Cast your mind back to a week ago Thursday, if it’s not lost in a drunken haze of the weekend that followed. For those of a meteorological persuasion, you may recall it was a very wet day and none more so than the constant drizzle which fell over London town.

It was with some trepidation then, that I set off on the hour long train ride to the capital of England to work on a shoot day for the brand new Alienware m11x.

Having spent 2 days putting together a shoot guide and a production storyboard, I had my doubts if some of the things, actually, all of the things we had planned could be executed. Along for the day were my colleagues from Heaven Media James Reed and Corin Cole and joining us, as the stars of the show were David “Zaccubus” Treacy and Shaun “Apollo” Clark, two of the UK’s leading all round gamers.

Zaccubus and Apollo, the volunteers for our experiment

The premise Alienware had give us was simple: See if the Alienware m11x really could stand up to an all day test, in testing conditions whilst being abused (in a gaming sense) by two top professional players.

To start with, this seemed like an easy win for the boys in black from Team Dignitas, after all, they are well used to flying around the world and staying up all day and all night practicing their game of choice, but the laptop, well, it was just a laptop. In fact, it wasn’t just a laptop, it was an 11 inch wide laptop, laughable if you would ever consider running a game on it, let alone giving it to two top professionals to test for a day without a power lead. This was going to be easy.

We also had to prove one other thing, that you could “game anywhere” as Alienware had claimed or more likely prove that you couldn’t. Call me a sceptic if you like, but I wasn’t convinced that spending a day around London with an 11 inch laptop wouldn’t require a pit stop to be made to top up the power at least once or twice, let alone its ability to actually run anything. After all, its not like there are gaming laptops at this size screen on the market which are any good right now and none of us had ever seen a laptop this small used for gaming other than solitaire.

As the rain tumbled out of the sodden, grey skies, we began our mini-adventure in Victoria station, under cover and in a café. This was familiar surroundings for these two, having spent hours and days in airport lounges, cafes and waiting areas and what better way to kick off our test than by having a little Quake Live gaming in the morning, using someone else’s wireless.

It might not look like much when it's closed up...

That didn’t prove much of a test, before we were moved on by security (you aren’t allowed to film in the station and this would become a theme of the day). By now the rain had eased a little so we popped on to a London tour bus and despite the soaking top deck, our two professionals sat down on soaked seats and began to play again, this time a little Call of Duty.

At this point I realised, having been concentrating on recording what was going on that the laptop was actually running two modern, current, graphically intensive (in COD’s case) games without any problem at all. It may seem like an odd thing to say, but I just hadn’t really expected this tiny machine to be able to cope at anything passing the lowest settings on everything and chugging along at 15fps, but this thing was running COD in glorious detail and at a respectable 33fps. Ok, its not going to set the world alight in terms of 3D mark, but its right up there with some of the best gaming machines on the market and its only 11 inches wide. Even Zaccubus was puzzled “look” he said calling me over, “its just running it, no problem, no drops in fps, just really smooth, I don’t understand…”

To help understand, we need to look under the hood, so to speak. It was plain by this point in our shoot day that this was no ordinary laptop, or indeed “notebook” or “netbook” as they have come to be known these days. Yes it only has 11inches for the screen, but for a portable machine, it doesn’t feel like that, it feels somehow bigger and the clarity is astonishing with the players often sitting in daylight areas around London that would usually require some form of arm and hand manoeuvring to shade the screen, when it just didn’t need it.

Inside, it has an Nvidia Geforce GT335M with 1GB of GDDR3 on board, which partly explains why it runs our games nicely. This is coupled with Intel’s Core Duo CPU and a complimentary 2GB of dual channel DDR running at 800mhz. The machine can also cope with having 8GB of ram in it, should you wish. The hard drive isn’t big, but its adequate for on the move stuff and again you can even choose to have the 500GB version if you so desire. To have had all of this kit in a laptop, even 5 years ago would have seemed insane, so to find it inside something which actually measures 11.25 inches in width is nothing short of astonishing.

... But the machine packs a wallop when in action

Our day continued as we made our way around central London with the guys really getting in to the spirit of the day, with us leaving them alone to get on with it and just sitting back and filming the things they got up to. On the train, on the tube, even in the back of the taxi they carried on gaming, developing a real attachment to the m11x, to the point where Dave always had a sad face whenever I took it back off him to store out of the rain.

We also found some less ordinary places, like telephone boxes and a skate park where bemused onlookers wondered what all the fuss was about and even left them to it on Westminster bridge, before we were once again moved on by yet another security person. In all of this time, the rain or drizzle continued, the security people continued to harass us and we were told “no” on more than one occasion when we asked if we could film somewhere, including filming in the London Eye (which we had cleared before hand, yet still got asked to leave!) and yet, the players carried on playing, carried on doing silly things we asked them to do, with good grace, humour and professionalism.

By the time we arrived at Piccadily, to get some reactions from the guys in HMV’s Gamerbase store, our legs were aching, our bodies racked with cold and our feet about to drop off but only one question had really been answered; yes it seemed, you really can game anywhere, but how many times had we had to stop to top up the power of the laptop? Actually we hadn’t. It had lasted all day long under some of the most intense scrutiny and abuse from our gamers. Yes the power light was blinking by the time we filmed it in Gamerbase, but you have to remember we set off at 11am and by the time we recorded the Gamerbase scenes, it was close to 6pm. Thanks to some clever engineering from Alienware which allows the machine to engage an ordinary 2D card for windows use and only utilising the Nvidia 3D card when it needs it, the power consumption is minimized, even though, we really had abused this poor thing all day long.

In the end, the Alienware m11x won the battle and outlasted the gamers and I have to say (and this rarely happens when reviewing kit for Heaven Media), I went home wishing I already had one.

Now the hard work begins, I need to somehow persuade my bosses at Heaven Media to get me one, for “work” purposes you understand ;)

Team Dignitas
M11x site