Today at CES 2019 Alienware announced their new top of the line gaming laptop, the Area
51m, which at the top end can be configured with an 8 core Intel 9900K CPU and Nvidia
RTX 2080 graphics, so let’s check it out.
One of the key features of the Area 51m is that you can upgrade both the CPU and graphics,
something we rarely see in most laptops these days which have the components soldered to
the motherboard. Alienware achieve this by using a standard desktop CPU socket, which
is how it can support up to the i9-9900K at this time.
For the graphics they’ve developed a custom graphics module rather than using the MXM
standard.
Alienware conveniently had a teardown display on the wall as they usually do, I really love
this as it lets us see all the internals, nothing is hidden from us. I asked about future
upgradeability because we’ve all seen new things like this quickly become abandoned
in the past, and they assured me that they are committed to this form factor, so in theory
it should be possible to upgrade the 20 series graphics to say 30 series or what ever may
be next from Nvidia.
If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering how on earth they keep this cool. Luckily
we can see the heatsinks and fans used on display, and they do look fairly beefy. I
was told that these are the largest heatsinks and fans that Alienware have ever used in
a laptop, and that is not surprising at all given the specs we’re dealing with here.
With all this power you’re probably wondering about the screen. I was told that it will
be available with a 1080p 144Hz screen with the G-Sync being optional, and I think they
also mentioned a 60Hz 1080p option too. I asked why they didn’t go with a 1440p screen
instead, given it’s a 17” laptop and it has all that insane horsepower inside that
would have been an awesome match. The reason didn’t really make sense to me, but basically
they said they can only use the panels available to them, sure fair enough, but last time I
checked there are high refresh rate 1440p panels available for laptops, so not exactly
sure what the deal is there. I suppose if you’re running RTX on though 1080p 144Hz
will be plenty in most current titles.
It’s not all bad news though, Dell are also launching what I believe is the first 240Hz
gaming laptop too, so get subscribed to see my other videos covering their laptops from
CES.
The Area 51m also has 4 memory slots and can support up to 64gb of DDR4 memory. There’s
a 90 watt hour battery, so fairly big, though with powerful hardware like this we shouldn’t
expect long run times.
It’s also got dual PCIe M.2 slots which support RAID 0 and a single 2.5 inch drive
bay.
The keyboard looked pretty good, it’s got per key RGB backlighting and there were both
white and black models on display, though I only got video with the white version. It’s
got 2.2mm of key travel and a steel backplate making it feel very solid.
On the left there’s what I assume to be a noble lock slot based on Dell’s previous
models, air exhaust vent, USB Type-C port which appears to have the Thunderbolt logo,
USB Type-A port and 3.5mm headphone and mic jacks.
On the right there was just two USB Type-A ports and an air exhaust vent.
The rest of the I/O is on the back, and from left to right we’ve got HDMI, Mini DisplayPort,
ethernet port with 2.5gbit per second rather than your standard 1gbit, Alienware’s graphics
amplifier port, and two power inputs for the two power bricks that this beast requires
to run.
As you’ve probably noticed there’s more RGB lighting on the back too, and this can
be customized along with the Alienware logo on the back of the screen, and the keyboard
and touchpad.
Overall the Area 51m is a very interesting laptop from Alienware, and I’m very keen
to test it out and see just how hot those powerful components get, as well as what the
performance is like in a bunch of different games. Other concerns that I have are around
Dell supporting this new GPU standard they’ve developed, while they sound like they want
to do their best to support this in the future, which makes sense given how much something
like this would take to develop, they aren’t fully in control here. For instance I feel
like some of it would come down to the next gen graphics, what if the power limit required
is too high for the laptop to support, or the cooling solution no longer adequate for
the next generation? The CPU upgrading would also have limits, and would be based on how
long Intel will be supporting the socket in the future. If you got a CPU lower than the
9900K though then you do at least have the upgrade path of moving over to a 9900K in
the future.
So what did you guys think about Alienware’s new Area 51m gaming laptop? Let me know your
thoughts down in the comments, and get subscribed to so the rest of my CES coverage, there’s
a lot of cool stuff to talk about.