Nowadays, the speed of computer upgrading is so tiresome that people don't like it. It's sad that the laptop they bought is out of date within a few days. However, Alienware's latest 13 inch laptop seems likely to escape this cruel law, because it can be connected with replaceable graphics card units to expand the game performance, which sounds like a crack.
Alienware 13 is the successor of Alienware 14. Compared with its predecessor, Alienware 13 is 1 inch thinner and 4.5 pounds lighter. The low configuration price of 1366 × 768 screen and 1TB hard disk is $999. If you continue to add money, you can buy the high configuration model with 2560 × 1440 touch screen and SSD.
If you don't think 13 is expensive enough, Alienware still has a way to help you continue to burn money: a $300 external graphics processing enhancement unit, and this external chassis (excuse me, this is my first impression of the product) can plug the full-size PCI Express display card in the desktop PC and provide an output power supply of up to 375W. After inserting the external graphics card, The built-in graphics card of the laptop will be disabled, and all graphics processing will be completed by the external graphics card.
In addition, there are four USB 3.0 interfaces on this external chassis. 13 After connecting this product, it will become a desktop game computer that supports 4K output in one second.
The notebook itself has a good sense of quality. The surface has a soft coating that feels good. The keyboard is the same combination of large keycaps and tricolor horse racing lights. The keys on the touchpad also have tricolor horse racing background lights. Although the touchpad responds strangely when two fingers operate together, as far as identifying a single finger is concerned, The performance of this touchpad is excellent.
13 This time, the optical drive was completely forgotten, and there was no crazy horse racing light effect on 14, so 13 didn't look like an alien spaceship that was about to break your window and fly back to outer space like 14. In terms of ease of use, 13 still has a card reader, three USB 3.0 interfaces, headset and microphone interfaces, and Ethernet interfaces, HDMI and speakers are also indispensable.
Of course, the most special one is the interface used to connect the external chassis, which will be mentioned later.
In terms of performance, the I5-4210U and the GT860M built into the 13 have already provided strong enough performance, but there is still a gap between them and the top performance machines (such as the Thundersnake BLADE, which sells for $2100). With the 13 performance, it is OK to run Tomb Raider and Land of Nowhere 2 under 1440P, provided that the special effects are turned off more than half, and the frame speed is not as smooth as greased up, But for Titan Fall, Island Crisis 3 and Wizard 2, which are very hardware intensive games, they can only play happily at 1080p resolution.
There are two ways to solve this problem. One is to buy a 1080p Alienware 13. Even without various special effects, the game picture is good enough The second, of course, is to add money to buy a $300 external chassis.
The overall black external case is about the size of a small toaster stove, and the materials used for this product are simply as simple as they are. After opening the clips made of cheap brittle plastic (I also broke a few), you can see the 460W PC power supply inside, Next to the power supply is a small circuit board with a PCI-EXPRESS X16 slot (this product does not have a video card, so you need to purchase another video card).
(The fixed point in the above figure is large)
I took the GTX 660Ti out of my desktop computer case, aligned it with the slot, inserted it, screwed on two fixing screws, connected two GPU power lines, and finally plugged in the power line. Then I connected the laptop to the case with a special cable, and restarted the computer.
After the restart is completed, there is no need to set, install the driver, or do anything. 13 automatically hands over the graphics processing task to GTX 660Ti, and of course, the improvement is also obvious. Tomb Raider can be smooth even using high image quality under 1440p.
So I decided to go berserk. I found a NVDIA GTX980 and a 4K TV. After playing for a while, I had one word left in my mind: Shuang. If I want to say what is left in addition to Shuang, it should be seven or eight exclamation points.
With the most powerful graphics card on the market for graphics processing, Titan Fall, Island Crisis 3, Tomb Raider and Land of Nowhere 2 can all play smoothly at a resolution of 4K. If the resolution is reduced to 2560 × 1440, all special effects can be turned on to the highest level, and you can continue to enjoy the picture without a carton.
Of course, adding an external accessory worth 900 dollars to a laptop to enhance its performance (not counting the price of a 4K TV) should be a reasonable way to improve its performance. However, it was unimaginable before that to enhance the performance of a laptop in this way. The external processing units used to be limited by the interface bandwidth, Or, like Sony's Vaio Z, it is not free to change the external hardware. Now, if you have an idle high-performance graphics card in your home, you can use it in this way.
However, there is no problem in playing this way: when using the GTX980 to run the Landless 2 and Island Crisis 3, PhysX must be turned off, or the game cannot run smoothly.
I like:
Excellent hand feel of palm rest and keyboard;
The machine is well made and not noisy;
When using SSD, the machine runs very fast;
The sound effect is excellent, and the surround sound is very good.
What I don't like:
Although the low-voltage Haswell processor is used, the endurance of Alienware 13 is very rubbish, only 3 hours and 10 minutes. You should know that the lamp factory BLADE has achieved a 4-hour endurance when using a standard pressure quad core processor, a high-resolution screen and a thinner body. Aliens, work hard;
The performance improvement brought by the external chassis is really amazing, but can we use high-grade materials when we buy this thing for $300?
After inserting or pulling out the external chassis, I have to restart it. Is this forcing me to buy the SSD version?
The soft coating on the fuselage has excellent oil absorption capacity.
Buy or not?
To tell you the truth, I'm a bit confused. It's really cracked that I can take all my games everywhere and then go home to enjoy the awesome games only by connecting a few lines. However, Alienware 13 is still a large and bulky computer with poor battery life, which also makes this product unqualified as a laptop. At present, Alienware 13 is inferior to Thundersnake BLADE in terms of performance and portability.
Personally, I would rather buy a laptop with better battery life, such as Dell XPS, to work. At the same time, I hope that this laptop can be connected to the external chassis after I go home to let me play games. Unfortunately, this is impossible (at least not at present).
For Alienware 13, its performance is really good. It can run many games smoothly. It is also very attractive to insert cards to upgrade its performance. If this is your dish, buy it.
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