Alienware Aurora m9700

M9700 SLI review

My FEDEX tacking number had the following status this morning



So I kind of took the day off from work

When FedEx arrived, the delivery man was carrying a very ugly box







I thinking “where is my cool Alienware box!”

But you have to unwrap the beast to get to the beauty
After opening the ugly box reveled the true packing






So now I’m psyched!

Out of the box I was imeidatly impressed. With 2x Graphic cards (and all the cooling that goes with them) and 2x HDD’s, on a 17” screen, this notebook was rather light!

Compared to the Aurora m7700 this thing is a feather







Ladies and Gentlemen, we have SLI in a notebook!




First Impressions

One of more important things for me and this laptop is graphic performance while on battery power (not battery life).

I was happy to find that while running on battery power both 7900’s are active in SLI. This is unlike the mALX that automatically disables one of its 7900’s when on battery (and cannot be disabled)

I was also happy to find that by setting windows power scheme to “Always On” AMD cool n’ quite does not turn on while running on battery, so no downclocking is preformed.


Processor running on battery power
4


So you can running this system, full blown on battery power and experience no performance drop.
Oh course, leaving both the graphic cards and processor running full blast will drastically shorten your battery life, but I only need around :30 of total batt life.


Benchmarking

One of the first things I did was install and run 3dmark05 at stock settings.

3dmark05 Score 9957!

edit: i beat that, not by much, but this is the best I can get under stock settings
3dmark05: 9988

edit: ok, beat it again, finally breached 10k!
3dmark05: 10111

Now that is an awesome score! This blows away any other 3dmark05 score running 7900GS published on 3dmarks web site.

I couldn’t wait to tweak the clock frequencies a bit and rise well able 10k!

and then I stopped, because of

THE UGLY

I was unable to overclock the graphic cards. After loading coolbits and selecting detect optimal settings, the screen flickers once and resets clock settings back to default of 375/500…

When I tried to manually change the core frequency and test changes by even 1, you get the following



I then tried to load updated drivers from nvidia.com and laptopvideo2go.com. Both drivers will not install.
So AW has these cards locked down, and no overclocking for j0o

But im sure someone will have a compatible driver out in no time.



BUT WHO”S COMPLAINING! AT STOCK SETTINGS THIS THING ROCKS!!



I am quite impressed and happy with this machine!

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By popular demand










Even this 6.5MB screenshot does no justice to how it really looks
http://webpages.charter.net/5002/WoW...706_230034.bmp