Landing at a Cybercafé Near You

“It’s tempting to imagine a secret cabal of scientists reverse-engineering Alienware’s new mobile graphics workstation, the MJ-12m, from a downed flying saucer. Everything about this powerful laptop—its cutting-edge components, the aerodynamic lines of its brushed-silver chassis, even its name (Majestic-12 was the covert government agency responsible for masterminding the early years of the flying saucer phenomenon)—evokes the UFO lore Alienware vigilantly brands into its computers.

The design may suggest black-op technology, but it would be more accurate to say that the MJ-12m was reverse-engineered from Alienware’s acclaimed gaming laptop, the Area-51m. They have similar components on the inside and the same silvery shell on the outside.

…Teamed up with an Area-51m motherboard and the Intel Pentium 4 processor that comes standard in both computers, the Go1000 is more than capable of transforming a first-class gaming laptop into a portable graphics workstation.

The Go1000 also boasts a heady array of high-end features specific to DCC applications: 8x AGP, a 128-bit floating-point graphics pipeline with 12-bit sub-pixel precision, 128MB unified frame buffer memory, and DX9 shader functionality. Professional digital artists will also be happy to see hardware-accelerated anti-aliased lines, OpenGL hardware overlay planes, two-sided lighting, and the latest iteration (version 4.0) of NVIDIA’s PowerMizer power-management technology, which moves much of the graphics workload from the CPU to the video card.

Not that the CPU needs help. With the beefy Pentium 4 processor featuring Hyper-Threading technology, the MJ-12m can handle multiple data-streams simultaneously, which means more streamlined multitasking and faster rendering of large graphics projects. The processor is also the same P4 chip powering today’s top-of-the-line desktop computers, not a stripped-down version made for laptops. All told, this graphics card/processor combo makes for a very powerful laptop, and it means that even the hard-core digital-effects crowd won’t have to upgrade for quite a while.

The MJ-12m mobile workstation is targeted at the people who make the content behind today’s digital games and movies. Computer graphics creators looking for a new laptop would do well to look under the hood of the MJ-12m. Behind the far-out branding sits an incredibly capable machine.”