Gadgetory

For the past couple of years, the trend in gaming laptops has been to go thinner and lighter, turning a powerful gaming machine into something that you can carry around all day and even consider using for productivity work. Alienware’s new Area-51 is not that. The Area-51m is the polar opposite of a thin and light laptop. It feels like a throwback to when gaming laptops were thick, heavy machines that never left the comfort of a sturdy desk. It is really a laptop in name only. In fact, you probably shouldn't even think of this as a laptop because, inside, it's got desktop components that will run laps around any other laptop you can buy and even give true desktop computers a run for their money. It's more like a portable desktop than anything else. I mean, even the power brick weighs more than most laptops that I spend time using, and there are two of them. This computer is so much like a desktop that you can actually open it up and upgrade not just the RAM and storage, but even the processor and the graphics card. My colleague Sean has already taken the Area-51m apart and showed you all what's inside, and you should really go watch that if you haven't yet. I'm not going to do that here. What I'm going to do is tell you what it's like to actually use this behemoth of a computer. The Area-51m has a new design for the company, but it's still unmistakably an Alienware computer. It does look modern and fresh, but you'll never really confuse it for anything but a gaming laptop. And it's got lots of different lighting effects, a giant fan exhaust, which I'll talk about a bit more, and, of course, Alienware heads all over the place. In terms of basic specs and layout, it has a 17-inch 1080p display, and the model that I have has a 144Hz refresh rate, Nvidia's G Sync technology, and Tobii eye tracking, a full-sized keyboard with a number pad and programmable macro buttons, a traditional trackpad with physical buttons that actually lights up when you touch it, three USB-A ports, a Thunderbolt 3 Type-C port, 2.5GB Ethernet, a MiniDisplay port, HDMI, and Alienware's proprietary Graphics amplifier for an external GPU. I'm actually a bit disappointed that it doesn't have even more ports, and possibly an SD card slot. That would have made this machine really attractive to content creators that need to crunch through lots of video edits and need the horsepower that this thing provides. There's clearly room for more ports on this chassis. I'm also personally not a fan of the traditional non-chiclet keyboard and trackpad. Both feel like something that would've been on a laptop from 10 years ago. But they work fine for what most people will be using this laptop for. The keyboard is pretty standard for Alienware machines, so if you're coming from an older one, it'll be familiar. And since most people will instantly plug a gaming mouse into the side of this, the trackpad isn't really that much of a problem. In terms of size and bulk, the Area-51m weighs 8.5 pounds, and it's about 1.7 inches thick. The 330-watt power adapter weighs just over three pounds, while the smaller 180-watt brick weighs another pound and a half. That means in order to bring the Area-51m from one place to another, you need to lug around almost 13 pounds, or six kilograms, worth of stuff. Plus your headphones, and mouse, and whatever else you want to carry. That why it's best to think of this as a portable desktop computer than a laptop. You can move it from one place to another, but you're not going to be using it along the way. You'll need to lug both of those power bricks along if you want to game. But if you want to just use the Area-51 for productivity work, spreadsheets, etc., you can get away with just using the smaller brick. And believe it or not, the new magnesium alloy chassis design actually makes this about a pound lighter than the old Alienware 17 that it replaces. Still, this thing is really not all that portable. Inside all of that bulk is where the good stuff is. Configurations for it start at just under $2,000 for the Core i7-8700 processor and an RTX 2060 GPU. And they go all the way up to a Core i9-9900K and an RTX 2080 GPU. Remember, this is a desktop processor and full-power mobile GPU, not the lower-power slim Max-Q stuff or mobile processors you'll find in those thinner and lighter gaming laptops. So if you wanted to buy the lower-end spec and upgrade that at 8700 to a 9900, or whatever processor that fits down the road, you can actually do that. Same with the GPU. Dell developed a modular graphics card inside of this that can be upgraded and replaced with newer components, which is what really makes the Area-51m unique. There's also a large 90 watt-hour battery in this, but that doesn't mean that the Area-51m has great battery life. For productivity work, you can expect 90 minutes, maybe two hours max, between charges. I actually struggled to write this video script on battery power before it ran out of juice on me. And if you're gaming, you can expect well less than an hour of