![]() ![]() Colours are well above average too and there was no noticeable merging of blacks in dark scenes in games and movies either. The screen itself isn't spectacularly bright, but the contrast is respectable and at full brightness it's perfectly visible outside in bright conditions. I can easily see this product lasting many years of knocks and scrapes - something its smaller, thinner contemporaries will likely struggle to match. Even if you push down in the middle from the outside there's no distortion. ![]() It's exceptionally solid-feeling and it's the first laptop I've come across (and I've tested a few other Alienwares in my time too) that has little flex or bend in the screen. I've been very impressed with the build quality of this laptop. Fire up a game or put the CPU under heavy load, though, and the fans kick into action and we'd certainly recommend using headphones to cut out the noise. As a result, when you're just web browsing or watching videos, the Alienware 18 is remarkably quiet. Inside is a mass of hardware, with some extensive cooling systems to deal with the heat from the two graphics processors and the Core i7 CPU. However, these still fall well short of even a modest desktop set, especially with bass. With all that volume to fill with hardware, there's plenty of space for speakers and the 2.1-channel set includes a subwoofer too. It gets very warm, you'll risk blocking one of the numerous air intakes plus the laptop itself weighs in at nearly 6kg - three times your average 15in model. ![]() You'd need a pretty low-lying desk for this not to be a problem too and having the laptop sitting on your lap probably isn't a great solution either. However, the main issue I found is that because the laptop is so high - well over 5cm/2in, that the sharp, angular edges of the front of the palm wrest can dig into your wrists. the buttons offer good resistance without being stiff too and the keyboard is very responsive. You can even assign different colors to different areas of the keyboard and there are a number of presets that change the color according to themes, some of which gradually scroll across the keys or indicate battery level for example.Įven the touchpad is back-lit - it's bizarre when you first use it but the pad itself is a joy to use and the backlight only makes things easier on low light. The keys are individually back-lit and both these, the touch pad and the external case illuminations can be cycled through many different colors. The keyboard is large with the full complement of numpad keys and even a row of macro keys that can be programmed using Alienware's on screen display software. Or, of course, you could use the built-in Blu-ray and DVD drive. With such a large screen, it's likely you'd be watching movies on it at some point and as well as a Gigabit Ethernet port for hooking straight up to a router, there's a speedy Intel dual Band 802.11ac WiFi adapter which will handle HD streaming services such as Netflix with bandwidth to spare. There's a 500GB Samsung SM841 mSATA SSD and to give you some extra storage space there's a 750GB Western Digital Black hard disk inside too, with space for a second 2.5in drive - either a hard disk or SSD. The rest of the specification on the model here stands at 16GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7-4930MX processor, which has a maximum clock speed of 3.9GHz and has four physical CPU cores backed up by Hyper-Threading, giving it eight threads in total - more than enough for today's games. ![]()
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