I have bought a maxxed out Alienware M17x, nearly £4000.00 paid three weeks into the system and this is the result, it has major problems and flaws, and Alienware/Dell have confirmed this machine is not all powerfull as it is advertised or made to be or at least at this moment in time it is not, not sure why they are selling it as I am on the verge of wanting to return it for either a proper working replacement or a full refund.
My system has the Vista 64bit, Dual Geforce 280M cards, QX9300 Quad Core 2 Extreme 2.53ghz , 1TB 7200rpm HDD in Raid & 1200p resolution on the screen with 4GB DDR3 ram (opted for 4 rather than 8GB at the moment, as I intended to wait for prices to drop, everything else maxxed out with all options).
Problems so far : (Which Alienware/Dell have acknowledged as follows)
1. Dual Geforce 280M graphics cards do not work properly in SLI mode appears to be a driver issue and fault, the onboard integrated card kicks in when in boost mode with one of the Geforce 280M cards hitting 70C + on temperature, whilst the second 280M sits idle at 35-45C. My benchmarks graphics test cannot hit more than 8-9 fps under DirectX9, forget DirectX10 benchmarking so far cannot get the system to do anything properly in DX10 mode just a blank screen, although when running dxdiag.exe the system reports upto date with DirectX10. Microsoft FSX cannot achieve more than 5-9 fps in boost SLI mode when maxxed out on settings (see other users on You Tube with similar maxxed out settings on other systems with Ati Crossfire and or desktop systems using the same Geforce 280/295 graphics cards in SLI mode). According to the norm with the setup working properly, one should be able to achieve at least 25-30 fps easily with capacity to hit the 60's with further testing and tweaks.
2. The quad core 2 extreme QX9300 chip tends to push all the workload onto one core running at 80+% again temps hitting the 70C's whilst the other three sit at 15% workload and temps of 35-45C. There is some flaw which is causing this and it is pointless having all this power and not being able to utilise it properly.
3. HDD, due to having carried out some changes i.e. disable GPU's in BIOS under Alienware instructions to alter the hybrid SLI mode so that one can manually control the save and boost modes i.e. integrated GPU and Dual Geforce 280M mode, the machine began to suffer blue screen crashes, after having gone through approximately 20 odd crashes I reverted back to the enable GPU's in bios settings. The HDD's since are knocking so loud that one can hear it across a noisy room. I believe the crashes have damaged one or both of the hard drives somehow and in order to reduce the sound, I had to go into Vista settings and disable "Superfetch", this reduced the knocking sound but as soon as the hard drive is accessed the knocking is there, again not sure how long this will carry on for before a failure occurs.
4. Alienware/Dell at this moment in time are working on the solutions but do not have one to give to customers so for those like me having paid out a fortune for something that is supposed to be the most powerful laptop in the world are left with a machine that just is the most expensive desktop led lightshow on earth, that is fact, I can give them that credit. At least I have managed to get it to flow slowly through all the rainbow colours across the lit keyboard. 4 weeks in and I have not been able to use the machine at all as intended apart from surf the web looking for solutions. I dont think the Alienware reps know what to say and so far no one can advise what status I hold, I may have to complain to the Credit Card company to seek some form of compensation, either I have been sent a dud of a machine or Alienware/Dell need to let the consumers know the reality.
Anyone wanting to know more, I am more than happy to comment and take things further specially if there are other M17X purchasers out there. Just my input to add to all the hype around this machine which I admit I fell for...................
) it's realy strong and fully power almost same with desktop that same specs, 2 harddrive run on raid ( double or 2 double speed to access data) and ect...i'v checked the whole unit, good speed, worth to try 
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