Alienware Area-51 m9750: Power Gaming on the Go
by Jarred Walton on August 24, 2007 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Conclusion
Anyone familiar with Alienware as a company could have probably guessed at the conclusion without even reading the article. This is one of the fastest notebooks currently available, with pretty much every high-performance option possible if you're willing to spend the money. If the primary concern is raw CPU performance, there are certainly faster notebooks out there, but if all you really want is the ultimate gaming notebook the Alienware Area-51 m9750 delivers the goods. Until NVIDIA or AMD comes out with a faster DirectX 10 mobile graphics chip, GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI is as fast as notebook graphics come. However, there are some major snags that interested buyers will need to get past.
First, you need to be willing to spend this much money on a laptop. The version we tested costs about $5,000, although you could still keep the SLI graphics and make a few other compromises in order to get the price closer to $4000 if desired. That's still about twice as expensive as a good upper-midrange notebook, and a modern $2000 desktop PC should still be able to outperform the m9750. Let's just assume that money isn't a major concern, however. Is the notebook still worth a look?
SLI has always been on the bleeding edge of gaming performance; while things have become a little better on the desktop, SLI notebooks have a ways to go. The biggest problem is drivers. We didn't encounter any difficulties with any of the older games that we've tested on the notebook, and most recent titles work as well. However, Bioshock definitely has some graphical glitches and SLI pretty much doesn't work right at present. We're certain that there are other titles out there - or there will be in the near future - that will encounter similar problems. A driver update is probably all that will be necessary, but when that will actually come out is anyone's guess.
We're still not sure how big of a demand there is for high-powered gaming notebooks. Yes, Alienware and several other vendors make some very powerful notebooks, but is there really that much interest from consumers? For most people, spending this much money on a computer is more than just a little frivolous. Then again, there are certainly gaming enthusiasts that have money to spare.
One thing we're sure of is that we will continue to see a lot of growth in the notebook industry, and while notebooks likely will always remain a year or two behind their desktop siblings in terms of raw performance, we are fast reaching the point where more processing power really isn't necessary. We can still come up with situations where quad core processors are useful, but stretching that to octal cores requires a lot more imagination. When a decent notebook is more than fast enough for anything you might want to do with a computer, the choice becomes spending the same amount of money on a faster desktop or else getting a portable computer instead. With companies like Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD all working on creating faster parts, perhaps we're not far off from Alienware releasing an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace VII that we can all use to jack into the matrix. Just watch out for the ICE....
Anyone familiar with Alienware as a company could have probably guessed at the conclusion without even reading the article. This is one of the fastest notebooks currently available, with pretty much every high-performance option possible if you're willing to spend the money. If the primary concern is raw CPU performance, there are certainly faster notebooks out there, but if all you really want is the ultimate gaming notebook the Alienware Area-51 m9750 delivers the goods. Until NVIDIA or AMD comes out with a faster DirectX 10 mobile graphics chip, GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI is as fast as notebook graphics come. However, there are some major snags that interested buyers will need to get past.
First, you need to be willing to spend this much money on a laptop. The version we tested costs about $5,000, although you could still keep the SLI graphics and make a few other compromises in order to get the price closer to $4000 if desired. That's still about twice as expensive as a good upper-midrange notebook, and a modern $2000 desktop PC should still be able to outperform the m9750. Let's just assume that money isn't a major concern, however. Is the notebook still worth a look?
SLI has always been on the bleeding edge of gaming performance; while things have become a little better on the desktop, SLI notebooks have a ways to go. The biggest problem is drivers. We didn't encounter any difficulties with any of the older games that we've tested on the notebook, and most recent titles work as well. However, Bioshock definitely has some graphical glitches and SLI pretty much doesn't work right at present. We're certain that there are other titles out there - or there will be in the near future - that will encounter similar problems. A driver update is probably all that will be necessary, but when that will actually come out is anyone's guess.
We're still not sure how big of a demand there is for high-powered gaming notebooks. Yes, Alienware and several other vendors make some very powerful notebooks, but is there really that much interest from consumers? For most people, spending this much money on a computer is more than just a little frivolous. Then again, there are certainly gaming enthusiasts that have money to spare.
One thing we're sure of is that we will continue to see a lot of growth in the notebook industry, and while notebooks likely will always remain a year or two behind their desktop siblings in terms of raw performance, we are fast reaching the point where more processing power really isn't necessary. We can still come up with situations where quad core processors are useful, but stretching that to octal cores requires a lot more imagination. When a decent notebook is more than fast enough for anything you might want to do with a computer, the choice becomes spending the same amount of money on a faster desktop or else getting a portable computer instead. With companies like Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD all working on creating faster parts, perhaps we're not far off from Alienware releasing an Ono-Sendai Cyberspace VII that we can all use to jack into the matrix. Just watch out for the ICE....
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Frumious1 - Friday, August 24, 2007 - link
Oop - was apparently posting at the same time as you. Count me for keeping the graphs as is!Marlin1975 - Friday, August 24, 2007 - link
It still uses the 945 chipset and not the newwer 965?I would think being on the cutting edge it would benifit fromt he new Mem. controller and other upgrades the 965 had?
toon26 - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
I have buy this portable with 4 giga of mémory but the bios reconize just 2559Mb of méméory.Commercial service of alienware For the small history my son comes to acquire this portable with option 4 giga of memory (it makes studies to become data-processing engineer) and appear that the BIOS of this portable recognizes only 2555Mo of memory.
The engineering department of Alienware is informed of a problem on this BIOS. The sales department of Alienware wants to offer a mouse well to my son for the damage undergoes (the option to pass from 2 to 4 giga has to cost 280 to him€, for a portable with 3400€)
Most comic of the history it is that the site of Alienware always proposes this option of the 4 gigas who is completely unusable so much than a new BIOS will not come to correct this problem.
All the tests which I could read on this portable in the newspaper industry or on Internet were made only with 2 giga of memory, and thus nobody could locate this BUG, not even the Alienware company which is praised to make pass more than 200 tests to your portable before sending it to you
JarredWalton - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
Which is why I have the following in the review:The OS options further cement the deal: no 64-bit, don't bother with the hugely expensive memory upgrade! And of course, for 64-bit you'd need new GPU drivers, which are MIA.
yacoub - Monday, September 3, 2007 - link
Nope, most major laptop manufacturers (Dell/Alienware being prime examples) seem to have a fetish for extremely over-priced laptops with outdated chipsets. Here, pay $5,000 and we'll give you 945 and DX9. WOW WHAT A DEAL! ;PJarredWalton - Friday, August 24, 2007 - link
It's a case of time to market. SLI notebooks were initially demoed at CES 2006. The first ones didn't show up until quite a bit later, and they were Go 7900 GTX cards. NVIDIA released the faster Go 7950 GTX, but I don't believe laptops supporting the faster cards became available until early 2007. Alienware probably doesn't have to resources to update their laptop line every time a new chipset comes out. Besides, they'd still have to deal with NVIDIA's driver updates (or lack thereof), and Santa Rosa wouldn't make that big of a difference in most titles - especially not in the GPU limited games.