Doc's 7700 Review

[DocEGM]

At long last, I received my Area-51m 7700 last Saturday, the 26th. I've played with it, and I've tinkered with it, and I shall today reveal my preliminary thoughts. Chances are I'll add pictures later.

1. Out-of-box

The packaging was sound and very tight. I opened the smaller box first and found a variety of accessories, including my AC-Anywhere, USB floppy, external hard drive, and black AW visor. Most of these accessories came in their own boxes, and they had been packed quite well. The larger box told much the same story; at long last, I pulled out the machine itself.

2. Dimensions

From what I've read, I'd expected a much heavier machine. Much to my surprise and delight, the 7700 didn't seem all that heavy. The chassis felt rock solid, as if it could survive quite a beating, and the bottom was veritably covered with fans. No doubt, though, it is a large laptop, though not imposingly so, and it fits quite well on my Targus lapdesk.

3. Interior

I looked over the touchpad, keyboard, and screen for any preliminary problems. The touchpad had a slightly gritty feel to it, but that worked itself out after only an hour or so of use. The built-in scroll wheel on the side hasn't really worked for me, but it doesn't matter.
My Delete key was set at a slight angle, bowing down toward the Backspace key, but I popped it into place easily, and the keyboard was fine. It has a very nice sound to it while typing, it feels very sturdy, and all the special keys are readily accessible. The keyboard is full-size, number pad and all, and function keys allow for the adjustment of volume on the fly; I have noticed, however, that some programs and games don't allow the use of the volume keys.
I didn't notice for several hours that I had one blue pixel, toward the upper left portion of my screen. It's the only one, though, and it doesn't bother me at all. At 1680x1050, I have to really be looking for it, on a pure black or white image, to see it. The screen is remarkably clear and has a very precise feel to it. It displays movies wonderfully, and I've noticed that it can stretch 4:3 aspect ratios to 16:10 with hardly any loss of quality.

4. Software

There was no extraneous software (see Dell) on the machine when I fired it up. There were a few registry keys left over: for instance, there was one for Doom 3, which was benchmarked at the factory, but I took care of those with RegScrub XP. I got all my software downloaded and installed quite quickly, and it all runs very nicely. My hard drive was just over 40% fragmented, though, so I did defragment; with this sort of from-the-factory setup, though, a reformat is definitely not necessary.

5. Hardware

First off, the processor: a 3.6 Ghz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading. It's performed excellently in benchmarks and Stress Prime 2004. No complaints here at all.
I opted for the 100 GB Seagate hard drive. It is 5400 RPM, as was my last hard drive, but it seems much more responsive and loads things quickly.
My 2 gigs of RAM has yet to begin reaching its limits. It seems very high quality, as well.
Now, the video card: a GeForce 6800 GO with DDR3 memory. This is where my first and only hardware problems began. The first game I tried, Counterstrike: Source, overheated in just a few minutes, and the same thing happened with Far Cry and in 3dMark03. I opened up the GPU compartment and cleaned it out with compressed air, though, and it's working well, though I do plan to invest in a cooling pad very soon.

6. Graphics

All I can say is, WOW. I've run multiple games on full settings with absolutely no hitch in framerate. Half-Life 2 looks great, Far Cry unbelievable. I have yet to run Doom 3, but I'm looking forward to it. This machine (when its graphics card doesn't overheat) is the best gaming laptop I've ever had the pleasure of handling.

7. Sound

With four speakers and a subwoofer, the integrated sound system is amazing. I'd heard complaints about its being too quiet, but that was fixed by kicking up the volume and turning the equalizer to its "Powerful" mode. Now, the sound system is booming even at half volume, and the sub does its job extremely well. At first, I experienced some crackling in the speakers, but that seems to have vanished.

8. Productivity

The system performs quite well with productivity tasks. Its multitasking capability is fantastic. For instance, while rendering a complex 3ds Max scene and listening to internet radio with six Microsoft Word documents, two instances of Powerpoint, and four browser windows with multiple tabs open (three of which were displaying video) I experienced no slowdown, and the system was very responsive in switching between tasks.

