Dell J399N,Dell 8P6X6

Publié le 6 juin 2012 par ehar

Slight weaknesses exist when it comes to color reproduction, covering only 40% of Adobe's RGB color space. This maybe clearly worse than the XMG A502, but for customers without ambitions for working with images, this maybe a small limitation. Dell W7H3N

The strong brightness helps the display when used outside, but the very reflective plastic pane covering the entire display edge to edge, prevented a better rating. Due to this design choice, Alienware could easily offer a coated, non-reflective glass display cover like Apple does, in place of the cheap reflective and scratch sensitive plastic pane they currently use. A non-reflective alternative was already lacking on the first M14x model, and so, the customer must live with reflections, unless they carefully choose a shady place without lights in their back. Dell 312-0762

Blickwinkel Alienware M14x R2

For a TN panel, the display has surprisingly solid viewing angles and allows multiple users to view the screen contents unaltered. Mainly vertical angles show the fact that we're not looking at a VA or IPS panel; from about 10 degrees off the vertical, contrast starts to shift lightly at first and becoming quite prominent past 45 degrees. Compared with the cheap panels of many other notebooks, this is still reasonable. Dell 312-1007

Ivy Bridge is everywhere - the M14x can't get around Intel's new CPU generation, even though the lowest priced model still uses a Sandy Bridge processor - the Core i5-2450M. Dell 50TKN 7W5X09C

We had the much quicker Core i7-3720QM installed in our test model, a fast, 2.6GHz quad core CPU from the high end range. Dell GRNX5 Turbo Boost 2.0 will raise the clock rate for single thread loads to 3.6 GHz, which provides sufficient performance for pretty much any situation, coupled with the architecture's high per MHz processing efficiency. Features already familiar to us from the previous generation like Hyper threading, AVX or AES-NI are aboard again, the 6MByte L3-Cache also remains the same. Thanks to Intel's latest 22nm manufacturing process, the TDP of the chip remains at 45 Watt, in spite of improved performance. Dell NF52T

The integrated GPU, now listening to the name HD 4000, was seriously upgraded and matches the performance of AMD's Radeon HD 6620G. Dell 0F965N Even though this is a large step forward in comparison to the old HD 3000 GPU, the absolute 3D performance remains uninspiring. Here, help comes with the dedicated Nvidia GeForce GT 650M, which is available with either 1 or 2 GByte of GDDR5 RAM. Our test model only has the 1 GByte version, but this should have no negative effects if we keep detail settings to playable frame rates on the 650M. The GT 650M is based on the 28nm Kepler architecture and sports 384 shader ALUs, clocked at 745 MHz or 835 MHz in turbo mode. Dell J399N

With 8 GByte DDR3 RAM in two 4GByte DDR3-1600 modules, the M14x is up to date. For storage, we chose a 64GByte mSATA SSD in combination with a 500 GByte 2.5" HDD. As pointed out above, the online configurator offers a multitude of different storage options. Dell 8P6X6

Asus X52J Battery

With an excellent score of 6.85 points in Cinebench R11.5 (64 Bit), the test model starts into our round of benchmarks. This puts the M14x a few numbers above all notebooks tested so far with that CPU, which speaks of an optimally exploited TurboBoost. We also got new records in the x264 HD Benchmark 4.0 with 150.05 / 37.67 fps in pass 1 / 2). Cinebench R10's single thread test (64 Bit) missed a new best score only narrowly with 6154 points. The Core i7-2630QM from last year's test was left in the dust. Dell PT6V8

Particularly interesting is the comparison with the smaller quad core processors from the two Schenker notebooks XMG A102 and A502. While the advantage over the 35 Watt model i7-3612QM is a comfortable 20 percent, this shrinks in comparison to the i7-3610QM to just over 10 percent. In view of the not so small triple digit price difference between the 3720QM and the 3610QM, it would be welcome if Dell would also offer the lower cost model in their configurator. Dell 312-0207