battery life, probably closer to 30 minutes. You can easily spend over $5,000 equipping the Area-51m, but the model I've been using has the i9 processor, the 2080 GPU, 32GB 2,400MHz DDR4 RAM, a terabyte of SSD storage, which is actually two 512GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration for maximum speed, and a 1TB hybrid drive for more storage. All of that will run you about $4,500 before any sales or discounts or whatever. And that's a lot of money for what amounts to a lot of computing power. If you wanted this kind of power in a traditional desktop, you could spend a lot less to get it. So, how does it all perform? Well, in short, really, really well. Now, traditionally, you wouldn't expect desktop components crammed into a portable laptop to form as well as if they were in a much larger box. But Alienware has done a really good job with the cooling design so that the CPU and GPU can perform nearly as well as when they're in a desktop computer. That's why the Area-51 has these giant grates on the back and the sides. When the fans start ramping up, they get loud, like, this kind of loud. (fan roaring) Now that's not really unusual for a gaming laptop and if you're in the market for the Area-51m, you probably expect it. There are some powerful speakers up front that can overpower the fan noise, but most people will just want to use a headset while gaming so you don't have to hear the fans at all. But you might not have many friends in your office if you try to use the Area-51m in there. (upbeat music) The Area-51m is able to play virtually any modern AAA game I throw at it, with the settings maxed out and not have any problems maintaining high frame rates. Even games like Battlefield 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider with all of their eye candy and ray-tracing lighting effects can be played with virtually every setting turned on and maxed out and still maintain frame rates between 60 and 80 fps. That's not quite the full 144Hz that this screen can push, but it's still high enough for a great experience in those games. Competitive shooting games like Apex Legends, Overwatch, CSCO, and yeah, even Fortnite, can run at hundreds of frames per second, well more than the native refresh rate of the display. There really isn't a game that can bring the Area-51m to its knees. And if you really want to, you can either overclock the CPU or the GPU to get even more performance out of it. All of that performance headroom actually makes it feel like the display here is mismatched to the components. And I have no doubt that the Area-51m could easily push a 1440 panel or maybe even a 4K display in lots of games, but the only resolution available is 1080p. If you're after the fastest frame rates you can get the high refresh rate screen is definitely what you want. But if you're more into visual presentation and eye candy, you might be interested in more resolution. Now, for what it's worth, Alienware tells me that there just aren't any higher-res 17-inch display options with the narrow bezels and high refresh rates available yet, and when they are, it will make them an option on the Area-51. But for now, if you want a game at a higher resolution, you'll just have to use an external display. So where does that land us with the Area-51m? It has indeed fulfilled the two goals that Alienware set out with it: make a portable machine that's just as powerful as a desktop computer and make it possible to upgrade the parts in that machine down the road. There is a bit of an asterisk on that last point, though. We don't know for sure that the next generation of Intel processors or Nvidia or AMD GPUs will actually fit in this computer. But Dell has said that if it's possible to physically fit the chips onto its swappable graphics boards, it will offer upgrade options. The other thing we don't know yet is how much those GPU upgrades are going to cost. And that takes me to the real conflict with Area-51m: it's just expensive. You could go out and buy a desktop computer and monitor with this kind of power and still have enough money left over to buy a more mainstream thin and light gaming laptop for when you want to game on the go, and you'll probably still have some money left over in your pocket compared to the Area-51. That makes this machine, unrealistic for most people. The kind of gamer that's going to demand this level of performance and a portable machine and put up with all the compromises and cost necessary to get it is probably going to be a competitive e-sports player or maybe even a hardcore VR fan. That all said, the Area-51m is a really impressive machine. And I'm very curious to see where its new ideas and upgradability and performance and portability go in the future. Thanks for watching. Given all the compromises with Area-51, weight and size and cost, do you think it's worth it? And if you haven't watched Sean's video on how to tear apart the Area-51 and pull out its guts and upgrade them, be sure to go check that out. It's really cool.