Alienware Area-51 m9750 Review

On the inside, the Alienware m9750 is built on the Intel 945PM chipset paired with the ICH7M south bridge – an aging but potent chipset for notebook computers.  It runs on DDR2 memory, speeds of 667 MHz only, but it does have two accessible memory slots.  Both the DX9-based GeForce 7950 and the DX10-based GeForce 8700M GPUs are available in SLI configurations.

Two SATA bays allow for a single or dual hard drive configuration and even the faster 7200 RPM 2.5” drives are an option for an upgraded price.  Networking is powered by an Intel PRO Wireless 802.11 a/b/g card, includes Bluetooth support and has an integrated Gigabit networking connection. 

The LCD itself, which we’ll see on the next page, is available in either a 1920x1200 or 1440x1900 resolutions, but only the high end option comes with the high contrast “Clearview” technology that I have come to enjoy.

The Area-51 m9750 is designed to do one thing and one thing only – be the most powerful notebook ever made. Though it’s a gaming notebook per se, it has the hardware to be competent in all areas of PC computing, not just gaming. Let’s take a closer look at its specs. 

Alienware Area-51 m9750 Design and Build Quality

The raw power of the Alienware m9750 is apparent from the hardware that resides inside, but machines of this caliber are just as often judged on their physical appearance, no matter how vain your mother might tell you that fact is. 

 

At first the m9750 doesn’t look like a far deviation from what you might have seen in other Alienware notebook designs and you are mostly correct in that.  The Alienware brand has a pretty style when it comes to notebook design.  You can clearly see the classic alien “head” on the back of the LCD with the impression of skeletal- or muscular-lines drawn on the back.

The size of the m9750 is pretty daunting: 15.65 inches wide x 11.75 inches deep even though it is only 1.5 inches tall when closed.  It does weigh quite a bit though: they call it 8.5 lbs without the power brick so expect at least 10 lbs total to carry it with you.

At first the m9750 doesn’t look like a far deviation from what you might have seen in other Alienware notebook designs and you are mostly correct in that.  The Alienware brand has a pretty style when it comes to notebook design.  You can clearly see the classic alien “head” on the back of the LCD with the impression of skeletal- or muscular-lines drawn on the back.

The size of the m9750 is pretty daunting: 15.65 inches wide x 11.75 inches deep even though it is only 1.5 inches tall when closed.  It does weigh quite a bit though: they call it 8.5 lbs without the power brick so expect at least 10 lbs total to carry it with you.

 

 

Opening up the m9750 reveals a full keyboard underneath that even has a near-standard number pad on it as well.

The entire surface of the notebook, save for the bezel around the LCD monitor (which is piano black), is a flat black and avoids finger prints like the plague.  Not as shiny and fancy looking perhaps, but I prefer this style. 

 

 

Here is a better view of the intimidating view left for anyone watching you work on your Alienware notebook.

 

 

The evil glow of the Alienware logo…

 

 

Looking at the ports and connections on the rear of the machine we see a wide array of options.  On the far left are a few options you probably won’t see on most notebook computers: stereo audio input, coaxial antennae/cable input, S-Video input and a standard modem connection.  The m9750 turns out not only to be a gaming machine but also a pretty good multimedia or media center system too.

At the center of the rear connections you see the large power input plug, a USB 2.0 port, an S-Video output, DVI output and standard VGA output.  Again, with three different types of video output here the Alienware m9750 machine is proving to pretty versatile for custom usage applications.

The two large venting areas on the back here should also tip you off to the other thing the m9750 has a lot of heat: heat.  More on that later.

 

 

On the left side of the notebook we have a Gigabit networking connection, two more USB ports, a small Firewire / IEEE 1394 jack, an SD/MMC memory card slot, a PC card slot and two mystery divisions.  Those two areas that look like they could slide out in fact do: they are where the dual hard drives on the m9750 are located. 

