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Alienware M17x R4 Review (i7 3610QM/ AMD HD7970M)

A very important part of overall system responsiveness is down to hard drive performance. We use two of our favourite benchmark utilities Crystalmark X64 Edition and HD Tach to rate performance from the onboard SATA controller.

The Solid State Drive isn't the fastest you can buy today, however in real world terms it seems very responsive with fast boot times and quick application loading. The mechanical hard drive delivers good sequential read and write scores, over 110MB/s. A good result for a 2.5 inch mechanical drive – which will be used primarily for storage.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

Similar results, around 280 MB/s read and 175 MB/s write from the SSD drive and 110MB/s read and write from the mechanical unit.

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15 comments

  1. Well I never thought I would say it, but £1,700 is actually pretty good value for that machine. must be their best priced laptop in a long time. I might end up going for a 128GB SSD though as 64GB is borderline.

  2. Thats a nice looking system. good pictures of the keyboard, is that the Star Trek font they use? lol.

  3. What a spec, my dream laptop. The ivy bridge mobile processors look good, but not really such a huge advancement for Intel.

    Shame they didnt use an AMD processor, but I suppose it wouldnt be popular.

  4. Dell confuse me, some of their pricing upgrades are decent, like the HD7970 but the memory options can be excessive. the fact that this is easy to open makes me want to spec the memory as LOW as possible, then get some from amazon, like the corsair veageance (16gb for £100 on amazon for 1600mhz! 2x8gb!).

    Can this computer take 8GB memory sticks?

  5. Hi Warren, yes it can take 8gb memory sticks. go for it !

  6. I dont mind dell machines. (its basically dell) – but I think id opt for a precision with Quadro for work. The only concern i have is dell batteries, ive had three other machines now and all the batteries fail after a year.

  7. I ordered one, now to deal with my wife 🙁

  8. You are mad buying one of these ! you could build one for much less ! alienware are a ripoff.

  9. Dont talk nonsense, this isn’t a desktop system. you can’t make a laptop. half the parts aren’t widely available for a start.

  10. Yes there are cheaper options like the vortex 3 from pcspecialist but they look cheap compared to Alienware. This is also cheaper than an apple too and has better spec. I’m sold on it