Now, on to the review. I will try to give an unbiased opinion as I have done months and months of research, comparing and contrasting every modern gaming laptop. This review will be fairly in depth (Should be for a $1800+ laptop), and I will try to be detailed, but also universal in describing details, so that you don't have to know any extreme technical jargon to understand the review as well as giving an up-to-date one. Enough said.
L. Gilbert (AL, USA): First things first the build quality is excellent, and this will be the first thing you notice as you un-box and remove it from its protective casing. I researched for months on purchasing a high-end/Gaming computer, and i have learned very much about numerous modern gaming computers and components. Most of the reviews on amazon and on review websites have stated its build quality is of the highest grade and that it is one of the biggest selling points for this laptop, and for good reason. The laptop feels solid, secured, and a bit heavy (weighs in at about 9.5lbs). In my opinion, not overweight considering the amount of components stuffed into this thing. The rubbery matte texture compliments it's sturdiness well, and to me was a great material choice for this laptop as it resists fingerprints rather well and will not show scratches as aluminum or plastic will. Not to mention keeping the laptop light, and relatively cool.
B. Oliver (Michigan): On to the Graphics, this laptop uses a combination of AMD Radeon 7970m ( Nvidia 675m on this model) discrete or dedicated card, in concurrence with an Intel HD 4000 integrated chip. First the 7970m, this is a nasty card that destroys most any game, modern or old. You can comment on this review, and I can test a game you might want me to play and let you know how it preforms. To name a few recent ones it preforms extremely well with that I have played. Black ops 2 (not very difficult for any machine), Battlefield 3 run great maxed out, Arkham city runs great, Farcry 3 runs insane on this laptop due to its great scaling on all 4 processor cores (all though I have had some crashes with this game). I've even played as recent as the Crysis 3 beta which runs great since the new drivers update. I cannot stress this enough, the ability to play such high-end games with such good results, all on-the-go, is a crazy feat to me. I run this laptop to a 27 inch monitor most of the time and it's hard to believe the graphics are coming from my laptop and not a desktop. Comparing it to the GTX 680m recently released by Nvidia, the 7970m in my opinion is on par with it, and even runs certain games better according to benchmarks. That being said in power consumption and cooling is better with the 680m. The biggest difference is the price.
Austin Somlo (Canada): When I looked to configure my laptop on Dell or Xotic PC, the price difference is over $350 which is simply not justifiable, even for a Nvidia fan boy. I knew and researched both the 680m, 7970m before I even wanted to purchase here, so seeing that amazon had the 7970, it only pushed me further to buy here. Intel HD 4000 is simply an integrated graphics chip which is used for anything but high-end games and uses MUCH less power. Heck, it will even run older games or less resource hogging ones great. AMD uses "Enduro" technology to switch between the 2 graphics solutions based upon your power source (battery or plugged in) and application (Video game vs. Google chrome) this all can be configured manually, but by default your computer switches to the Intel HD 4000 when on battery power EVEN if you are trying to run a high-end game. But like I said, this can be changed manually with a combination of power and graphics setting changes. All that being said, the drivers are a bit faulty, especially with windows 8. I could not decide whether to install AMD's drivers for the 7970m from their website or Dell's which seemed outdated. I spoke to a few Alienware techs on this issue. All said that it is preferable to use Dell's drivers, but AMD's should be compatible. I noticed some performance loss using Dell's driver version, so I cleared the drivers completely and installed AMD's 13.2 version which had updates for the Crysis 3 beta.
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