Alienware's thoroughly redesigned Area-51m is a big, bold gaming rig.
With a 17-inch screen and a thickness of 1.2 inches, the new flagship of Dell's premium gaming division tips the scales at nearly 9 pounds.
Inside, our test model (starts at $2,106.99; $4,409.99 as tested) boasts two of the most powerful components you can find on any consumer PC: an overclockable Intel Core i9-9900K CPU (yes, the desktop version!) and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 graphics chip.
The engineers at Alienware also managed to make the exterior distinctive, futuristic, and yet understated.
This Editors' Choice gaming laptop is far from portable, and it's wildly expensive, but we can't think of a more remarkable feat of laptop engineering that results in this much computing power.
Clock This Alien Up...
It's not hard to find a 17-inch laptop with a powerful CPU and a GeForce RTX 2080 GPU that's much slimmer and lighter than the Area-51m.
The 17-inch version of the Lenovo Legion Y740, for instance, is 1 by 16.2 by 12 inches (HWD) and just over 6 pounds.
You can even find a Core i9 and an RTX 2080 in 15-inch models like the Gigabyte Aero 15, which measures 0.74 by 14 by 9.8 inches and tips the scales at 4.4 pounds.
So why would you even consider a megalith like the Area-51m?
Because not all Core i9s and RTX 2080s are created equal.
The most powerful require elaborate cooling setups to ensure they don't overheat when you're playing.
So manufacturers have opted for modified "Max-Q" versions of Nvidia's graphics chips that limit their performance to accommodate the cramped, hot interiors of a thin laptop.
The Area-51m, by contrast, has two air intakes, two exhaust outlets, a giant fan that can push air at velocities rivaling a desktop cooler, and an array of copper fins and pipes that distributes heat evenly throughout the chassis.
The result is not only an RTX 2080 unencumbered by Max-Q limitations, but also a laptop with the ability to accommodate a desktop-class processor with eight cores, 16 threads, and a maximum boost clock speed of 5GHz.
The Core i9-9900K is Intel's flagship mainstream CPU, used in desktops like the very newest Apple iMac, as well as tricked-out, tower-style gaming rigs.
If you were building your own desktop PC around this chip, which alone costs around $500, you would have to buy a robust cooler to take advantage of its full potential.
So Alienware has accomplished a difficult feat by stuffing it into a laptop.
Buying the Area-51m would give you immense bragging rights, assuming your friends and frenemies have their knowledge of high-end laptop specs down pat.
Dell is willing to take a gamble on enough of the buying public appreciating the difference between a mobile CPU and a desktop one of similar name.
For those who "get" it, the Area-51m is like a supercar that's just restrained enough to be road-legal.
Store, and Store Some More
The CPU and GPU are the Alienware Area-51m's main attractions, and there's little reason why you would want to configure it with lesser options, considering that you'll be toting the same bulk either way.
(Apart from your budget, of course; say, you love the chassis but don't have the bucks for the deluxe loadout.) If you do want to downgrade, though, Alienware offers two Core i7-based configurations, as well as options for a GeForce RTX 2060 and a GeForce RTX 2070.
The base model comes with an Intel Core i7-8700, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060, 16GB of memory, and a 256GB SSD.
These are less expensive, to be sure, but run a bit counter to the purpose and point of opting for a gaming machine in such a beastly chassis.
dell ces preview Alienware Area 51 24
A dizzying array of storage options is available.
You can equip an Area-51m with as many as three separate drives, choosing among PCI Express M.2 SSDs, hybrid SSD/hard drives, and Intel Optane Memory storage modules.
Depending on which configuration you choose, you can opt for the drives arranged in a RAID 0 setup, in which data is mirrored across the disks, or a setup where they are mounted as individual storage volumes.
Our review unit comes with two 512GB SSDs in RAID 0, plus a single 1TB hybrid drive, for a total of 2TB of storage.
Memory options range up to a whopping 64GB, which is likely overkill for most gamers.
Even the 32GB memory complement of our review unit is beyond the needs of much of today's software and most games, but if you know you need the extra RAM for future-proofing or running special apps, Alienware is happy to oblige.
You can upgrade the memory and storage yourself easily enough by removing the laptop's back cover, which matches the Lunar Light—i.e.
white—color of the rest of our review unit.
