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Dell’s Alienware brand is known for its outrageous gaming laptops and, despite its diminutive size, the M11x is still worthy of the adjective. While Windows performance was average for a laptop, it has a dedicated graphics card capable of 30fps in Call of Duty 4.
If you switch to the graphics chip that’s built into the Core i5 processor, and the M11x will last for almost seven hours before needing a recharge. Dell has installed a 256GB SSD, which is huge in SSD terms. However, it accounts for almost a third of the M11x’s price – £505, to be precise. SSDs improve boot times and application loading times, but do little to affect application performance. The M11x boots to the desktop in just 24 seconds, which is remarkably fast. However, it managed just 56 overall in our benchmarks, which means it’s slower than laptops we’ve seen costing less than £600.
This is the fault of the Intel Core i5 520UM, a low-power version of the standard mobile Core i5 processor. This dual-core chip may support Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost, but it runs at a paltry 1.06GHz compared to the Core i5 520M which runs at 2.4GHz. Its score of 72 in the single-threaded image-editing test is a good example of Turbo Boost at work, but even this isn’t that impressive.
This spoils what is otherwise a fantastic laptop. Gaming performance is impressive, and battery life is great as well. Replacing the SSD with a hard disk would make it a lot cheaper, but the dull backlight on the screen is disappointing, and we can’t recommend it.