I love my MacBook but OSX isn’t the life-changing operating system that I seem to hear everyone extoll. After the shine and gloss has been marred by wear-and-tear, it feels just like any other. As OS is only as good as it’s applications after all, as remarkably exemplified by the newly rebranded iOS. Of course, it was a marked improvement over Windows XP, which I’m still using on my workstation and has to freaking DIE. However, Windows 7 brought about many changes that puts its usability on par or sometimes better than OSX. If only there were some way to mash these 2 OSes together..
Anyway, one of the things I mainly do on my machine is playing games, right after surfing and videos. Most of my games are not compiled for OSX, especially the more hyped, AAA games. The ones that are mostly requires a re-purchase, which I am definitely not willing to do. I mean I’ll pay for porting, but I won’t pay for the whole development twice. I bought Parallels and bootcamp-ed my MacBook in order to run these games, and ended up bootcamp-ing more. Once it’s on Windows, I don’t want to reboot just to get back to OSX to play my games. I’ll just stay there. But the problem is that the power management on Windows isn’t as good as the ones on OSX. I found that I want a laptop that is powerful enough for me to run my games (so no Intel integrated BS), yet has the 7-hour rated battery life of my MacBook when doing everything else.
And that’s when the Alienware M11x hit my radar.
I first saw it on one of those blogs and it was intriguing. Gaming has always been GPU-bound in my opinion. A CPU bump will no longer provide any significant improvement, at least none that’s noticable. So if I were to build a gaming system, I would save most of my cash into buying a good GPU, probably something mid to high end, depending on my monitor resolution. Thus, the CPU of the M11x, being a ULV processor, will serve most games just fine. The GPU, a GeForce 335M, isn’t the best mobile GPU, but it’s definitely the best for its class of notebooks: the ultraportable. Having owned a Dell Mini 9 before, I’m well acquainted to the ups and downs of using such a small notebook.
I had wanted to get it there and then, but there were some rumours floating on the web about a refresh, with Core i5/i7 and Nvidia Optimus. At first, I was a bit skeptical. How could a notebook released in March, get a spec bump in June? I wasn’t too sold on auto-switching graphics, but the Arrandale ULV CPUs was too drool-worthy. Plus, there was that officially unofficial video of Dell’s Head of Consumer Operations casually dropping that the M11x would get a spec bump in June. Availability of funds dictate that I wait until May, so I decided to wait until June before I place an order.
Seems like my patience has paid off. I was super stoked to read about Intel’s official announcement of new ULV CPUs and soon after, the rumours of the bump in spec proved to be true.
So it has been ordered and will arrive some time this week. So exciting! (Update: when I was proofreading this yesterday, Dell called and informed me that it will come today! Woooo!!)
Now, what to do with my MacBook? I hate to lose the ability to use OSX when I want to. And it could be useful for jailbreaking my iPhone some day.
