Alienware Area-51 m9750
Today we bring you a review of our second Alienware gaming laptop, the Area-51 m9750. It should be fun seeing how Alienware managed to improve on the m9700 I tested back in June. You know it's going to be badass, so let's see if it's 'Darth Vader badass', or more like 'Anakin Skywalker in Episode III badass'.
+ Pros
Nice LCD for gaming
Fast SLI graphics with 1GB of total memory make for a killer gaming system
Great for desktop replacement
Scratch- and fingerprint-resistant
- Cons
Price
Runs hot
Touchpad was slow and clunky
Technical Specifications
The m9750 sports an Intel 945PM + ICH7M-DH chipset, and is equipped with not one, but two 512MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950GTX PCI-E graphics cards running in SLI mode for a total of 1GB of video memory. Built on a 90nm process with 24 pixel pipelines and 8 vertex pipelines per GPU, and core clock and memory speeds at 575MHz and 700MHz respectively, it does not get any better than GeForce Go 7950GTX SLI. You can expect amazing gaming experience, which I will elaborate on later in the review.
On the memory front, our m9750 was outfitted with 2GB dual-channel DDR2 at 667MHz, with 5-5-5-15 timings. Configurations start at 1GB and max out at 4GB.
Our m9750 came with 320GB of hard drive space in the form of two Seagate Momentus 160GB Serial ATA 3.0GB/s 7,200 RPM w/ NCQ & 8MB Cache in RAID-0. Hard drive performance seemed to be average, and not tremendously faster due to the theoretical speed boost from the RAID array. That said, these two drives were near-silent under normal operation. Alienware has a number of different hard drive configurations possible for every type of user. For users that want a single hard drive (no RAID), Alienware offers:
5400 RPM - Up to 250GB SATA with NCQ
7200 RPM - Up to 200GB SATA with NCQ
For someone who wants maximum capacity, there are dual hard drives in RAID 0:
5400 RPM - Up to 500GB (2 x 250GB)
7200 RPM - Up to 400GB (2 X 200GB)
So there's a maximum of 500GB you can toss in this sucker that's damn sweet!
The m9750 is equipped with a Realtek HD Audio processor which provides pretty good sound for a laptop. There are two speakers mounted on the front of the laptop base, and a subwoofer mounted in the bottom. I didn't notice any great bass improvement with this sub, but I didn't really expect to, seeing as the m9700 was the same way.
Not really a 'technical specification', but I feel it's worth mentioning- the default desktop. As with the Aurora m9700 before it, I was impressed with Alienware's completely barren desktop. It's really annoying to get a new system and have it all cluttered up with icons that you probably won't use anyway, like 81 different dial-up offers.