9. Mobility

As I said, the 7700 really isn't that heavy. The weight is very balanced, so it's not difficult to carry at all. The messenger-like bag that came with it seems a little iffy, and I don't really want to trust my machine to it, but the XL backpack is amazing.
The backpack fits the 7700 like a glove, with room for an external wireless card, and also held my mousepad and mouse, a 128-CD case, the power supply, my headset, my lapdesk with its mousepad attachment, and two game boxes. The weight wasn't very bad, all things considered, and I got used to carrying it around very quickly.
The one downside to the 7700's mobile potential is its battery life. On battery, one can expect approximately an hour of battery life before reaching low battery--always assuming you aren't running anything really intensive. My 3.6 Ghz processor clocks itself down to 2.9 when running on battery, also. So, if you're in a situation where you need lots of battery life, you'll want an extra battery or two. Luckily, changing the battery isn't a daunting task: I've become fairly adept at changing it in 30 seconds to a minute, which is plenty of time, say, between classes. And even on battery life, it's still a screaming machine, though games and intensive 3d software don't perform quite as well.

10. Miscellania

I haven't had many problems, all things considered. The one blue pixel isn't even noticeable unless I'm really looking for it, and I've gotten used to the touchpad, to the point that I prefer it over my last. The video card overheating issue was easily fixed with a can of compressed air and a screwdriver.
Also, at one point, I screwed up a registry clean and ended up with my sound card not working; this was, however, entirely my fault, and a registry rollback fixed it right up.
Now, I'm right-handed, as are the majority of human beings, and I like to use a USB mouse for gaming. The USB ports are on the left side of the laptop, though, and that presents a slight problem if your mouse has a short cord. Mine stretches easily around to the right, so it's not really a problem, and I've also noticed that the right palm rest makes an excellent mouse pad in a pinch.

11. Summary

I easily give this machine a 9.9 out of 10. The tenth of a point I've subtracted can be attributed to the impossibility of perfection, my one blue pixel, and my overheating 6800. Easily, the 7700 owns my old laptop, as well as quite a few top desktop machines. I give the 7700 my full recommendation, though I highly suggest the XL backpack and an extra battery or two if you want its full mobility potential.
My overall experience with Alienware has been of very high caliber; all the problems I've had have been immediately addressed, and the wait from order to reception was more than worth it. You will not regret purchasing this machine, I can promise you that.

--Doc

[pgarvis]

Good review, I should be getting my 7700 tomorrow

[Dave]

benches my friend benches!!! congrats nice review. awesome system.

[DocEGM]

Thanks.

I haven't run many benchmarks yet, and the ones that I did run were when I was seeing whether my video card would explode or not. On those, though, (at least, the ones I completed) I scored 3866, 3912, 3899, and 3760 without even going to a full benchmark config. This seems promising, and I'm sure I can hit 4000 easily just by closing all the extraneous processes that were running when I did those benches. I'll post some more when I really get the benches going.

[TL chris]

Nice review! Sound like it's everything you hoped for. Minus the overheating and blue pixel of course.

[Tman52]

pictures

[Game33]

Ya good review I feel the same way about mine but I dont have any dead pixels.

[Craig]

Nice review Doc!

Thanks for taking the time man!

[alienrex]

great review. have fun with the lappy

[GhostNN]

Just out of curiosity, what is the GPU and MEM speeds on your shipped 6800 go DDR3 in the laptop. I keep readeing from different places of different clock speeds for both gpu and memory and wanted to know what you got on a shipped product...

[asphyxiate]

okay, what did you have to do to overheat the GPU on this thing? i wouldnt wanna do that when i get mine. and i might try and use it actually on my lap

[DocEGM]

Actually, I'm beginning to think that my video card is just defective...it's still overheating a bit. Alienware had me completely reformat my hard drive (which would have annoyed me, had I installed any more than I had) and I'm still having a few problems, so I'm going to try to get them to send me a new video card.

My clock speeds were 275/325 (or somewhere close), I think. I don't remember, and I haven't installed Coolbits since said reformat.

[asphyxiate]

i see... has anyone else had problems with their graphics card overheating in the 7700?

[krullulon]

Originally Posted by asphyxiate

i see... has anyone else had problems with their graphics card overheating in the 7700?

i run my 7700 3.4's 6800 at 300/500 and have played WoW for 10 hours straight with no heat problems. mobometer never shows temps over 65c.

i also have the 7700 sitting on an angled 1.5" laptop riser pad to get extra airflow under the machine, but i'm not doing anything else to cool it down.

[Atalan]

We also had a problem with the Video card, which kept on crashing after a few hours of gameplay even at the stock 250MHz setting (DDR-2 model). We called AW and got the card exchanged quickly, the replacement card works well so far even with the 330MHz clock speed the DDR-3 cards have at stock setting.

So I would recommend changing the card if it proves to be unreliable, it worked for us.

Atalan