(You can also order an Area-51m in Dark Side of the Moon—a.k.a.
black.) The bottom removal is an easy process, with just six screws to loosen, and once the cover's off you have access to the memory SO-DIMM slots, the M.2 connectors and a 2.5-inch drive bay, and the battery.
This is a throwback to the user-serviceable laptops of old that I definitely appreciate in an era when most new laptops aren't intended to be easily upgraded after purchase.
Indeed, many are tricky to crack open at all.
In contrast to the plethora of memory and storage options, the display situation is somewhat static.
Just a single screen size and native resolution is available: a 1,920-by-1,080-pixel, 17-inch display.
But you can configure several of the screen's other attributes.
You can choose between matte and anti-glare finishes, as well as refresh rates of either 60Hz or 144Hz.
You can also add Nvidia's G-Sync frame-rate-synchronization tech.
The matte screen of our review unit has both G-Sync and a 144Hz refresh rate, making it the best possible setup for competitive, hardcore gamers and esports hounds who aver that maximizing frame rates on a high-refresh-rate panel gives them an edge.
A different school of gamers might prefer bumping up the resolution to 1440p or 4K, which the Area-51m's GPU could certainly accommodate.
But Alienware isn't offering 1440p or 4K screens, which seems like a missed opportunity, especially given the generous customization options for the rest of the laptop.
Our Area-51m also comes with built-in eye-tracking, backed by the familiar Tobii technology.
Eye tracking is not new (nor even new to high-end Alienware machines), but it's been slow to catch on.
It's available as a supplementary means of control for some games, and Microsoft recently added an experimental feature that lets you control basic Windows functions with your eyes, such as opening the Start menu and even typing on an onscreen keyboard with glances.
These features did not work very well on the Area-51m, with the system rarely detecting where I was looking.
Still, I appreciate that the latest-generation Tobii sensors (located below the display) don't emit annoyingly visible infrared light like some other integrated sensors I've tested, such as those on the Acer Aspire V17 Nitro .
Solid Input, Serious Power Delivery
The Area-51m's keyboard is excellent, if a bit old-fashioned.
It's not an island-style board, which means there's very little space between the keys, resulting in a stodgy look.
But that also means there's room for an additional column of customizable macro keys on the left side, a common feature on high-end standalone gaming keyboards.
The keys themselves are sturdy, and I didn't detect any flex in the middle of the board when I struck forcefully.
You can control macros and per-key lighting effects using the Alienware Command Center app, from where you can also toggle N-key rollover on or off.
The app also lets you adjust the color of the backlight for the Alienware logo on the display lid.
The pleasingly accurate touchpad, which also includes adjustable backlighting, is on the small side.
It's not clickable, which means you'll need to use the physical buttons below it for left- and right-clicking.
That's probably not much of a drawback for most prospective owners, who will likely use the Area-51m on their desk plugged into an external gaming mouse much of the time.
In that case, the touchpad is merely ornamental.
Port options pepper three of the edges: a single USB Type-C port that supports Thunderbolt 3, an Ethernet port capable of speeds up to 2.5Gbps, three USB 3.1 ports, an HDMI output, a mini-DisplayPort 1.4 output, audio-out and headset jacks, and a proprietary connector for the optional Alienware external GPU enclosure.
Just one USB Type-C port is a bit stingy on an expensive laptop, especially one with as much real estate as the Area-51m.
On the other hand, you probably won't need a spare USB Type-C port for display output, since there are plenty of dedicated display output ports.
Beyond those ports, the chassis has two separate, identical power ports.
To run at full power, the Area-51m requires a giant 330-watt power adapter and a smaller 180-watt one.
This limits its ability to function as a portable PC even more.
You can use just a single power brick, but you'll get a warning message before booting into Windows that the system requires a second adapter to function at full capacity.
Some configurations with less powerful graphics chips and CPUs require two 180-watt adapters, instead of one 180-watt and one 330-watt.
Wireless connections include 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0.
A 720p webcam is located above the display, lacking the infrared sensors some other machines have that let you log in to Windows using face recognition.
Sound quality from the dual speakers is adequate for a laptop, though not remarkable.
