| Alienware M9700 |
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Optical Drives and Graphics Capabilities
Techwarelabs noticed that Alienware followed an extremely nice design approach when it came to the m9700. The LCD screen tilts all the way back to lay flat on a table. This could come in handy should you need to stand up while conducting a meeting and need to look down onto your lcd screen, as well as prevent damage to your lcd screens hinge should you accidentally have someone pull on the display or with other laptops over extend the hinge breaking it. A very appreciable design aspect is that even after testing for its' heating aspects, by using video games such as Quake4, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, FEAR and LockOn Flaming Cliffs, the test unit we received never got hot in the palm rest area. This was a very nice feature that Alienware incorporated compared to other gaming laptops on the market that have the so-called "automatic palm heater" built-into them. The m9700 has dual exhausts on the backside of the unit to keep the unwanted heat away from the user. This heat reached temperatures upwards of 100 deg F during our tests. Users will also want to keep the power supply in a cool ventilated area as ours got substantially hot. The m9700 is very quiet when it comes to heat dissipation, as even during our most demanding tests it could barely be heard when the fans went into their highest speeds.
The DVD/CD optical drive is located at the front-center of the laptop which I felt is a better place for it, making it easily accessible.
Here is one area that I think can and should be improved upon, which is the
DVD/CD optical drive type. Having tested quite a few systems with optical drives,
I was surprised to see that Alienware still uses the standard tray type optical
drive in their high-end gaming laptops instead of the slot drive optical units
like some high end computer manufacturers use. The tray type optical drives
are normally very flimsy, noisy, made of plastic and can be broken quite easily
by leaning on it, catching it on a piece of clothing, etc. The slot type optical
drive units, like the ones found in almost all cars, would also aid in that
other problem with laptops, which is space accessibility when their need to
be opened. Countless times we have had our laptops dvd/cd drives either obstructed
or in close proximity to other items, sometimes catching on them. I look forward
to the day when all laptops use the slot drive type for their optical drives
on their high end systems.
With the dual NVIDIA 7900 GS video cards in SLI, the m9700 is no slouch when it comes to achieving excellent frame-rates and smooth gameplay in all the games we tested with no video artifacting whatsoever, despite the temperatures coming from the backside exhausts. Alienware has definately done their homework here with providing adequate cooling to their video gpu's and video ram to prevent such occurences from happening. All in all we never actually noticed any heat or increase in temperatures from the user's side of this machine. The only times you can tell the unit is hot is by reaching around to feel the output from the exhaust fans. This feature alone will definately be praised by many gamers. We will go into details about the performance of this laptop a little later but for now some examples of gameplay taken from the Prey Demo can be seen below:
As you can see we didn't spare the resolution nor the details and still had acceptable framerates on this very demanding title.
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