The basic idea sounds great: Use a fast (mSATA) SSD for the operating system and combine it with a slower but cheaper and much larger 2.5" HDD. Too bad that the already tiny 64GByte SDD had to sacrifice 20GByte for the recovery partition, and has very few Gigabytes of free space left, after installation of the operating system. After just a few months of growing temp files and such, users are going to run into space problems. Don't even think about the installation of sizable software programs, your games will have to end up on the slow HDD. Dell 312-0210

This is particularly sad when thinking about the Samsung SSD PM830's excellent performance. Surpassing 470 MB/s read speed and also great 167 MB/s write speed, using the AS-SSD Benchmark is especially impressive for an mSATA drive. Further strong results with small 4k files as well as the SSD typical short access times provide strong every day performance. Dell D951T

But the 500 GByte Seagate ST9500423AS Hard drive doesn't need to hide. At 7200 rpm and a generous 16MByte cache, she is one of the faster drives if her type and convinces with an average transfer rate of 75 MB/s in HD-Tune. Dell F681T

Just a few weeks after its release, the Nvidia GeForce GT 650M turned into a constant guest in our testing facility. No wonder, it pairs acceptable energy consumption and price with performance that almost reaches the level of previous high-end accelerators, a nearly unbeatable mixture. Dell NGPHW

Without trouble, we instantly reached 2358 points in 3DMark 11, establishing the M14x on the same level as other notebooks sporting the GT 650M GPU. Once more, it is notable that the Schenker XMG A102's DDR3 version of this card is slightly ahead. This card is clocked 13% higher with 835 MHz base and 950 MHz in turbo mode, but has less than half the memory bandwidth with its 900 MHz DDR3 VRAM vs 1000 MHz GDDR5. We take this as an indication that the Kepler architecture has a particularly efficient memory bus. Dell SQU-722

While the predecessor's GeForce GT 555M sooner or later lost its stamina in some newer games, the new GeForce GT 650M remains completely unphased and delivers 60% higher frame rates on average. Dell SQU-724

This provides absolutely fluid game play at a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels with high details in all games we tested; even anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering can be activated. The screen's native resolution of 1600 x 900 pixels requires only in the demanding Anno 2070 a minimal detail settings reduction. We detected no problems or stuttering as a result of the card's video RAM size of just 1 GByte, but the upgrade to the 2GByte version could turn out to be more future safe in the medium term. Dell 0C852J

We took a particularly intensive look at the performance of the notebook in Diablo3, which we already introduced in a dedicated article. On the M14x, we got an average frame rate of 50-60 fps with maximum details and 1600 x 900 resolution and the game remained stable in larger battles above 40 fps. Dell 0F310J

With up to 50 dB(A) in games, the first version of the M14x was enormously loud, even for gaming notebook standards. This was one of the greatest criticisms in that test.

For this reason, today we wanted to check the noise levels under load, which regrettably have barely improved at all. Just seconds after the start of a more demanding 3D game, the fan starts to speed up by levels, to break the 50dB(A) threshold in a matter of minutes. The average of a 3DMark-06 run ended up around 45.2 dB(A), which may be below the 2011 model, but can't be called quiet by any measure. We measured similar values for the XMG A102, but there, the subjective experience appeared lower and more pleasant. Dell 312-0944 C852J

During idle, the fan turns off completely, most of the time, reducing noise to the faint hiss of the hard drive (31.4 dB(A). Depending on the surrounding temperature, a certain system load is required for the fans to spring into action at low speed. We did not observe the fans coming on for simple Office or Internet use. Dell F310J

Before we focus on the measurements below, we would like to point out that we tested in an environment temperature of 78.8 F. In these conditions, the idle temperature of roughly 95 F and 108 F under load are just barely acceptable. We would not recommend using this notebook on your lap. Generally, we almost have to call these values customary in this class of notebooks, so that we can't criticize Alienware too harshly for this - otherwise, the M14x would probably get even louder. Dell H134J

The behavior of the hardware seemed a little strange during the stress test. While the CPU heated up to 201 F(94 C), it didn't bother to reduce its clock speed and remained between 3.1 and 3.2 GHz, the GPU started to throttle at less than 160 F, a completely uncritical temperature. Since this didn't happen in applications or games, customers probably need not worry about this oddity. Dell BTYAVG1

Asus X52J Charger