Alienware has finally released the system, and its performance more than lived up to expectations. Our review system included a host of upgrades that more than doubled the baseline model’s price and we can’t help but wish that a us$3,600-plus laptop would have a slightly more sophisticated look (Alienware’s occasional tweaks to its plastic, alien-head design haven’t gone nearly far enough). Still, this highly configurable system is great for hardcore gamers who want to ditch the desktop, although they’ll pay for it, at around $1,500 more than the closest Dell XPS M1710 we could configure, which lacked the dual video cards.
The 17-inch wide-screen LCD display offers a 1,920×1,200 native resolution, which is higher than the standard 1,600×1,200 resolution for a screen this size. That means that onscreen text and icons are extremely tiny, but also that you can fire up video games at super high resolutions. The screen looked great, with excellent detail, but lately we’ve soured on glossy screen coatings, finding the glare from ambient lighting distracting. As expected, the Alienware Area-51 m9750 and its dual GeForce Go 7950GTX cards pummelled the competition in our F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 tests, offering up 81.1 frames per second in Quake 4, even at a ridiculously high 1,600×1,200 resolution with anti-aliasing turned on. The twin video cards in SLI mode are clearly the system’s highlight, as the m9750’s Core 2 Duo T7600 CPU performed on par with other recent systems in more mundane benchmarks, such as Multitasking, iTunes encoding, and Photoshop CS2 tests (although the Alienware’s 7,200rpm drives helped it power ahead in the Photoshop test) . It’s when it comes to games performance, however, that the m9750 really shines, racking up a 3DMark06 score of 7,343 – which is impressive for a laptop. Running it through Doom 3 came in with a result of 131fps at 1,024 x 768, 129fps at 1,280 x 1,024 and dropping only to 126fps at 1,600×1,200. Results for Halo were similarly impressive, with 146fps, 140fps and 130fps at the same respective resolutions but Halo is an old game that is not really in the demand on the laptop in mind. And also the indication that this is also and old computer; laptop so expect a much hotter temps gauge and also the battery life can be also a factor when it comes to mobility, but may be compensated with a larger external battery in hand, but overall the laptop form the past.
The Area-51 m9750 ran for a mere one hour and 12 minutes on our DVD battery drain test, a short lifespan, even for a massive desktop replacement system. Of course, powering a 1,920×1,200 display and two GPU’s isn’t easy, and we don’t expect laptop gamers to keep their systems unplugged for any length of time.
