Alienware 18 Gaming Notebook Review (with Intel Core i7 4930MX)

The Alienware 18 features a full complement of connections which should fulfill the needs of most gamers. On the left hand side of the machine we find a Kensington lock slot, a DC-in jack, an HDMI in/out jack, a Mini DisplayPort, two USB3.0 connectors, two headphone jacks and a microphone jack.

Moving round to the right hand side of the machine we find the Blu-Ray drive alongside an SD card reader, two further USB3.0 ports and a RJ-45 ethernet jack.

The rear side of the machine is reserved for three large exhaust vents.

Alienware have choen to use a Killer Networks Gigabit Ethernet NIC and a Broadcom 4352 5G WiFi card which also supports Bluetooth 4.0.

Removing the bottom cover of the 18 reveals a very similar internal layout to previous Alienware machines we've reviewed.  The main difference is that Alienware have chosen to use an integrated battery with the 18 which cannot be removed without opening up the whole laptop.

We can see three large cooling modules inside the 18: the pair on the left cool each graphics card and the one on the right is reserved for the CPU.

The hard drive and memory are easily accessible under the main cover, as these are the only components that most users are likely to change.

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