Alienware Sentia m3450 14-inch Notebook

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Anthony Fiti
Kurtis
Alienware
Dec. 5, 2006

Specifications

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Taking a Closer Look

The exterior of the laptop looks sharp. The top of the laptop fits with the alien theme of the company. It has a sort of rugged look about it thanks to the ribbed shell. Or maybe a duck just stepped on the mold as it was forming and they liked how it turned out! Either way, it looks just like every alien I've seen. In the center there is an alien head emblem which illuminates when the laptop is on. Finally, there is the Alienware name above the alien head, which also illuminates when the laptop is beamed, err! powered up.

I found the laptop's various ports to be well organized. On the right side is the plug for the AC Adapter, the DVD drive, telephone modem, one USB port, and the headphone and microphone jacks. On the left side are two more USB ports, a 4-pin firewire port, a regular line-out port and a SPDIF port since the laptop features 7.1 HD Audio output. There is one express card on the left side of the laptop as well, sporting one slot for a 54 Express Card. The rear of the laptop has a VGA out and an S-Video out.

The keyboard and trackpad setup is pretty standard fare. The keyboard has the usual laptop Function keys to control things like audio volume and screen brightness. The power button is located at the top right of the top case. To the left of the power button are three shortcuts for common applications: one is programmable (defaults to your media player), and the others point to your default Mail and Web applications. The one thing I didn't like about the buttons is that you have to press firmly to get the button to register. I found myself pushing the button a second and third time until I got used to how hard I had to push the little buggers. On the front of the laptop there is a 5-in-1 memory card reader which supports SD, MMC, MS and MSPRO (it's protected by a little rubber flap when not in use, and I didn't even notice it at first). Finally, there are five LEDs on the lower left portion of the laptop, power, battery status indicator (orange for charging, blue for full, off for discharging), HDD indicator, Mail indicator, and wireless connectivity.

The laptop sports a 14" widescreen LCD with a resolution of 1280x768, which is good enough for watching 720P video. Above the LCD is a webcam, which can record still pictures and video, and to the left of the trackpad there is a microphone for recording audio.

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Page 3 of 9

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks
Page 3: Taking a Closer Look
Page 4: Bundled Software
Page 5: Testing: Hardware & Software
Page 6: Testing: Temperature
Page 7: Testing: Performance
Page 8: Testing: Battery Life
Page 9: Conclusion

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4 User Comments

1 - Posted by EmoMakesMeCry on December 6, 2006 - 1:43 am

pretty sweet notebook. the only problem i have with the sentia is it's keyboard. it just looks...i dunno...ugly? i can't put my finger on it.

anyways, any idea if y'all will be getting a thinkpad x60 for review? that'd be a pretty cool comparison. :)

2 - Posted by Nick on December 6, 2006 - 12:30 pm

No way would i get a notebook that shuts off under full load due to thermal throttling. That just screams poor design. Im really surprised such a problem could make it through testing unnoticed. They make test chambers specifically for rooting out these types of failures and it would surprise me greatly if alienware didnt employ them during design, testing and production.

3 - Posted by Kurtis on December 6, 2006 - 4:47 pm

I was quite surprised myself... Oddly enough, it doesn't crash under loops of 3DMark, which is what they use for stability testing. But it does crash under the heavy CPU load of Orthos (and HL2, coincidentally).

4 - Posted by Anthony on December 6, 2006 - 4:50 pm

Indeed, and its not like my room is that hot (76-78F). But two laptops later I could provoke both into shutting down while running Orthos.

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