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-