Alienware Aurora mALX 19″ Gaming Notebook Review

Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, Prey

Lost Coast is the free technology demo that Valve created to show off their HDR rendering technique.  Because this method of doing HDR (high dynamnic range) lighting uses integer math instead of floating point, both ATI and NVIDIA cards can do both HDR and AA at the same time. 

• Asus VX1 – Intel T7400 Core 2 Duo, 2x1GB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7400 512MB
• Asus Z96J – Intel T7600 Core 2 Duo, 2x512MB RAM, ATI Mobility X1600 256MB
• Dell M1710 – Intel T2600 Core Duo, 2x1024MB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7900 GS 256MB
• Alienware mALX – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512MB
• Alienware m9700 – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 512MB

In Half-Life 2 Lost Coast, the difference between SLI and non-SLI modes is not dramatic with just a 10 FPS difference. The minimum recorded frame rate benefits the most with SLI with a passable 15 FPS compared to the paltry 1 FPS without SLI.

Now let’s take a look at one of the most graphically intensive games to be released this past year: Prey.

Settings: High level shaders, 2x Anisotropic filtering, 2xAntialising.

• Asus VX1 – Intel T7400 Core 2 Duo, 2x1GB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7400 512MB
• Asus Z96J – Intel T7600 Core 2 Duo, 2x512MB RAM, ATI Mobility X1600 256MB
• Dell M1710 – Intel T2600 Core Duo, 2x1024MB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7900 GS 256MB
• Alienware mALX – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512MB
• Alienware m9700 – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 512MB

• Asus VX1 – Intel T7400 Core 2 Duo, 2x1GB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7400 512MB
• Asus Z96J – Intel T7600 Core 2 Duo, 2x512MB RAM, ATI Mobility X1600 256MB
• Dell M1710 – Intel T2600 Core Duo, 2x1024MB RAM, NVIDIA Go 7900 GS 256MB
• Alienware mALX – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GTX 512MB
• Alienware m9700 – AMD Turion 64 ML-44, 2×1024 RAM, 2x NVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 GS 512MB

The results in Prey are absolutely amazing. At 1680×1050 resolution with high detail shaders and Aniso and AA, you still get an impressive 60 FPS! Really amazing gaming results as you’d expect from coupling the world’s fastest mobile GPUs.