Alienware Aurora m9700

DESIGN/FEATURES
Alienware has been building gaming notebooks longer than any other company here, and its experience shows in the 9.5-pound Aurora m9700. Anything weighing less than ten pounds is positively svelte in a crowd like this. The Aurora is encased in a solid chassis adorned with Alienware’s trademark glowing AlienEyes and rubberized grips. Notable features include a 1.3-MP tilting camera above the display, a touch-sensitive, quick-launch pad, and a front-mounted optical drive. Positioning the optical drive away from the sides allows for better port distribution and makes room for the RAID configuration that is fast becoming a company standard.

PERFORMANCE
The Aurora m9700’s performance numbers are just as high as its build quality. The notebook is saddled with a mere Turion ML44 processor, but the SLI GPU array enabled 3DMark03 scores above 21,000 and a F.E.A.R. frame rate of 67 fps with the settings maxed out, good enough for a third-place finish. With the display’s subtle color depth and crisp brightness, gaming was a total pleasure. F.E.A.R. has never looked this good on a machine with this price. While other notebooks dispel heat through the front and sides, warming up the palm rest, Alienware keeps the Aurora m9700’s heat directed through the rear of the notebook, making for more comfortable long-term usage. The system’s media and audio performance were also quite good; if the sound was a bit more powerful, this would be an unbeatable system.

VERDICT
Alienware takes the crown for packing SLI graphics into a 17-inch, sub ten-pound notebook; the Aurora is certainly more portable than Vigor and Voodoo’s giants and more powerful and affordable than the Dell XPS M1710. With SLI starting at $2,396, this should be the first choice for all but the wealthiest gamer.