The Alienware brand is of near legendary status after more than two decades in existence. However, with the brand name’s laptop two things are synonymous: powerful machines that are equally big and bulky. Two years ago Alienware set out to change this image of theirs with the much loved M11x laptops, sadly these were discontinued last year and it’s replacement, the M14x is what I’ll be looking at today.

I know a lot of people loved the M11x, but once I used it, I realized that gaming on that small 11-inch screen was sort of unfulfilling. Meanwhile the M17x and especially the M18x are practically desktop replacement notebooks, and as such are nowhere near as portable for daily life as the M11x would be. The M14x is, therefore, the perfect compromise in giving relatively powerful specs on a relatively light chassis.

Our test M14x R2 (revision two) came armed to the teeth in the highest-end hardware possible. The 3rd gen Intel Ivy Bridge Core i7-3610QM quad-core processor runs at 2.30GHz, TurboBoosting up to 3.3GHz under pressure. Coupled with 16GB DDR3 memory and a 750GB HDD with 32GB SSD for cache makes the M14x R2 an excellent mobile workstation in its own right. The 1600×900 screen provides sharp image without straining the eyes and quite a lot of real estate, and mated to a mid-range Nvidia GeForce GT 650M with 2GB GDDR5 memory it’s also a decent gaming machine.