Gadgetory

This is the Area 51m from Alienware. It's their latest and greatest flagship, it's their biggest laptop, it's the most expensive, it's very powerful, running the latest hardware, newest design It's, it's their flagship It's smaller than I thought it would be, like when you look at pictures, it's hard to kind of see the scale It's big, don't get me wrong. This isn't like a super portable device But, it's smaller than I thought it would be based on pictures that I saw at CES So the design on this thing is very Alienware I personally really like this design They've clearly spent time in making their product look and feel very unique The unit I have is in this lunar white color, It's this kind of light grey color, almost white, but not like stark white It's also a soft touch finish, which is nice to hold I am a little concerned about long-term durability of this particular color Like you have, I don't know, if you're Mr. Cheetos and you're constantly dipping your fingers in like colored items, I could see the surface dirtying up over time, but if you take care of it, I think it's a really nice-looking finish The build quality feels very good, it's very Alienware like, like this is a device that just feels very tanky There's no flex on the chassis, this is what Alienware does This is probably their specialty. They have heavier devices, but their stuff is built very well The logo up at the front lights up, it's their alien head, but aesthetically, the attraction to this device for me is definitely the light-up trim on the tail end of the device The lighting here looks really cool to me, it's kind of like the engine of an alien spaceship or something I think they did a really good job and honestly, if this device was just like a plain generic looking black box, the truth is, people probably wouldn't be giving this thing as much attention as it gets, but because it looks as cool as it does, here we are There is glossy plastic on the front of the device and also on the trim like just around the bezels of the screen, and I really don't like that they use this material This is just material that can get scratched very easily, so it's unfortunate that they use it I feel like over time, if you don't take care of it, this will look aged quite quickly compared to the rest of the device So the ports on the Area 51m are kind of limited I feel it's got like the same number of ports as a 15 inch device It's got 3 USB-A's, and then 1 Thunderbolt 3, and even on a device this large, it doesn't have an SD card slot For the people that are buying devices like this, they don't need an SD card slot So I get it, like they don't really need to put it in, but I would have liked to seen it because there are people that can make use of it Now, if you notice on the back, there's two AC adapter sockets, and we've seen devices like this before, devices that require two power connections But this time, there are two different sizes, there's a 330 watt and a 180 watt, and this is just for this particular configuration, but the fact remains you do need two AC adapters to run this thing at full power I don't like that, I got to be honest, I understand why they did it, like, you can't have AC adapters that are larger than 330 watts in some regions, so make this thing an international device, they have to do this, but it just makes this device so much less portable Despite its size, you now, you have to carry two large AC adapters It can run off with just one like the 330 watt will power this, but it won't be full performance, it's more for, I don't know, if you need to go somewhere real quick, and you just need to bring something At least you can use it with just one adapter So there's two speakers on the front, very nice sounding speakers It's Alienware, their flagship devices usually have great sounding speakers and these are no exception, they have very rich sound and they're well-positioned The keyboard is a classic Alienware keyboard It's got plush travel, good keyboard for gaming I don't like the positioning of the Page Up and Page Down keys This is something that's bothered me on a lot of Alienware keyboards, but I think most people will enjoy this keyboard for gaming Same with the touchpad, it's kind of a standard Alienware touchpad Dedicated hardware buttons, Windows Precision drivers The inputs are good on this device, and you have full control of lighting in software Performance on the Area 51m is excellent It's running an 8-core desktop-grade CPU, the 9900K, and it's running a desktop-grade GPU, the RTX 2080, not like a laptop RTX 2080, but an almost full wattage RTX 2080 from a desktop All packaged into here, and both of those components, the CPU and the GPU are upgradeable. That's what make this thing so unique Playing games on this thing is fantastic It has awesome performance, ultra fast framerates, Ray Tracing support It's basically a very powerful desktop system inside of this thing Now I'll say I've used other powerful laptops before, right? We've seen the Predator 21X, we've seen stuff from MSI that are also very big and very powerful But for some reason, this doesn't feel like a big and bulky system when you're playing games on it. I'm not sure if it's like the thin bezels on the screen or the ergonomics of the wrist rest, but it just feels like a regular laptop when you're playing with it And when you're carrying it around, that's a completely different story