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How we adore a handy little Swiss Army knife, it has a knife to cut vegetables,a corkscrew to open vine bottles, scissors to cut paper,a can opener, the list of tools goes on and all this in a gadget that can be held within a palm of your hand. What if there is laptop the size of your average textbook that can be  as handy as the Swiss Army knife by delivering your computing needs with the same finesse. Surfing the internet,doing your office work , catering to your multimedia entertainment needs and lets you play the high end games that only over-sized laptops could do in the past. Alienware had done just that by launching their M11x range of laptops.

Alienware laptops provokes thoughts of a huge laptop  with crazy performance figures,although they brought  forward some fantastic machines they have always wanted to push the envelope. Now they have come out with m11x r3 with specifications taking a huge leap forward for a 11″ laptop and thereby boosting its performance.

Video/audio

The video card in the M11x can be chosen between a Geforce GT540M with 1GB or 2 GB video memory along with Optimus. The 2GB video card has a performance unparralleled in its class. Games like Crysis 2 and Arkham city will work smoothly at medium settings, expect some lag at high settings though. The 11.6″ High Def  (720p/1366×768) with WLED back-light  can be quite small for gaming, but then there is always the HDMi port in case you would want to plug onto to a HD TV. The sheild of plastic covering the the screen can be quite glossy. Nonetheless the  display quality is quite amazing with its WLED backlight display.

The audio powered by Klipsch in M11x with 5.1 surround is one of the best available on laptops in the market.The sound from the speakers are crisp,loud and powerful enough to enhance the gaming experience.

Processor

The new second-gen  core i7-2617M with 4 cores and 4 threads make the M11x a beast for its size. Its is a vital improvement made by alienware to taunt  its competition. The previous m11x  had a core i5 processor which didnt quite meet the competition . The multitasking capability of m11x is paramount of its class. The low voltage processor fails to fully tap the power of  i7 processor nonetheless the performance has been significantly improved.

Memmory/storage

With a choice of 4GB,8GB and 16GB DDr3 at 1333MHz there shouldnt be any deficit in terms of memmory for gaming and all that heavy duty multitasking. The 4GB of RAM should be quite plentiful, as excess of it it is hardly used by the processor.

Hard-drive capacity starts at 320Gb and can be incresed all the way upto 750GB or can be replaced with a 256GB SSD for better performance which are common numbers to  see in gaming laptop HDD.

Additional Features

The standard Alienware fx lighting for its keyboard, powerbutton, front grille, the alien logo on the cover and the exhaust fan underneth is a delight to tweak and play with for hours. The alienware fx toolbar allows you to  change colours, give transition effect, make the lights probe making your laptop look like one of those pimped out import tuners. There is also a button underneath when pressed  lets you know how of much of battery is left without starting up the laptop.

A minor set-fall would be in the lack of an optical drive in the M11x. But then again the with portable hard-drives the necessity of a CD-ROM has dwindled with time.

For those of you looking for a portable gaming laptop and size is a factor look no further an alternative would be hard to find.

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