are worth theyre money?

I've got the top end M15X and overall I've been very pleased. I think most of my criticisms (i.e. the touch sensitive buttons) were touched on in the review, although I think the volume slider could have used some more derision, it really doesn't work very well.

My main criticisms after some extended use are

a) It's going to have to go back at some point to have dust removed from behind the screen

and

b) the track pad is horrid. It's made of the same shiny surface as the rest of the laptop so you cannot feel when your fingers reach the edges. Sometimes my finger won't glide over the surface either, making it hard to use. Finally, the trackpad's sensitivity doesn't fully extend to the backlit border around it. It ends somewhere before that, making it hard to slide your finger along the edges for scrolling.

But overall it's an excellent piece of kit, every game runs with max details on at 60fps+ except for Crysis, which runs perfectly for a few minutes until the heat causes the GPU to throttle...

if you're going to buy an alienware then getting the extra 3 year warranty is a must. I now have a £2000 brick. Lesson learnt the hard way!

While it worked it was great. I had a 17" m7700 which is a model of a few years ago - I must admit I bought it after reading a review of it on here.

dell has a laptop with TWO 8800M GTX parts in it!

imo, so far, i think the dell is the daddy of gaming laptops.

cheers,

bill

stuff and nonsense: http://www.eupeople.net/forum

how heavy is it? my old area-51 weighed a tonne. It lasted for several years and I was very happy with it, but the cost was still barmy; as demonstrated here with the new laptop.

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=544F

To that as far as I can see.

Acer AS8920G-934G64Bn Core 2 Duo T9300 4GB 640GB (2x 320GB) BluRay Vista Ultimate

Twice as much memory, fast processor, GeForce 9650M, blue ray (without paying extra), full hd screen without paying extra, bigger screen (might be a mixed blessing) and a similar weight.

If you want a laptop you can play games on, you're probably not going to chuck it in your rucksack everyday, so why go for 15.4".

Have to actually check that 9650M is better than 8800M, maybe it's not.

the review mentions a realtek hd audio, but on the alienware site it says its intel... has it changed?

I've been using the top of the range one of these for since May. I've been very impressed with it's build quality and the software build on it - OK it's Vista but it runs fine on this :)

I agree with the Poster above who mentioned about the motherboard soundcard, I bought the Creative X-FI option with it - guessing the Realtek would be rubbish - and it seems quite a lot better. I'm not a big fan of Creative but this laptop + X-FI runs my sound studio software fine with ASIO4ALL driver. Quite happily runs Reason4, Cubase at Ableton at low latency very nicely all simultaneously. Also has firewire port for proper external sound modules.

As for gaming - well it blowns my SLi desktop system out of the water (2x7800gtx) which I was rather suprised at! And is relatively quiet even when under heavy load - say after a long Warcraft session. Runs HL2 Orange Box on 1080p on my HDTV excellently though it's HDMI port, then chill with some Blu-Rays after.

Costs a hell of a lot of money (around £3.5k in all for the options I chose) but it exceeded my expectations so money well spent.

The only drawback I found was the wait time between ordering and it arriving - about a month - but you are kept up-to-date in the build process and it does feel a more personal experience compared to other vendors.

Top marks from me.

A tepid games section...

A HDTV love-in thread...

An echoing and self-linking news forum consisting almost exclusively of reposts of news articles.

Likewise, a baby laptops thread populated solely by re-posting of Reg articles...

And a dodgy favicon to boot.

What's with the continual approval of irrelevant and desperate eupeople plugs?

It's Realtek audio - to the best of my knowledge there's no such thing as Intel audio

I don't think that Acer compares very well, it's much bigger at 18.4in, the CPU is slower and the graphics card is a 9650M GS so it'll give you about 9000 3DMarks compared to the 15000 of the 8800 GTX. It's not a bad laptop, but if you want the best gaming performance in a relatively small package, the Alienware is the better option.

Not sure whether you were trying for humour or not, but in case you weren't:

1> Alienware IS Dell nowadays...

2> Alienware also have a twin 8800 capable model (m17x) - but it's an absolute beast compared to the m15x.