Alienware Aurora mALX 19″ Gaming Notebook Review

The Screen and Audio

The 19″ Display

The biggest reason to buy the Aurora mALX is for its big screen. At 19″ and a native resolution of 1680×1050, it’s among the largest you can buy on the market today. Of course size doesn’t matter if the display itself looks terrible. Well, I’m happy to say that Alienware has done a fantastic job at selecting the panel for this product. While playing games and watching movies, I’m astounded at the resolution and the vividness of the display. It is sharp, bright, and has terrific view angles to up to nearly 90-degrees on either side.

Compared to my Dell FP1707 display which uses a good Samsung panel, the mALX looks as good if not better! At all view angles the 19″ display was vivid and crisp, the saturation was excellent, and the blacks were nice and dark. I can confidently say that the panel on the Aurora mALX is the best I’ve seen.

Surprisingly the panel does not suck up any more power than the 15.4″ display on my Asus notebook. Here is a chart showing the power consumption of the mALX while idle and varying the screen brightness.

As you can see, the 19″ consumes about the same amount of power as the Asus Z96J’s 15.4″ screen.

Block Rockin’ Beats

Often I find that notebook speakers are poor and would prefer using headphones over the integrated speakers. However, sometimes a notebook comes along with speakers that really impress me like those found on the Asus A7J (I have yet to find notebook speakers comparable to those!).

After auditioning the speakers using a variety of music genres (jazz, classical, rap, vocal pop, etc.) and a few movies, I have to say that I’m very impressed with these speakers. Even though there are just 2 speakers located on the top surface of the keyboard, they produce a rich enveloping sound, no doubt thanks to the SRS-WOW technology it employs.

Though the speakers have a nice sound envelop, it does lack a bit in the bass department. The treble is very excellent without being overexposed and metallic which is great for dialog in movies and vocals, but not so great for special effects sequences and heavy beats.

But don’t dismiss the mALX yet! The system does come with a pair of full-seal headphones. These cans really produce a strong bass and a pretty decent sound range. Perhaps the best part of these headphones is that they eliminate outside noise really well. While listening to some music, I barely hear my fingers typing on my keyboard in front of me. There is a plug adapter and headband foam replacements included.