 

 

The front of the m9750 consists of two speakers on either side of the DVD-RW drive included in our build.  Having the optical drive on the front of the machine might be problematic for people that are used to working on their machines close to their body, like on an airplane but then again this system probably isn’t the best choice for travel.

 

 

Finally, on the right side of the system we find the audio connections including standard headphone jack, microphone input, and support for analog 6-channel output as well as an optical digital output.  There is also a wheel-type volume control and another USB port bringing the total to four: three more than the Macbook Air. 

Alienware Area-51 m9750 Laptop Keyboard and Touchpad

As you might expect, beneath the screen you'll find the keyboard. In an elegant touch I liked the way the area containing the hinges for the screen curve upwards. Beneath this you'll find shortcut keys for the usual suspects such as your web browser, your mail program and your media player. There's also a TV button, which makes sense as there's an integrated TV tuner to make the most of Vista's built-in Media Center software. Above these there's a row of blue backlight indicators for wireless, charging, hard disk activity and if the mouse pad is active, as well as scroll and number lock. Of course the power button of the right of this has a cool blue light too.
 

You get a pretty much full size keyboard with a number pad too. It does mean that when you’re sitting in front of it you're shifted slightly over to the side, but it's not as bad as some I've used. You get a full size Backspace, Right-Shift and Return key, and arrow keys underneath, but the Home, Page Up/Down and End keys are also located on the arrow keys and you have to use the Function key to get to them. The keys have a good feel to them but I did want a touch more travel to them - not a deal breaker though. The touch pad is a large oblong affair, to match the aspect ratio of the screen, and there's a scroll area on the right of it.

Alienware Area-51 m9750 Laptop Port

Alienware Area-51 m9750 Laptop Battery Life

Power consumption and battery life are very closely tied – try taking a 3-cell battery and connecting it to this system and you are going to see a system go into emergency shut down procedures very quickly. 

 

For our raw power consumption tests I plugged the notebook in with the AC power cord supplied when the battery was fully charged.  Comparing the m9750 to the Dell M1710 shows the inter-planetary system using surprisingly less power at idle than the intra-planetary system.  (sorry…). At load though, the Alienware is pulling more wattage at the wall – actually higher than the expected maximum output of the power brick that was 180 watts. 

This is still WELL below even the most model of gaming-based desktop systems though thanks to the mobility optimized components.

 

The battery life of the Alienware m9750 was a surprise – it actually lasted longer than I had originally expected.  Doing just simple web browsing with the wireless connection, we were able to get about 98 minutes of work time in before the system shut itself down.  While watching a DVD, the battery life was cut to under 80 minutes.

As you might have guessed, gaming on the batter would indeed be a futile task – don’t both asking how long it would run for.  I am guessing that with some titles the load times might take longer.  Gamers will require power access!

Alienware Area-51 m9750 Laptop Wireless

Alienware Area-51 m9750 Laptop Performance

As you might guess based on the specs of our test sample, the m9750 is about as fast as you can get a notebook machine configured today.  Fast dual-core processors, RAID 0 hard drives, SLI graphics – it all adds up to great system performance that is nearly on par with some our desktop setups and gaming that is nearly unmatched in the mobile sector. 

 

Our benchmarks in PCMark05 as well as the few games we threw at it proved the m9750 can stand up to most users’ demands, no matter what they are.  The large 300GB of storage might seem a little smaller right now since larger mobile drives have been released since we received our sample, but have no doubts you can configure them in now.  If you are a gamer heading out school or looking for a gaming-ready desktop-replacement machine, this could be a great choice.

Alienware Area-51 m9750 Laptop VGA/Graphics

When it came to performance we had to decide what to compare the machine to. In laptop terms it’s pretty much out there on its own but we felt that the Shuttle SD39P2 system that I looked at recently was a good candidate. After all, aside from a laptop, if you’re looking for a compact system a Shuttle would be the way to go. The luxury a Shuttle gives you is the ability to put a full-on GeForce 8800 GTX inside, As such, in performance terms the Alienware is soundly beaten on the raw numbers front, which hurts it considering that the Shuttle is also a lot cheaper to put together, even if you add the cost of a 24in monitor and speakers.

