Hi all,

First post here on the forums. I have a very strange issue with my new Alienware M15X. I got it back in March and - due to extenuating circumstances - only used it for very general things for the first couple of months. But recently more time has been freed and I decided to start using it for some gaming, namely 'Brink'. However, when I ran it, I was getting - at best - around 5 frames per second, even with the graphics settings turned way down low. I thought it might be just that game, so I put on a couple of other games, namely Alien vs Predator (the latest one) and Half Life 2, both of which reacted in the same way (HL2 ran at only about 2 fps).

So I started having a play around to see why "the most powerful gaming laptop" was running games like a snail, and I found out that it was only doing it on games that utilize DirectX. OpenGL games such as Quake 3 and Serious Sam worked fine with excellent framerates (around 90 to 120 fps).

I assumed that it must be something to do with corrupt DirectX files of some sort, so since I hadn't really installed anything I couldn't replace on there, I decided to do a factory reset on the laptop using the provided disks... No dice. It's all back up and running and the laptop still processes DirectX graphics EXTREMELY slowly.

Is it perhaps a faulty video card in the device? I really would like this fixed. I payed $4000 for a laptop that can't even run Half Life 2...

Here are the specs of my laptop:

Genuine Windows(R) 7 Ultimate 64bit
Intel Core2 i7-940XM Processor (2.13GHz, 4Core/8Threads, turbo boost up to 3
15.6 " Full HD (1080p) WLED (1920 x 1080) Display with TrueLife(TM )
1.5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 460M
8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM(2x4GB)