Last year Dell launched the Alienware laptop collection in South Africa. Alienware has long been recognized for its line of gaming laptops.

Alienware has wanted to establish itself as the gaming laptop on the market for several years. It weighs 5.3 kg, for your 15 inch mobile laptop.

The Alienware M11x has 2 graphics adapters, 1 based on Intel and the other based on Nvidia. At first, it would switch between two by pressing a variety of keys, but after Nvidia’s technology changed, Dell integrated it into newer types of notebooks.

When turned on, the lights flow from different places within the body and all of these can be set. Different colors and designs of strobe lights can be configured with the included program.

The body is only strong and also the keyboard has hardly any curvature. That is, it does not bend much when writing about it. It’s definitely not the best laptop keyboard in the world, yet you type easily enough.

Also, the touchpad doesn’t come across the best cash to buy. It doesn’t have a center click button and it doesn’t seem to service multi-touch actions.

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When we tested the gaming efficiency of the device, we were a bit unhappy at first.

Apparently the Nvidia 335M GeForce graphics card must be performing much better than we were experiencing, which led us to discover that the laptop was equipped with a reasonably old edition of the Nvidia card graphics driver.

Once the drivers were updated to version 257.30, we noticed an extreme improvement in game performance.

Even graphically intense games like Metro 2033 seemed to work very well.

It’s worth noting that Steam noticed a graphics card difficulty when launching games. It’s probably because the Nvidia technology kicks in right after the game launches.

The biggest downside to the unit we reviewed is that it just shipped with 2GB of RAM. It doesn’t appear to be a problem as Dell suggested that the pre-made devices offered in South Africa may have 4GB of RAM. Optical drive deficiency may also become a deal breaker for some, however it could be cured to a level with an external USB drive.

Overall, the Alienware M11x is a solid gaming laptop, albeit a bit pricey and perhaps a bit flashy for some. Hard-core PC players could best be offered with a desktop computer that they assembled on their own.