especially with the two AC adapters, it is very large, but playing on it, it's a comfortable gaming experience It also benchmarks like a beast, like there's not much else out there that can compare to this in the laptop market right now, and the GPU scores are very close to the desktop RTX 2080 scores It's pretty nutty. In regards of thermals, I would say I'm content This is a very unique device in terms of what Alienware was trying to deliver It's running a desktop CPU, desktop GPU, both of those are very high wattage and they just run extremely hot If you're expecting excellent thermals on like quiet fans, it's not going to happen Your system will stay quiet but you're gonna throttle in games And same with boost clock, if you want this thing to be running at max turbo on all cores, it's like, this is not that system for it So if you cranked the fans on this thing and you cranked it up to maximum fan speed, you will get good thermal performance. They're gonna run loud, but the temperatures are good, even after several hours of heavy gaming And on one hand, I'm impressed that they're able to cool that CPU in this particular chassis, but on the other hand, it is an overclockable CPU and there's a part of me that thinks If you're gonna put that CPU into this chassis and give users overclocking options in the software, it should be able to, but there was no amount of undervolting and tweaking that I could do in the software to get a substantial overclock on this particular chip On a desktop, I've seen that chip go really hard but not on this chassis And it kind of makes me question the whole idea of even using a desktop chip in a laptop in the first place, like if it's not giving you really substantial gains Is it really worth it? Now, the GPU is overclockable as well and I'm able to get decent performance increases with that Okay, I want to take a look at the insides To get access to the standard stuff, you just remove the bottom panel You get access to your RAM, your drives, and your Wi-Fi card But to get access to the good stuff, you got to remove a little bit more You got to pop off a bunch of screws, disconnect a few cables It's not super hard, it's a 15 to 20 minute job But inside, you'll see the CPU socket and the GPU The CPU is a desktop LGA socket, you can swap that out whenever if you want, if you want The graphics card, however, is a custom Dell form factor, so if you want to upgrade that in the future, you're going to have to buy that directly from Dell There does seem to be some confusion in regards to the upgradeability of these devices I've seen some discussions saying that the RTX 2060 config, like the base config, can't be upgraded in the future because it doesn't have like the ventilation on the side And I reached out to Dell, they say that's not the case All the devices will have side ventilation and all devices can be upgraded in the future That being said, I do have some thoughts in regards to the upgradeability of this device It sounds awesome on paper, right? The idea of an upgradeable laptop has been like everybody's dream, but in this particular scenario, the CPU socket that they're using is like, it's the LGA 1151 And by the time a substantial upgrade appears in the CPU segment, we don't know if that will use the same socket like it may, it may not, it's a bit of a gamble if you're gonna purchase this laptop with the intent of upgrading the CPU in the future The GPU upgradeability is something that I think is great That's something that just makes a lot more sense to me But the CPU upgradeability is, I'm not sure on that The battery life is short. I'm getting an hour and a half of battery life with the screen at 250 nits. I can't say I'm surprised like these are desktop components being run off a battery Right? That's- that's never gonna give you long battery life Oh, Tobii eye tracking This is a feature that is on a lot of the Alienware flagships I don't think it's particularly useful, but there are sensors that track where your eyes are looking at on the screen I know that some e-sports team use it for training and stuff like that But I personally have never found something useful with it The screen, 17 inch, 1080p There's supposedly some higher-res options that'll come out later this year once manufacturers started making some thin bezel high-res panels But right now, you only get 1080p Personally, I don't mind, like I feel like, for most gamers out there, 1080p is where it's at, like if you look at many of the popular streamers or pro gamers out there, they're often running 1080p panels And this particular panel is pretty bright and color accurate and it supports G-Sync Now, I want to wrap this video up with my own personal thoughts on the Area 51m This is a very powerful gaming laptop. It's the most powerful gaming laptop that I've used It's awesome for video editing, it's awesome for gaming, but I don't know if the extra performance that you get from this device really warrants the extra cost, the extra weight, the extra fan noise Like there's a lot of stuff you have to deal with, if you're gonna use this system Now, the upgradeability on it is awesome Like it's something I think is gonna draw a lot of people to it But you got to carry these things around Two huge AC adapters to power something like this because it really is a desktop in a laptop form factor And this thing is crazy power-hungry You boot it up, stuff just go-