It is practically difficult if you are aiming to buy a laptop for playing games, since they exhaust the battery power and demand huge components. But Alien ware M11x (starting price $799) is one exception to the above quoted things. You may get a clocked processor for this amount with 2GB capacity RAM.
The M11x is stylish and good looking and the keyboard is enormously back lighted with various colors of your choice. The brightness of the keyboard cannot be adjusted so at times, the lighting may blur your vision.
Otherwise, the keyboards are stylish and comfortable giving soft touch. The touch pad is good but its buttons are either undersized or soggy that sometimes, you feel uncomfortable when pressing them. It has a mouse setting right this issue.
It contains a web camera which is in built with face recognition technology. It is possible to cheat that with your photo and keep this as secret.
Number of ports is available in Alien ware for external connection such as two USB ports on either side, and 2 headphone jacks for managing double player games. The laptop consists of a battery charger along with indicator, in the underneath portion and is useful for knowing the charge level if you are planning to travel.
The M11x model does not possess optical drive like many other models. It has Windows 7 as its operating system along with restore disc.
In my view, benchmarking tests are not required for any laptop and is done by only those people who are exclusively involved in this business. Let us concentrate on the issue of games and find out whether it can cover all games and how fast it performs while playing.
You can play all the new games quite well enough in this device. You have to keep the intensive effects at the minimal level for getting high frame rates per second. You can set the visual settings at high level since it does not consume more horsepower. Generally the device was tested on playing for various games and it performed reasonably well. For high settings also it could deliver average or more than average fps rate.
There was some problem with the lighting effect of LED screen and that could be corrected using separate monitor connected with your laptop. The picture was looking great when I connected the device with high definition projector.
Similarly the switch/button between integrated and discrete graphics is not without any flaw. Sometimes, it directs you to quit certain applications and turns the screen completely dark.
The laptop may die in the middle of the game, depending upon your usage of hardware and its battery life gets exhausted after 2.5 hours. The same battery may last for 8 hours if you read or write in this device. I feel strongly that the time of battery is reasonable enough for playing a full game.
This model is worth buying (such expensive price) if you are a game lover. If you can wait for its next version which is going to hit the roads with upgraded hardware and Blu-ray (drive) it would be better. Otherwise, you can buy this model and CPU can be upgraded later.