J.D. Hodges

Ahh, the allure of a nicely portable yet rugged gaming system… 14″ sounds like a nice sweet spot between portability and decent screen size doesn’t it?!

Two of the top machines in that arena are the Alienware 14 and the ASUS G46VW. Here are my initial thoughts:

+The Alienware 14 when kitted out with the 1080p matte display is nearly a perfect mobile gaming machine 🙂 However, it is going to run around $1,499 to get a correspondingly good video card (GeForce GTX 765M GPU) to match that nice display. Also, it does not have Thunderbolt if that is important to you.

+For those on a budget, the entry level G46VW with a low-res 1366×768  matte LCD can be had for around $749-$799 (sometimes higher at Amazon, their sellers vary a lot). Bumping up to the 1600×900 bsi5n06 model is probably advised thought that is going to push the price higher 🙁 The one big perk is that if you want to ‘dock’ this bad boy then you have Thunderbolt ready and waiting.

Recommendation: if you’re up for spending a bit of cash go for the Alienware 14 and spec it out to the hilt, if you want a bargain gaming machine stick to the entry level G46VW as its video card it almost better suited for 1366×768 rather than 1600×900 IMHO… and when you got to those higher spec-ed models the G46’s price gets mighty close to an Alienware 14!

PS as mentioned earlier, if you want to use one of these machines docked as a work/main machine you may want to consider the G46 with Thunderbolt!

And of course here are links to a couple full reviews: