Recently Alienware has just refreshed their entire lineup of gaming notebooks as well as the X51 gaming desktop. Today we will be focusing on the 18" variant in Alienware's new lineup of gaming laptops. Unlike the other smaller screened brethren, the 18 doesn't come with the newer Intel CPU's, instead they stick with the older but still blazing fast CPU's. Alienware, with the 18, brings more connectivity ports with USB 3.0, with another USB 3.0 supporting Dell's PowerShare, 7 in 1 card reader, HDMI (ver 1.4), mini DisplayPort and more.

Beyond the new hardware improvements, Dell has essentially still kept the relatively new and beautiful design but they have overhauled the internals for more performance, screaming performance. Besides options to change the base 4710MQ to a monstrous 4940MX, there are also options to configure the laptop with Nvidia's new graphics solutions. Just like other 18" Alienware's, this new refreshed model can also be configured with dual graphics options.


Alienware didn't stop there as they have also improved the cooling solution to maintain manageable temperatures for the CPU (one fan), GeForce GTX970M 6GB GDDR5/GTX980M 8GB GDDR5 (one fan per GPU) bringing three cooling solutions for this behemoth. Besides the new cooling mechanism, Alienware is touting this model to be their most upgradable laptop ever sporting Intel's 4710(M)Q, not the usual 4710(H)Q which means its using the swappable LGA based CPU's and not the soldered onto the motherboard BGA based CPU's.

At the moment, it is not yet known if the GPU's are based on MXM or soldered onto the motherboard. This laptop also has 4x DDR3L SO-DIMM slots for a maximum configurable memory of 32GB. Alienware also included up to four bays for users to populate with SATA HDD's or SATA SSD's, with the drives maximum height of 7mm, with the addition of a M.2 slot for SSD's seen on the maxed out option of the 18.


Dell is shipping the Alienware models starting today for a starting price of USD2,499 (likely to be ~RM 10,456) and can be configured with different hardware options through Dell's online store. No word as to when these refreshed models will make it to Malaysia. For more information on the laptop, click here