Where are the full load temperatures for the CPU and GPU? That is the main weakness of all "gaming" laptops of 2013. I was hoping this big guy has a cooling system to match the components, but now I think if you are hiding them the temps must be over 80 for GPU and over 90 for CPU ... just like the rest of the 2013 "gaming" laptops. When will they learn? They are too hot for a laptop and too expensive for a toaster!

Great review. I'm in the market for the Alienware 17 and am looking to purchase within the next couple of months. You've helped me solidify my decision. I actually happen to be in Germany, but English (American) is my native language.

Since I'm a bit naive in computer technical stuff, I had a couple questions:

The only current configuration offered by Dell DE in regards to their hard drive is the "750GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s + 80GB mSATA SSD Caching" option. Does this mean I only get one hard drive? I'd like to have it split up for better performance and security. Other laptop configurations, such as the Alienware 18, offer a "1.5TB RAID 0 (2x750GB 7200RPM) + 80GB mSATA SSD Caching" alternative. I don't know why they don't allow that in the configuration.

The second question is, since I'll be going back & forth from Deutschland to America often, how can the different in electricity standards affect the laptop even with an adapter? My current laptop was purchased in America and brough over to DE, and sometimes I wonder if this difference has some sort of negative effect over time.

Again, thanks for the thorough review.

It's an interesting point you bring up; yes, it is a newer driver, but I don't believe a new driver can give a 48% increase in performance to a game.  In fact, nowhere in the release notes for the nvidia drivers do they site a 50% increase in performance on Crysis 3 between driver branches 311 and 326.  Also, it's strange that the apparent big performance increase has not been seen on any of the other games; therefore, it leads me to strongly believe that the Crysis 3 43fps is a misreported figure, either due to typo or Crysis 3 was not run on Ultra when tested on this particular notebook.

Can the author of the article comment or someone else from notebookcheck follow this up, I strongly believe it to be an error, doesn't make sense otherwise?

I doubt its a typo. 326.45 drivers used in this 780m test while previous drivers used were 311.27 and 311.48. Now its feasible a 780m can run this at 43fps. Look here for crysis 3 fps:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-780M.88993.0.html

Nice Review, just want to point out a probable error in one of your benchmarks.  You have Crysis 3 tested at 43 fps at Very High Settings.  This is 48% faster than any of the previous 780M notebooks you have tested, so this must be an error in your testing of Crysis 3 on this notebook.  I suggest that the 43 fps is either a typo, or the game was run at lower settings than Ultra!  Could the administrators look into this discrepancy and either point out why there is such a big performance disparity or correct the error?