ALIENWARE AREA-51M

THE ALIENWARE AREA-51M IS A FULL-FLEDGED DESKTOP DISGUISED AS A LAPTOP - BUILT TO REBUILD

The ‘world’s most powerful gaming laptop’ wants to bring user-replaceable processors, graphics cards, storage, and RAM to portable computers

At CES 2019, Dell showed off a couple of new interesting products that grabbed a lot of attention but by far, the most ambitious new launch is the Alienware Area-51m flagship gaming laptop. It's the first laptop to feature an upgradable desktop-level Intel CPU and Nvidia's new RTX series graphics cards (GPU), which brings it one step closer to being an actual replacement for a gaming desktop. We had a chance to spend some time with it at Dell's booth and here's what we think of it. 

If you take away the glowing alien logo on the lid, it's not instantly recognisable as an Alienware laptop and that's because the Area-51m is the first Alienware laptop to debut Dell's new ‘Legend' design language. According to the Dell, this is only the fourth time in the company's history where the design for a product category has been completely overhauled from the ground-up. The sharp corners and bold lines has given way for more rounded edges and curvy accents. 

The rear ‘loop' backlighting is a prominent part of the new theme, as it's also present on Dell's upcoming 55-inch 4K OLED gaming monitor. Out of the two colours schemes, we personally quite like the white trim or as Dell calls it — Lunar Light. A nearly 4kg, the laptop is incredibly heavy and it's not something you'll be carrying around, even at home. It also ships with two power adapters, however, we're told that a single one is enough for regular use while the second one is need if you plan to switch to the high-performance profile or if you're overclocking the GPU or CPU.

For those hardcore gamers, there’s plenty of firepower. Alienware is offering the Area-51m with Intel’s 9th Gen i7-8700, i7-9700K, or i9-9900K — the fastest gaming CPUs you can buy — along with up to a GeForce RTX 2080, the beefiest GPU for laptops yet. Though Nvidia’s newly announced mobile GeForce RTX graphics chips aren’t quite as potent as the desktop versions, Azor says the Area-51m uses a full-fat version that’s overclockable, too, with framerates within roughly 5 to 10 percent of a desktop graphics card.

And if that’s not enough horsepower a year from now, we come back to the intriguing idea of swapping those parts out. Due to the customizable nature of the Area-51m, you can technically slot in any Intel chip that’s compatible with Intel’s Z390 chipset, and the graphics card is theoretically user-upgradable as well.

There’s a catch, though. Alienware is using its proprietary Dell Graphics Form Factor (DGFF) cards for GPUs in the Area-51m, and since neither Nvidia nor AMD has promised that they’ll make future chips compatible with that format, Alienware can’t promise future upgrades either. The company thinks it’s likely that future GPUs will be small enough and draw little enough power to fit on a DGFF board, but it can’t say for sure.

Azor says he’d like to bring the DGFF format to future Alienware and Dell G series gaming laptops, which would, in turn, create a larger market for the graphics boards, but he may not be able to justify that either: “If customers don’t show demand for it, it’ll be a novelty and then it’ll fade away,” he admits. But the interest could also come from other PC makers — Azor says he’s willing to sit down and talk with Dell’s competitors about the possibility of letting them use DGFF cards, too.

Even that might not be enough if Nvidia and AMD aren’t fully committed, though. There’s long been an “MXM” standard that would theoretically allow you to upgrade graphics in laptops, but support was lackluster and consumers have never really been able to just go out and buy an MXM graphics chip.

Which gets us to the biggest number attached to the Alienware Area-51m: $2,549, which is just the starting price you’ll pay for the first available configuration on January 29th. That gets you an Intel Core i7-8700 processor, RTX 2070 GPU, 1TB hard drive, 8GB of DDR4 memory, and a 1080p 60Hz screen. It’s by no means the full capability of the Area-51m, but the beauty of what Alienware has built here means that, with the possible exception of the display, all of those components are upgradable down the line should you need more power in the future.

It’s not likely that the Area-51m is going to be a best-seller: the sheer size and price tag mean that there’s probably a limited audience, even in the best scenario. But that’s not really the point. As Azor comments, “This product is mostly centered around doing the right thing for our customers, something that we were just going to be absolutely proud of and have an absolute blast with.”

Based on what we’ve seen of the sheer spectacle of the Area-51m so far, it looks like they’ve more than succeeded in that regard.

The Alienware Area-51m starts at $2,549 , which is quite expensive and the price tag will only get bigger by the time it lands in India, but considering that this is the only laptop currently which offers this level of upgradability gives it a unique advantage over the competition.