In raw performance terms then, the Alienware doesn’t make sense – but what you have to take into account is its portability. Sure, 3.9Kg is not light, but you can’t fold up a Shuttle and place it in a draw or carry it around anywhere nearly as easily. The looks and design are also on a different planet. I actually don’t see this machine as quite the complete package – I’d have liked to have seen a dual digital TV Tuner for a start, but it’s still the best gaming laptop I’ve seen. The dual 7950 GTX cards can and will deliver an excellent gaming experience and when the mobile 8800 series do eventually arrive this machine could be something very special indeed. There’s no denying that there’s still ultimately a compromise to be made between portability and performance but the fact that you’ve got an upgrade path if you buy now makes this still an enticing prospect on two conditions – you really want a laptop over a compact desktop and you’ve got the funds to fuel your desire.

Alienware Area-51 m9750 Laptop Benchmarks

Performance testing with a notebook is always a challenge; benchmarks don’t always run as they normally do on desktop platforms due to a lack of Q&A testing, but we were able to squeeze quite a bit out of this Alienware m9750. 

Let’s first take a look at overall system performance using the classic PCMark05 benchmark.  Since the new PCMark Vantage only runs on Vista, this was our best choice for quick and repeatable testing.

 

 

For this test we compared the Alienware m9750 notebook to the previous Dell M1710 notebook that was our top performing mobile machine prior to this review.  For a look at how it compares to desktops, I threw in results from systems built around the Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 and the AMD Athlon FX-62 processors. 

Comparing mobile to mobile, the Alienware system has a big advantage in overall performance in every respect: overall performance, processor, memory, graphics, and hard drive.  It doesn’t come as a surprise though since the m9750 is running a Core 2 Duo processor at higher clock speeds than the Dell M1710 and that it has a better GPU (two of them no less) and a RAID 0 array of hard disks.

The m9750 doesn’t beat out the desktop systems in overall performance, but it does in terms of raw graphics power.  These desktop systems were using single GPU configurations, of course.  The hard disk performance is also surprisingly close considering we are very used to see the drives on notebooks lag well behind the desktop competition. 

 

 

Our gaming tests don’t compare the performance of the Alienware m9750 to any other setups since our testing methods have changed so dramatically since our last high-end notebook.  I decide to take a few modern gaming titles, World in Conflict, Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament 3, and see how well I could play them.  As a real world gaming experience test, I wanted to get as close as possible to the native resolution of the screen, 1920x1200, for the best possible image quality.  I was able to run at that resolution in World in Conflict though for Call of Duty 4 and UT3 I had to scale down slightly to 1400x1050.

World in Conflict is pretty CPU heavy title, though the GPU can still make a difference in overall game play quality.  Playing at 21 FPS with a minimum of 11 FPS is a pretty good experience in this game as it is a real-time strategy title rather than a fast-paced shooter. 

Running Call of Duty 4 at Medium settings, at 1400x1050, the Alienware m9750 is able to chug out over an average FPS over 37 while maintaining a decent minimum too.  Our UT3 testing is pretty similar with the system pulling in about 34 frames per second at 1400x1050 though here we were able to push it to the maximum settings in the control panel.

This quick summation of the performance on the Alienware m9750 is enough to impress: for a mobile machine the notebook is able perform quite well in both application tests and real-world gaming experiences.  While most current Core 2 desktops would be able to best it, the mobility factor is a big draw for many users and I have no reservations calling the Alienware m9750 one of the fastest notebooks on the market today. 

Conclusion Alienware Area-51 m9750

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Gaming
specs
Value
Design
Mobility
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Total Score