Dell just revealed their top-gaming laptop, Alienware’s Area-51m. The laptop’s hardware, a combination of a Core i9-9900K desktop processor with a full fat Nvidia RTX 2080 video card, is impressive, but that’s not the best part. It’s the design. With a white chassis, sci-fi “A51” text, and a sleek Tron-style light loop on the rear, the Area-51m looks stunning.
Design
There’s nothing else like the Alienware Area-51m on the market. The sleek Area-51m contrasts stark white and black panels with truly out-there design elements, like the futuristic font, that make it unique. This is a big, heavy gaming laptop that weighs in at 8.5 pounds and measures up to 1.6 inches thick. The size is a consequence of the hardware, which includes desktop instead of mobile-grade components. While technically a laptop, the Area-51m is really a portable desktop replacement.
While the Area-51M leads the pack in looks, it doesn’t do so at the expensive of practicality. It includes three USB-A 3.0 ports, one USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 port, HDMI 2.0, mini-DisplayPort 1.4, a headphone jack, a global headset jack, a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, and even an Alienware Graphics Amplifier port in case you’d like to add an external graphics card.
Oh, and you’ll find not one but two power plugs. The Area-51m comes with a pair of power bricks, a 330 watts and a second at 180 watts. The system will power up with just one, but performance will be reduced, and the battery may discharge if both aren’t plugged in.
The Alienware Area-51m has a surprisingly normal keyboard. It spans the full width of the laptop, includes a number pad, and offers chunky square keycaps that don’t look as modern as the laptop that surrounds it.
The touchpad is similar in size to the touchpad on most modern 13-inch laptops, and while it feels responsive in most situations, it can be clunky when attempting multi-touch gestures.
The Core i9-9900K simply propels the Area-51m into a different league of performance. It’s super fast, comparable to a higher-end tower. Both keyboard and touchpad are lit by a rainbow of per-key RGB LED lighting controlled through Alienware’s custom Alienware Command Center software. It’s also easy to change the lighting, save a preset, or link a preset to specific games.
Tobii’s eye-tracking tech comes bundled with the 144Hz display option. You can use it to navigate your desk with only a glance or control special features in select games. The laptop can also automatically dim the display when you look away, then turn it back up to full when you glance back.
Features
Dell’s announcement of the Alienware Area-51m focused on its design, but that was only half the pitch. The other half was upgradability. Modern gaming laptops usually can’t be upgraded beyond adding more RAM or, sometimes, another hard drive.
The Area-51m’s desktop-grade components, however, can be fully replaced – including the processor and GPU. While socket-compatible CPU upgrades should work, GPU upgrades will only be possible by purchasing a special package that will be sold by Dell. Details on what the upgrades will offer, or how much they’ll cost, haven’t been announced yet. That makes sense because the Area-51m comes with RTX 2060, RTX 2070, and RTX 2080 GPU options are the best you can buy today. There’s no “upgrade” available. Still, gamers buying today must take it on faith that Dell’s future GPU upgrade modules will be sold at reasonable prices and be widely available.
Alienware sells the Area-51m with four display options. The base choice is a 1080p 60Hz IPS display, which can be upgraded with G-Sync compatibility for $50. There’s also a 1080p 144Hz IPS display that, again, can be upgraded to G-Sync for $50. My review unit had the last of these four options.There’s no 1440p or 4K panel available, but the 1080p looks great, with excellent contrast and color. Sound-wise, it’s pretty good. The Area-51m is loud at maximum volume and produces some bass, which creates a fuller, deeper sound than most laptops.
While Alienware Area-51m’s desktop-grade Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU takes the spotlight, the Core i9-9900K processor is totally worth mentioning. This is an eight-core, sixteen-thread processor with a 3.6GHz base clock and 5GHz boost clock. Intel’s Core i7-8750H, the mobile six-core found in most gaming laptops, is impressive, but the i9-9900K kicks things up a notch.
The harddrive comes standard with two 512GB solid state drives joined together in RAID0 (it also had a 1TB hybrid mechanical drive for added storage). The RAID0 configuration has speeds of about 1.5 gigabytes per second, but the fastest drive can exceed three gigabytes per second.
While the Alienware Area-51m’s processor performance is impressive, it’s sort of besides the point. Game performance is far more dependent on the GPU. Here, the Area-51m has a subtle trick up its sleeve. It uses Nvidia’s RTX 2080 instead of the RTX 2080 Max-Q. The Max-Q version, found in most gaming laptops, is built to aggressively scale back its clock speeds depending on thermal conditions. With the Area-51m, it will perform much closer to a gaming desktop.
Command Center
Gaming laptops often bundle in software to control special features, like the keyboard backlight, but Alienware’s Area-51m goes beyond that. It uses the Alienware Command Center, a software interface that controls backlighting, fan speed, and overclocking, and ties those features to specific games.
While Command Center can act like a launcher, it doesn’t have to be used that way. The settings selected for specific games will be enabled no matter how you launch them.The settings are handy, as well. Fan noise is readily noticeable when the Area-51M is at full throttle. Command Center can make life a little more silent, however, if you take time to associate a quiet profile with games that don’t demand performance.
You can also tie specific macro key and lighting schemes. You might choose to only light the WASD keys when playing a first-person shooter or light the row of number keys when playing an MMORPG. In short, the Command Center is simple and unlocked some nice perks once I took a few minutes to poke around in it.
Bottom Line
Alienware’s Area-51m is a killer gaming rig, and its performance justifies both its lack of portability and its high price tag. Starting at $2,000, and up to nearly $5k, but you could spend just as much on a gaming desktop and end up with a system that’s not much quicker than this Alienware.
The Alienware Area-51m is easier to upgrade than most laptops. While the CPU or GPU are a little difficult to upgrade, it can be done, and the hard drives and RAM are easy to swap out as well.
