Alienware Area-51 m9750 Review

Total Score

There are really just three types of notebook users in the world: those that want the most battery life, those that want a mix of battery life and performance and those that want portable computing powerhouses.  Alienware has been an expert on the third type of system, even though they have attempted to offer some mid-range products as well.  But let’s not kid ourselves – Alienware’s name is all about the niche market, for the user that has money and isn’t afraid to spend it. 
 

There was a time when if you wanted to play games you didn't buy a notebook. Notebooks were fine for spreadsheets and shopping lists, but fire up an up-to-date 3D game and you were entering a world of painfully slow frame rates. It's all different these days of course, with everyone from the likes of Rock, Evesham and Dell offering pimped out powerhouses designed to give you portable gaming pleasure that you can easily slip into a cupboard when you're done. If that's the sort of thing that appeals then you really can't buy without considering Alienware. It prides itself on producing gaming PCs and notebooks for the masses and based on previous efforts, we know it does a pretty darn good job. Inevitably, a fully loaded Alienware system is going to cost the proverbial arm and leg, but it's still always going to be more affordable than truly custom boutique suppliers of true exotica such as Vadim. After all, this is a company owned by Dell.
 

Good news then that Alienware has launched a new top-of-the-range gaming notebook. The system we were sent was pretty loaded specification wise, which accounts for the full on £2,462 price tag, compared to the rather less eye watering £1,198 that the system starts at. Coming under the Area-51 umbrella, our sample m9750 features an Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 running at 2.33GHz, backed up with 2GB of 667 RAM. This is combined with nVidia SLI graphics. Just to be clear, SLI is nVidia's dual graphics card technology, so you're not just getting one GeForce Go 9750 GTX in this notebook, you're getting two. In case you're not up on your graphics technology, that’s a good thing, potentially offering up to twice the performance in certain games. Along with this you're getting two hard disks, which can be set up in RAID 0 or 1 configuration offering either 250GB of secure storage or 500GB of ultra fast storage. You also get a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution display, which is quite something on a 17in display - you won't see this resolution on anything smaller than a 23in external monitor.

Today we are looking at the Alienware m9750 notebook; a 17" screen beast that boasts more than a few features that your desktop probably doesn’t have.  A dual-core Core 2 Duo processor, SLI graphics and RAID 0 SATA hard drives are the stand outs. 

Let’s take a quick look at the system specifications, from the Alienware website: