Today on my Global TV Sunday Morning News Tech Talk segment I showed the David and Goliath of portable computing from www.Dell.ca
From the Gaming PC and Laptop division of Dell, say a respectful ‘hello’ to the Alienware 18 Gaming Laptop, the mother of portable gaming starting at $2,299…yes.
The Dell Alienware 18 is a gaming notebook with no compromise.
Why? It’s kind of like squeezing the best of desktop PCs into a luggable laptop, with an abundance or Intel quad core power, two NVIDIA GeForce 780M gaming cards, 32GB of RAM like my configuration was, one SSD memory drive and one speedy SCSI hard drive…it goes on and on. That drives the price to more than $4,000!
Needless to say, this puppy play games with quality beyond gaming consoles. Benchmarking it with the latest www.Futuremark.com PCMark 8 Professional Edition, it topped the scales as a gaming, not to mention business and productivity tool. Its score of 3899 for creative software from games to video editing, was almost 25 percent lower than the best gaming desktop PV. It almost makes its weight of 5.5 KG (you wouldn’t want to use this on your lap) worthwhile.
My own Photoshop CS6 benchmark of a series of action files was competed in 58 seconds, the fastest I have seen on any laptop. A special Excel Monte Carlo engine file, about 35,000 rows and 10,000 columns, took less than five seconds to complete, versus the some two minutes today’s average laptop takes.
The construction, material quality and very serious “Game on” look impresses. The keyboard has additional gaming settings and colour key configurations and the 18” monitor full HD resolution is bright and sharp.
And guess what? It comes with Windows 7! No fooling around with gaming purists!
I want one!
Compare this to Dell’s mighty little Venue 8 Pro that has a few slingshot tricks of its own, like an 8-inch IPS HD display, bright and sharp, fits in coat pockets, pre-installed with Home and Student 2013. It also runs on Intel, but the much tinier but still Photoshop capable newest Intel Atom 4th gen quad processor, meaning it runs any legacy Windows software.
Imagine, the Venue 8 Pro Tablet starting at $319 weighs less than the charger for the Alienware 18! It easily runs all day on one battery charge, compared to the less than three hours for the Alienware 18 and features a 5MP camera in the back and responsive 1.2 webcam up front.
I found the touchscreen to be sensitive and responsive but I liked it more with a Bluetooth and mouse keyboard. Still having a fully Windows 8.1 capable device on the go shows the range of hardware Windows computing encompasses today.
Decisions, decisions.
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