Tech Forum: The Alienware M11x Looks Like Sexy Ass Awesomesauce, But Can It Handle the Metaverse?

I need a new laptop that can handle my day job of working in the metaverse, and the new Alienware M11x is an extremely portable, 11" laptop with black matte Batmobile studliness that makes my geek propeller spin like mad. Reviews seem quite good. Graphically, it rocks a one gig NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M which can be upgraded to 8 gigs (I'll probably boost it to 4 gigs.) I checked with someone at Blue Mars, who said this system should be able to handle that world just fine. How about Second Life, running Viewer 2? Help me, tech savvy readers -- my heart says yes, but should my brain go along?

Comments

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Buy it, test it and report back to us.

And if it's any good, get us a group rate :P

Seriously, the performance of any system with Second Life seems to depend on what phase the moon is in and if you've made the proper offerings to the tech gods. I just got a new desktop that I hoped would rock my virtual world, and while it's less a slideshow, my world is still shades of gray. And green cloud people.

Trying to figure out how to budget for a T1 line. Maybe that'll help. I think I need to get insanely wealthy first.

[Breen Whitman]

The NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M is a fair graphics chip in terms of laptops. Comparing to a Desktop, its benchmarks equates to a low end chip, with benchmarks at about the GeForce 7800 - 8800 range(5-6 years old).

This means in SL with Viewer 1 will perform very well. Viewer 2 will be pretty good, but "Ultra" will be out (FPS below 10), and high will be do-able with water reflections off.

Shadows will be very choppy. For the new features like shadows and global lighting then a desktop machine will be required, with at minumum a Geforce 240 of ATI HD 4780 as minimum. A 480 or HD5870 will be better.

SL is not a first person shooter. Unless you are at events with lots of movement, you can get away with 10fps.

Blue Mars is slightly different. It is a preloaded world and the CryEngine(the renderer) is very efficient. SL is Dynamic, and carries a lot of overhead due to the renderer.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

It should be OK but not great - you would be better in Viewer 2 with a machine with a 360M chip.

[Strachan Ofarrel]

You may find this comparison of laptop graphics cards helpful: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Comparison-of-Laptop-Graphics-Cards.130.0.html

[Little Lost Linden]

"Seriously, the performance of any system with Second Life seems to depend on what phase the moon is in and if you've made the proper offerings to the tech gods."

Couldn't agree more.

I have an HD5850 for SL and with some of the hacked shadows turned on it still crawls. It's that paired with a quad core Q6600.

SL just doesn't use the GPU as it should. Uses to much CPU, just like always.

http://blogs.secondlife.com/thread/18876?tstart=0

[Brenek]

"But Can It Handle the Metaverse?"

I run SL on my midrange Toshiba with Intel graphics.

I imagine your real question is something like "Can I run SL at full settings with no problem."

Spoiled jerk, what with your shadows and long draw distances ;p

[DMC Jurassic]

Thumbs down, Hamlet. It won't perform for the investment and you may ultimately be disappointed with what is essentially an aging G92 8800-series core - particularly in the interests of future-proofing for new SL lighting & shadows. G92 is 3-years old now.

Whatever Laptop you buy, make sure it's about Nvidia Geforce 260 GTX (G200-core/refreshed G92) or ATI 5700 "minimum".

In mobile terms, that means you'll want to be looking at an Nvidia 360M GPU in any notebook.

http://tinyurl.com/y9sxkpj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_9_Series

SF.

[L. Knoller]

"Sexy Ass Awesomesauce"?

[Hamlet Au]

Why yes, sexy ass awesomesauce.

Loving this advice, thanks much!

"it won't perform for the investment"

DMC, what if I'm happy with somewhat above average performance for at least a year, two tops? It's just a $900 machine, so I'm not planning to keep it much longer beyond that.

[DMC Jurassic]

You're welcome, Hamlet. Well, a thing to note in all fairness is that the 335M is a derivative G92 Nvidia GPU core, or in simple terms, it's an Nvidia 8800. I've relied on that GPU in the past and it got me through.

The Nvidia 8800 has been perhaps the Champion or Mainstay GPU of Second Life in recent years. When shadows were initially introduced, it was the first GPU along with the ATI 3870s that was supported to work with shadows.

The Intel i5 &/or i7 are both strong processors, and when combined with sufficient RAM and that GPU, the notebook should be powerful enough to push SL processing-intensive polygons and shadows.

At least by not running the absolute Top-of-the Line PC, you are perhaps better positioned to understand and be able to report on performance experiences in-line with the majority of SL users.

It's still good hardware. Go ahead. Feeling happy about using one's own preferred 'Tools of the Trade' is just as important as the trade itself. ;)

SF.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I wish laptops were as easy to build as desktops. Then you could get the nifty case with whatever guts you wanted, and swap out components as new ones came on the market.

But if wishes were horses, the gutters would be choked with wish crap. Or something like that.

[Mark]

"Seriously, the performance of any system with Second Life seems to depend on what phase the moon is in and if you've made the proper offerings to the tech gods."

A user's experience with SL depends on many interacting factors, probably more so than any other existing internet based application.

Some of these include:

Your computer: processor, hard drive memory, video card memory.

Internet connection: internet speed - sometimes you think you have a particular speed that you are paying for but you really don't. It depends on the amount of bandwith available from the provider for all the people using the service at any point in time. You have faster speeds late at night and in the early mornings.

SL: grid performance, textures, scripts, the amount of people in a sim, preference selections etc.

Personally, I'm using a 2006 Dell Lap Top and I've been getting pretty good performance from SL since increasing memory and internet speed to the maximum available.

[Sandor Balczo]

Buy a Mac.

[mr nguyen]

Realease date of m11x r3 Read more here :
http://www.techwafer.com/2011/04/10/alienware-m11x-r3-ultraportable-gaming-laptop-coming-this-month/

[RadzNguyen]

Shadows will be very choppy. For the new features like shadows and global lighting then a desktop machine will be required, with at minumum a Geforce 240 of ATI HD 4780 as minimum. A 480 or HD5870 will be better.

SL is not a first person shooter. Unless you are at events with lots of movement, you can get away with 10fps.

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