Roundups of any sort are always tricky. Matching apples to apples is rarely possible, and the brand loyalists are always quick to defend their build of choice. So we made this roundup easy. We reached out to some of the most prolific names in gaming notebooks and asked them to send us their best and brightest example of a gaming machine. Price be damned, we wanted to see some stunning performance numbers.
Four vendors—Alienware, ASUS, Eurocom, and Killer Notebooks—responded to our call. The other big names you might expect to see in a cage match like this all came up with reasons to pass. Dell preferred to have Alienware represent its best efforts (R.I.P. XPS?). VoodooPC’s Envy is armed with Intel’s GMA X3100 integrated graphics core and is not suitable for gaming in any capacity. Falcon Northwest wanted to wait for new graphics adapters, and though they became available toward the tail end of our testing, the show had to go on. And OCZ’s Hypersonic brand didn’t have anything available at retail. Nevertheless, we still managed to round up a motley crew of performance-oriented systems at a number of different price points.
The first, Alienware’s m17x, got out of the gate before anyone else with Nvidia’s new GeForce 9800M GT graphics adapters—in SLI, thanks to a bridge chip mated to Intel’s PM965 chipset. It also boasts 1 TB of storage, a Core 2 Extreme CPU, and perhaps the classiest chassis design we’ve ever seen. Last month we took a look at Alienware’s smaller m15x. While that notebook was a solid piece of kit, the Area-51 m17x is decidedly more tenacious in its approach to mobile performance.
Next up, ASUS’ G71 represents the first Centrino 2 laptop design to land in our labs. Its hardware manifesto is significantly more mainstream than the configuration that Alienware sent in. However, there’s something to be said for a fully modern notebook with the latest power-saving technology. We expect the G71 to serve up a better balance between price, performance, and battery life.
Eurocom’s exotically-named Montebello is the third offering in our line of potent portables. Smaller than the other three contenders with a 15.4” LCD, it effectively hides Intel’s fastest dual-core mobile processor, the latest Centrino 2 platform, and an Nvidia GeForce 9800M GT graphics card inside a fairly pedestrian shell. This one’s probably the biggest surprise in the bunch.
Finally, Killer Notebooks submitted its own weapon of mass destruction, the Odachi. Laden with a 3 GHz desktop processor, two of the fastest mobile GeForces in SLI, three 7,200 RPM hard drives striped together, and 4 GB of DDR2 memory, it’s the gun in this knife fight. But you do give up some aesthetic appeal in favor of all that muscle.
Read on as we introduce the hardware in each notebook, get hands-on with look and feel, and benchmark each machine in our standard suite of tests.
- Introduction
- Alienware’s m17x: Hardware
- Alienware’s m17x: Look and Feel
- ASUS G71 Republic Of Gamers: Hardware
- ASUS G71 Republic Of Gamers: Look And Feel
- Killer Notebooks’ 17.1” Odachi: Hardware
- Killer Notebooks’ Odachi: Look and Feel
- Eurocom M860TU 15.4” Montebello: Hardware
- Eurocom M860TU Montebello: Look and Feel
- Test Setup
- Benchmark Results: Gaming
- Benchmark Results: Media
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Synthetics
- Benchmark Results: Battery Life
- Pricing And Conclusion



But it sure as hell feels good having one ^___^
"shipped the system with a 64-bit copy of Vista Ultimate (Alienware included x32 Home Premium)."
Besides the gaming scores looked weak imo..
I personally thought it was a better idea to go get a Gateway P7811FX with a single Geforce 9800GTS. It plays Call of Duty at 1920x1200 max settings around 50FPS. AND it cost me ONLY $1249 (Plus Best Buy let me pick any game I wanted for FREE!)
even with a beast graphics card, you'd be pretty hard to get more than 2 hours of shitty performance.
get a gaming desktop and perhaps an EEE or iPhone for travelling. my iPhone has 20+ games and enough media (don't forget TV connector for watching films in hotels) to keep me busy for more than one week away from my gaming rig.
I think maybe you had a bad experience with a laptop that claimed to be a "gaming" laptop. I bought one before like that and it have an 8600M Geforce and it Sucked bad... If you get a good laptop with say a 9800gts or so you would be suprised...
99.90%
Truck driver's, students, profesionals on the move or frequent travelers.
then there are people who like low electrical bills.
and most of these people can use thier laptop plugged in.
From an architecture standpoint, the two mobile components are similar. Both center on the G92M GPU manufactured at 65 nm. Both include 96 unified shader processors fed by 512 MB of GDDR3 memory on a 256-bit bus. Where the components differ is clock speed. The 8800M GTXs boast 560 MHz clocks, 1,400 MHz shaders, and 900 MHz memory. All three figures are faster than what you’ll get from the 9800M GTs."
These are overclocked, it has nothing to do with poor naming by Nvidia.
Either way, it's always fun to watch Alienware's overpriced creations get thrashed. Go Killer Notebooks
Try $1800ish for the 15inch Montebello equivalents (same as Eurocom's price or thereabouts), with a much better cooling design than cheaper systems (Gateway 7811x's - which should have also been reviewed in here, as well as a few others). Ah well.
Decide what's worth the price. $850 extra for an extreme CPU? No.
Well Done Killer Notebooks!
The Silk Pigs
Side note: I really wanted something smaller so I'm hoping that the 15.4 inch gaming notebooks become more affordable.
About the only positive I could say about it was that the CPU, RAM, HDD and optical drive were all user-replaceable. The WUXGA screen had backlight bleeding problems and the GPU gave decent framerates in Crysis at 1920x1200, until the damn thing froze...
I find it difficult to see that there is no viable option between a $1300 Gateway and a $4000 boutique build. $2000 could get you all the parts for a top-performing 17" gaming laptop. Why those wingnuts haven't figured it out yet is beyond me.