Great, a chunky notebook with a low-res TN panel that can play games. WTH is groundbreaking about that? I would 100% pay the extra $800 for a Razer Blade over the AW14.
Nice refresh but the haters are going to hate on these. If I was to get one of these it would have to be the 14, since battery life is horrid on the 17 and 18.
I like the 4Gz haswell upgrade with a GTX 780M on a 17" would be nice but the redesign is like half baked. The bottom is silver? with hints of the generic Dell and the top is like an upgrade of the old Alienware. It's like they had to design teams going. The old Alienware team and the generic Dell team and someone said, hey lets stop the bickering and put the two together. A silver bottom does not belone on an alienware computer
They should really look at the Razer notebooks. Thin, Light, and Powerful is what a lot of people are looking for now. Hell I wish they would bring back the m11x. It was on the chunky side but portable.
Maybe if they spent more time on actually developing products and less time developing flashy product presentations, the gaming community would probably hate them less.
No one buys a gaming laptop for the battery life - you don't game on battery power in the first place and additionally after a couple of years, the battery becomes a turd anyways.
No one buys a gaming laptop for the battery life - you don't game on battery power in the first place and additionally after a couple of years, the battery becomes a turd anyways.
A lot of the new Haswell gaming laptops are getting over 4 hours of web surfing battery life thanks to Optimus which can shut off the dedicated video card (the only one that doesn't is the Asus G750, but even then, Nvidia's 780m can clock way down to save lots of power). Also the CPU is very power efficient too. So, with the dedicated video card off the laptop doesn't take much more power than a regular laptop.
According to laptopmag's review, the 14" alienware gets about 5 hours in a web surfing test.
In a few years (let's say 4 years) you can always buy a new battery pack for it, probably $50 or less if you shop around.
These laptops are extremely easy to work on. I have an m18xr1. 3 years old and i upgraded the heatsink for the cpu to the copper triple pipe and upgraded the 6990m's to gtx 680m's and got my i7-2960xm at 4.4ghz and this thing still tops performance charts 3 ye ars later. Ye's I spent over 3k but all I have to do is upgrade gpu's once in awhile and I have a gaming notebook still at the top of the pack. It's a worth while investment and their cooling system is very well designed every with heavy overclocking. Lotsa copper instead of a aluminum.
i am disappointed if they are sticking with the TN screens though. We atleast deserve 1080 IPS screens at the bare min. I'll be holding onto my m18xr1 for at east another year probably 2 that will be 5 good years out of this laptop near the top of performance charts.