Alienware is renowned for its eyecatching, high-powered gaming computers, but there has been little change in its laptops designs since its acquisition by Dell in 2006. The M17x aims to change this and is the most powerful and stylish gaming laptop we've seen so far.

While Alienware has traditionally used customised stock chassis, this model has an entirely new design. The anodised aluminium finish looks stunning and is incredibly hardwearing. The interior uses lower-quality plastics, however, which slightly reduce style and resilience.

The chassis is one of the largest we've seen, in order to house the powerful components inside, and the metallic finish increases its weight to a backbreaking 5.8kg. Surprisingly, battery life is excellent, however, letting you work for 183-minutes when away from a power point.

The large chassis allows for a spacious keyboard. The backlit keys are great to use and respond well. A pad of numeric keys is also fitted on the right-hand side for easy gaming use. The large, honeycomb textured touchpad is equally responsive.

The 17-inch screen is encased beneath a sheet of incredibly reflective glossy plastic that runs edge to edge. It isn't the brightest screen we've seen, but games and movies look great, thanks to the strong colour, contrast and deep black levels.

Hybrid graphics

The highlight of this laptop is, of course, its graphics. Two top-of-the-range Nvidia graphics cards are linked together in an SLI configuration for the best gaming power of any laptop we've seen. Games run smoothly and quickly, as does HD video.

An additional integrated Nvidia GPU is also fitted. You can switch between it and the SLI chips at will, without needing to reboot, when you need to choose between maximum performance or battery life. The whole process works effortlessly with just two mouse clicks.

Home performance is also impressive. The quad-core Intel Core 2 Extreme processor uses an incredible 12MB of Level 2 cache and is backed by 4096MB of memory. Even the most demanding software runs with ease, making for a fantastic home or office workstation.

With 1TB of storage, a Blu-ray drive, 8-in-1 card reader and a wide array of ports, this is a very well-equipped laptop. Even the integrated webcam impresses, with facial recognition software letting you log in by simply looking into the camera.

Although this is an expensive machine, its power and feature-packed specification make it by far the best gaming laptop you can buy. Alienware had a lot to prove with the M17x and has truly set a new standard in the gaming laptop market.

Alienware m17x benchmarks

BENCHMARK MACHINE: Toshiba Satellite Pro U300

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