Alienware Arena

Hey, so I've been looking into getting a laptop for a very long time now and right now it's looking like the M15x is the right choice for me. I'm going to be using it primarily for gaming and going to LANs for the next year and then after that using it at college for 3D modeling for animation and games. At first I was seriously considering the M11x because of its long battery life and portability, as well as the fact it just received a refresh, but after looking at other 11" laptops at my work the screen size turned out to be just too small for me. As I previously mentioned I know that the M11x just received a refresh and the M17x got an upgrade after E3, my biggest question is are there any plans for Alienware to upgrade the M15x in the near future? If I'm going to invest my money in a serious gaming laptop I would rather wait out another month or so and buy one that had a more powerful graphics card in it. I know that the M15x currently can run nearly all of the latest games at high / ultra settings but for games in 6 months time I fear that with the GeForce GTX 260M just won't cut it. If Alienware doesn't plan on updating the M15x's graphics card, due to the price I plan on buying a Dell Studio XPS, which will preform much better for my modeling at college. If I could get some feedback in regards to whether Alienware plans on updating the M15x or if you guys had any suggestions as to what I should buy that would be greatly appreciated.  

iGames|Ferguson said: You can spec an M15x with an ATI 5850 which is quite a bit faster on many benchmarks than the NVIDIA GTX 260M. The next highest end technology on the market is on the M17x.

So are you saying that the M15x has the best current graphics card in it that it can handle, or that Alienware has yet to update it with something better?

The ATI 5850 or Nvidia 260 are the best you can get on the M15x because of the power requirements of the video cards. There probably wont be any updates on video cards for a while on the M15x because the ATI series is the fairly new and the newer Nvidia cards are power hogs. Personally I would get the ATI 5850 the performance and directx 11 are superior to the older GTX260.

triplesss said: The ATI 5850 or Nvidia 260 are the best you can get on the M15x because of the power requirements of the video cards. There probably wont be any updates on video cards for a while on the M15x because the ATI series is the fairly new and the newer Nvidia cards are power hogs. Personally I would get the ATI 5850 the performance and directx 11 are superior to the older GTX260.

So the GTX 260 doesn't support Directx 11 or doesn't run it as well? I've looked at a lot of benchmarks and even though they are very close in many aspects people still seemed to recommend the GTX 260. Any thoughts as to why?

Bottom line: it really depends on the apps you plan on running. Some run better on Nvidia and some on ATI. Though the 5850 is newer and beyond benching better, should have slightly better longevity because of that.

So no one knows if a new m15x is coming out? Cause I plan on picking one up too.

I have the 5850 and it flys

"So the GTX 260 doesn't support Directx 11 or doesn't run it as well?"

To answer the Direct X question the GTX 260 does not support DX11 it is a Direct X 10.1 card. It will still run on Windows 7 that has DX11 but in Direct X 10 mode. So it cant run DX11 at all as where the HD5850 will Run DX11.