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 Alienware Aurora mALXTop dollar gets top performance from this monstrous 19-inch gaming rig. Price: $5,549
by Russ Fischer 
Just how big is Alienware’s 19-inch, SLI-based top-of-the-line mALX gaming laptop? Packed into the box is a backpack seemingly large enough for an Everest climb. With dual Nvidia Go 7900 GTX cards and dual HDD support up to 240GB, the mALX may be the ultimate rig for flying through the latest games at the highest settings. At 15 pounds and a base price of $4,499 (our configuration costs $5,549), this system is best suited for LAN parties. Wherever you take the mALX, it will dominate the competition.
As is often the case with gaming laptops, the mALX is decked out cosmetically as well as technically. Color-shifting metallic fleck paint is airbrushed onto the cover. The standard Alienware design has been modified to look more like a texture out of Quake. Once open, however, the chassis is almost demure, if an 18-inch footprint can be. A full-sized keyboard with acceptable key depth lurks within. The glowing alien head remains lit, as does the set of irritating lights under the display. You’ll be hard pressed to focus on those lights when the 19-inch, 1680 x 1050-pixel display is active, however. The resolution may be lower than that of competitors’ similarly equipped models, but make no mistake: This panel is gorgeous. The widescreen layout is truly immersive at 19 inches and is equally suited to games, media, and productivity. It’s extremely bright and not too glossy; we had to make only slight adjustments to kill overhead glare. Getting lost in the screen is easy, thanks to its sharp, precise performance. Our configuration included a 2.4-GHz AMD Turion 64 ML-44 processor, plus 2GB of 400-MHz RAM and the dual 512MB Nvidia GPUs. (Standard-issue graphics are 256MB per GPU, with a price difference of $350.) Dual 100GB 7,200-rpm hard drives in a RAID configuration helped facilitate data flow. Alienware offers a slightly cheaper 5,400-rpm option, but we don’t recommend it. The mALX’s 3DMark scores promised good things to come (27,116 on 03 and 5,624 on 06), and it generated stellar frame rates in F.E.A.R.: 85 fps on auto-detect and 81 fps with settings maxed. Even with 4X full-screen antialiasing and all lighting and shadow options enabled, that performance was absolutely smooth. The view was so nice we wanted to play the game all over again. The excellent gaming performance doesn’t quite mean perfect productivity. While the mALX is capable of handling any aspect of media and document creation, the AMD processor benchmarks slightly lower than Intel’s Core Duo chips. This huge system requires a lot of power; the battery drained in just over an hour. Wi-Fi strength isn’t great, either, with a mere 8.1 Mbps at 15 feet and 5.9 Mbps at 50 feet. Instead of cramming every conceivable extra port into the case, Alienware has focused on offering the most useful options. The left side features audio ports and the optical drive; the right has the PC Card slot, three USB 2.0 ports, FireWire, Ethernet, a 4-in-1 memory card reader, and a TV-antenna input. The rear panel is focused on video, with RGB, DVI, S-Video in and out, two more USB 2.0 ports, and a modem port for good measure. The 4.1 sound system projects well, but it’s not as good as the Voodoo Envy u:909. The system’s fans are loud enough when gaming that we preferred headphones. We were happy to see a pair of Ozma 7 headphones in the package, as well as Creative’s PCMCIA Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook. We were disappointed that despite the ample space, dedicated media controls don’t make an appearance. That’s a notable omission, even though they’re not part of Alienware’s typical design. As a consolation, a Windows Media Center remote is available. Though machines from Dell, Eurocom, and Voodoo offer competitive performance, the mALX edges them all out. One caveat before diving in: Intel’s Core 2 Duo chips have arrived and may make this model quickly obsolete. The performance boost in early tests isn’t large, but when paying for a premium rig like this, every bit helps. Alienware Aurora mALX Specifications
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