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Alienware Sentia m3450 14-inch Notebook
Testing: Hardware & Software
The Alienware Sentia m3450 I received is equipped with a 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB DDR2 667MHz, 100GB 7200RPM HD and a dual layer DVD writer. The display is a 14.1" widescreen, at a resolution of 1280 x 768. This lappy has three USB 2.0 ports, a 54 Expresscard slot, a 4-pin firewire port, and a 5-in-1 memory card reader which supports SD, MS, MSPro and MMC cards.  The LCD screen is the glossy kind (even though apparently people prefer the matte/anti-glare screens). While conducting my DVD battery test, I gauged the laptop's screen quality. One of the things glossy screens do afford the user is better perceived colors. The colors seem much more vibrant than the matte LCDs I use at work. However, the negative impact is that this usually means the colors are oversaturated. Overall the laptop's LCD screen is on par with other laptop LCD screens I have viewed. My only real complaint with the display is its low resolution. I would have liked to see a higher resolution than 1280x768 (which is also a weird 5:3 aspect ratio) on a 14" display. It can play back 720p (1280x720) material unobstructed, but with little black bars on the top and bottom. One of the odd things about this laptop was the optical drive. The mechanism to open the drive is very sensitive, which means that when I first got the laptop, I found myself accidentally opening the drive when I didn't want to. Until I got used to not touching the drive at all, it was very annoying. As I mentioned previously, not a whole lot of software came with the Sentia m3450, which is a good thing because I don't want a lot of junk software on my nice new laptop. I of course tested the DVD playing software, PowerDVD, and it played DVDs just fine. The only other software that was of use was the camera software. It functioned well enough as a demo, but it's not all that useful unless you like to take webcam-quality pictures and post them on MySpace or something. [Editor: Who would think of posting crappy photos on such an excellent website as MySpace?] Another thing I was able to test was Windows Media Center integration with my new Xbox 360. The Alienware laptop comes with Windows XP MCE 2005 as the installed OS. I was able to load WMV movies on the laptop, and once my Xbox 360 became aware of the laptop, I could stream videos and music from the laptop to my TV, and have the pretty MCE UI on my HDTV for browsing through files stored remotely on the laptop. I was able to not only stream regular videos, but 720p and 1080i videos as well, over a wireless network. I should note that with Windows XP Home or XP Pro you can stream music and videos as well, it's just not as pretty as having your 360 act as a Media Center Extender. I also tested the built-in wireless network card. It had no problems handling my 6Mb/s Internet connection, and I copied a 350MB file from my desktop computer (connected to a switch at 1Gb/s, then to the wireless router) in 175 seconds for a speed of 16Mb/s. I then copied the same file back from the laptop to my desktop in 180 seconds for a speed of 15.5Mb/s. This is enough to stream HD quality video (as long as you're not talking about full bitrate MPEG-2 at 19.2Mb/s - but that is rare out in the real world).
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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