Alienware - Internal

Based on some less than great experiences in the past with Clevo laptops (mainly some questionable build quality) we felt it necessary to perform an Alien Autopsy (Sorry!!!!).

We removed the cover for the graphics card section and after checking the seating for the 7800GTX we are happy to give it a clean bill of health. You can also see in the pictures below the GPU cooling vent. In regards to specification the Go 7800 GTX is very similar to its desktop brother with a clock speed of 400mhz (desktop is 430mhz) and a memory speed of 550mhz (desktop is 600mhz). So while this is clocked slightly slower we have the full compliment of pipelines and vertex shaders (that being 24 and 8 respectively), on paper this should be one very fast laptop for gaming.

As well as the raw speed provided by the Go 7800 GTX Nvidia have also added numerous power saving features to the mobile GPU. First up we have the dynamic clocking which allows the GPU speeds to drop as low as 16mhz and therefore reduce the power requirement. Clock gating is also used when required (allows unused parts of the gpu to be turned off if not being used). With these two features enabled, and some excellent engineering by Nvidia with the 0.09micron manufacturing process the Go 7800 uses exactly the same power consumption as the previous high end Nvidia model, the Go 6800 Ultra. There is no need to take a step down in specification if battery life is a major concern for you.

Finally, as this is a 7800 variant we get the full featureset which includes Shader Model 3.0, HDR lighting and Purevideo support.

The hard drive compartment was next and all was well here too, the Hitachi 100gb drive was secured well and placed in the lower of the two bays so a second could be added if required. We were surprised to find that this was actually a 7200rpm drive rather than a slower 5400rpm model. A quick look at the product specifications confirm that this drive has the same power requirement as a standard 5400rpm drive so a good move by Alienware. Furthermore Hitachi have integrated some excellent shock tolerance technology which covers up to 300G when in use and 1000G when not in use.

The memory area was equally uneventful with 2 x1gb PDP modules securely in place. This model is limited to 2 sticks however if you go for 2 of the 1gb modules you shouldn’t need any more memory for the life of the laptop. The memory used here is 200mhz (DDR400) with timings of 3-3-3-8.

It’s all going well so far with regards to build quality ... so on to the CPU. The first thing you notice about the CPU compartment is the massive size of the cooler. This isn’t a problem, and the size helps give more effective cooling however it is a hefty piece of copper kit.

Underneath the cooler we have a lovely AMD FX-60 CPU, the fastest AMD chip money can buy (some would say the fastest desktop CPU money can buy). The CPU is clocked at 2600mhz and of course has two cores. This is a desktop chip rather than mobile optimised and so has all the expected features including a 13x multiplier with 200 HTT speed, 1mb of L2 cache per core and the Toledo/90nm process being used.

Voltage on the chip usually sits around 1.30v which is a little below that used by desktop boards we have used. This didn’t concern us though and the chip performed flawlessly at all times. Therefore this reduced voltage would appear to be a minor power saving tweak employed by Alienware. Additionally when not under load the system does clock down the CPU via the multiplier to 1100mhz, again saving power and reducing heat.

Unfortunately, this is where we found our only minor build quality issue. To the left of the CPU we have some components which are cooled by thermal pads. These thermal pads had the blue plastic covers still attached. It’s hard to say what effect, if any, this would have had on the reliability of the system however we removed them just to be sure.