The M55 - Internal

 

The graphics card in the Alienware M5500 is the Mobility X1600. The X1600 is ATI’s 2nd from top of the range mobile product and is designed to offer good portability combined with excellent performance. Built on the 90nm process the core clock of the X1600 is 419Mhz with 256mb of DDR3 clocked at 468Mhz. Like the desktop part the mobile X1600 comes with 16 pixel shaders and 5 vertex shaders. As you would expect with a mobile part ATI has employed various power saving technologies and in addition to this the card is able to work on varying voltages depending on the circumstances. This allows the card to maximise battery life.

When configuring the M5500 we decided upon the Pentium M 770 CPU. This processor comes clocked at 2.13Ghz and features 2mb of Level 2 cache. The CPU runs on 1.3v and is a single core model.

All systems nowadays should come with a minimum of 1Gb, that volume of memory is enough to handle most applications currently available as well as future proofing your system for use with Windows Vista. Our M5500 was kitted out with 2x512mb of DDR2 4300 with timings of 4-4-4-12.

The memory modules themselves are unbranded, however a quick look in CPUz tells us they are manufactured by PDP Systems.

Alienware have chosen Intel's ProWireless card for the M5500, we’ve seen versions of this card in various systems and each one has worked flawlessly, so its good to see it here.

The final component of note is the hard drive, usually we find Hitachi 7200rpm drives within Alienware machines (in fact most performance laptops) however this time around its a Seagate 7200rpm model.