subject: Dell And Alienware Gave The World The Smallest Gaming Laptop [print this page] With the M11x, Dell and Alienware gave the world the smallest gaming laptop, and we liked it a lot. So why change it? To include the two things we"ve all been waiting for: Optimus and i5/i7 CPUs.
Price and Configuration
The model we tested came complete with a 1.2GHz Core i7-640UM Latitude-D820 processor (Turbo to 2.66GHz, Overclockable to 166MHz bus), 4GB DDR3 RAM (800 MHz) and a 500GB SATAII 7200RPM hard drive. This model, complete with Windows 7 Premium and Bluetooth, will set you back $US1319, though the base model including an i5 CPU starts at $US949. The older Core 2 Duo models are also available, starting from $US799. customisations include 2-8GB of RAM and 160GB-500GB hard drive or a 256GB solid state drive. All models now ship with the NVidia GT 335M with Optimus.
Aesthetics aside, the only other change is that Dell"s done away with the VGA port, which means no more impressing the class with Powerpoints directly through your laptop. All the other ports remain (3 USB, HDMI, Ethernet, FireWire, DisplayPort and a Latitude-D410 memory card reader), but this is still a letdown. VGA may be old tech, but it"s still widely used nationwide.
Otherwise the R2 is identical to the M11x on the outside. The display hasn"t been improved. It still feels an inch too small and way too reflective. All of the keys on the right, including the arrow keys, still feel too small as well.
Powerpoints directly through your Inspiron-640m laptop. All the other ports remain (3 USB, HDMI, Ethernet, FireWire, DisplayPort and a memory card reader), but this is still a letdown. VGA may be old tech, but it"s still widely used nationwide.
Otherwise the R2 is identical to the M11x on the outside. The display hasn"t been improved. It still feels an inch too small and way too reflective. All of the keys on the right, including the arrow keys, still feel too small as well.
With the M11x, Brian told us that it"s really two computers in one because of the switchable graphics. With Optimus, that all goes away"sort of. As Brian noted, Optimus is the automatic switch between integrated and discrete graphics, and indeed it does exactly that. The problem is that in practice, Optimus isn"t as beneficial as previously described.
On my Gateway W32066LD , I can stream 720p videos from YouTube without slowdown, all through integrated graphics. On the M11xR2, any video above 360p will activate the discrete graphics, even though the i7 CPU is far more powerful than the Core 2 Duo in my Gateway. (Discrete graphics aren"t necessary.)
This lack of optimisation slams Latitude-D810 battery life when running various applications when it doesn"t altogether increase performance.
I ran two main benchmarks and tested both with integrated and discrete graphics enabled, and compared them to our scores from our benchmarks on the M11x.
Testing with GeekBench, the R2 fares much better than the M11x, thanks to the i7 CPU, garnering as much as 700 points more than the Inspiron-6000 original model. While the M11x was no slowpoke when it came to everyday computing, the R2 works and feels faster, even though the hard drive and RAM are the same.