It's clear that the Area-51m's real estate is devoted to processing power, not tweeters or woofers.
The laptop lacks an optical drive (not a big deal—few games come on DVDs anymore) or an SD card slot.
That's not a ding, just an observation given that machines this size often have one or both.
The Core Componentry: A Speed Monster
We updated our PC benchmark testing process last year, so our database of results isn't as large as it normally is, but the Area-51m is unquestionably the best-performing laptop we've seen on nearly every one of these tests.
That's certainly an achievement, but it's also somewhat of a requirement.
A laptop-in-name this large, heavy, and expensive, and packed with this many desktop-class components, should be the best-performing in order to justify its superlatives.
What's significant about the Area-51m is that its performance advantage applies across the board.
It's equally proficient at editing images in Adobe Photoshop (a punishing task for the CPU) as it is rendering frames in a video game.
For the purposes of comparison, I selected a few other recent laptops with Nvidia's GeForce RTX graphics chips to go head-to-head with the Area-51m on our performance benchmarks, as well as another recent Alienware laptop (the Alienware 17 R5) equipped with Nvidia's previous GTX 1080 flagship graphics processor.
Below is a summary of their specs...
There are only a few systems here, but rest assured that I could have chosen any laptop in our database and the Area-51m would still come out on top.
Graphics Tests
Freed from the constraints of Nvidia Max-Q in its big, bold chassis, the GeForce RTX 2080 turned in impressive results on our 3D graphics benchmark tests.
The 3DMark Fire Strike test is a grueling gaming simulation that taxes a laptop's graphics muscle, and it's no suprise that the Area-51m offered a roughly 25 percent perfomance improvement over the machines equipped with GeForce GTX and RTX Max-Q silicon.
It offered an even bigger advantage on the less-demanding Sky Diver test.
This ordinarily wouldn't matter much, since you're likely not buying an Area-51m to run Minecraft or Doom.
Still, it's interesting to note the jaw-dropping potential of the Alienware's graphics subsystem, which seems to defy limits that the CPU power and cooling abilities would pose to lesser laptops.
The Superposition benchmark, a similar test broken into demanding (1080p High) and easier (720p Low) portions, mirrors the 3DMark results...
...but it gives you an idea of the actual frame rates you can expect.
Real-World Gaming Tests
The synthetic tests above are helpful for measuring general 3D aptitude, but it's hard to beat full retail video games for judging gaming performance.
So I also ran a few in-game benchmarks as a check on these numbers.
Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world video games at various settings.
These are run on both the moderate and maximum graphics-quality presets (Normal and Ultra for Far Cry 5, Medium and Very High for Rise of the Tomb Raider) at 1080p and at the laptop's native resolution (if different) to judge performance for a given system.
On Rise of the Tomb Raider, the Area-51m achieved an average 151 frames per second (fps) on the in-game benchmark at 1080p and maximum graphics quality.
This is especially noteworthy because it's above the maximum 144Hz that the screen can display and thus, in this game at least, fully leverages the lofty refresh rate.
Results on the Far Cry 5 benchmark were slightly lower, at 124fps on the maximum graphics quality setting, but that is still excellent.
These two tests, indeed, are the clearest real-world illustration yet how when the RTX 2080 is unleashed (i.e., not constrained by Max-Q), what a raw-performance difference it can make with the same GPU.
A Side Note About the Future
Neither of these games above has built-in support for ray tracing or AI-assisted graphics rendering, two of the main advantages of opting for a GeForce RTX GPU over a GeForce GTX one.
If you own any games that do, you can expect even an even better gaming experience.
To estimate the improvement, I used the new 3DMark Port Royal benchmark test from UL.
It works similarly to the Fire Strike and Cloud Gate tests, except that it calculates performance both with and without Nvidia's AI-assisted graphics rendering, known as DLSS.
The benchmark employs the same sort of real-time ray-tracing seen in the handful of leading-edge ray-tracing-enabled titles like Battlefield V and Metro Exodus.
On the Port Royal benchmark at a 1080p resolution, the Area-51m recorded 41fps with DLSS turned on, and 57fps with it off.
This 39 percent gain is significant, though in line with what you can expect from other GeForce RTX-based laptops.
For example, the 2019 Razer Blade 15 Advanced...
