Last month we looked at a couple of sub £500 gaming laptops and concluded that it’s possible to buy a laptop capable of providing a reasonable gaming expensive without breaking the bank.
But, if money is no object and you absolutely have to have the very best, fastest gaming laptop available in 2012 then you’ve come to the right place.
This month we’ve thrown the budget out of the window and set about identifying the most powerful gaming laptop currently available.
Most Powerful Gaming Laptop 2012 »
Alienware M18X
What we like – Fully customisable up to an insane specification.
Best deal – Check out the Alienware Configurator yourself and have a play with the various options.
Details – The Alienware M18X is one of the few laptops on the market that can be configured to include an insanely quick, top of the range I7-2960XM. Add to this dual graphics cards, SSD drives and a huge amount of ram and you’ve got a gaming machine that won’t break a sweat running the very latest games.
All this power doesn’t come cheap though, we worked through the Alienware configuration tool maxing out each individual component and ended up with a price totaling more than £4000!
At this price it’s not a laptop for casual gamers, but if you’re a pro gamer and have managed to monetise your hobby maybe, just maybe you’ll be able to justify buying yourself one of these monsters.
Key features include:-
Processors – The M18X can be configured right up to the very top of the range i7-2960Xm level. This is a very fast processor even by desktop standards and has a maximum turbo frequency of 3.7GHZ. You can shave almost £400 off the build by opting for the i7-2860QM which is still a quick processor and can comfortably handle modern games.
Graphics Cards - The M18X can be configured with a variety of graphics cards maxing out with with dual AMD HD6990M cards. For those on a slightly lower budget you can switch to dual GTX 560M cards and shave £225 off the total price.
Hard Drives and Ram - If you opt for either Windows 7 professional or Ultimate the M18X can address a huge 32GB of DDR3 memory. Sticking with 8GB to start with will save you over £400 and can always be upgraded at a later date. The available hard drive options are also impressive and max out at two 250GB SSD drives running in a RAID 0 configuration. We’d go for the single 256GB SSD + 750GB HDD option which is considerably cheaper.
Screen Resolution - The standard monitor fitted to all M18X’s is a full 1080P white LED panel.
To conclude, the M18X configured with everything maxed out is a seriously quick piece of kit that comes with an equally serious price tag. But if you don’t mind opting for slightly lower spec components in a couple of key areas you can easily shave £1500+ of the price tag without massively reducing the overall performance of the system.
Also Consider – Take a look at the less expensive M14X which is a capable gaming laptop in a more convenient chassis. Alternatively, if you’re really on a budget take a look at the Acer 5750G
