MAXIMUMPC APRIL 2004
Alienware Area 51M
Don’t like your graphics card?
Change it in five minutes with
the Area 51MHark, the quest is over: The Holy
Grail of mobile computing—user
upgradeable graphics—has been
unearthed in Alienware’s Area 51M
notebook! This isn’t a matter of
adding RAM or tricking a vendor into
sending a replacement graphics card
that requires a dissection to install.
Alienware lets you flip over the Area
51M, grab your screwdriver, and voila ,
you’ve gone from a GeForce FX 5700 to
a Radeon 9700 before the commercial
break in The Simpsons is over.
The Area 51M’s goodness doesn’t
stop there, either. Inside the stylish
metallic exoskeleton of the Area 51M
is an Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
buzzing along at 3.2GHz. Also included
are a 4x DVD+R/RW burner, Gigabit
Ethernet, and wireless as you want
it—be it A, B, or G, the Area 51M sup-
ports every 802.11 spec in existence.
Like Dell and Voodoo, Alienware taps
Hitachi’s 7,200rpm hard drive for stor-
age duties. While we were quite satisfied
with the 5,400rpm Hitachi drives in the
Satellite and Mayhem G1, 7,200rpm
makes it that much faster.
Then there’s the graphics card. In
this case, Alienware sent us a notebook
with an nVidia GeForce FX Go 5700
with 128MB of RAM, and promised to
also send us a Mobility Radeon 9700
for swapping purposes. (We still can’t
get over the fact that we can run what-
ever graphics we want on this laptop!)
Unfortunately, the Radeon didn’t
materialize before press time, so we’re
only printing the scores of the note-
book with the GeForce card it initially
shipped with. If you read our February
issue, however (Alienware Autopsy, page
12), you already know that we found
the process of upgrading the graphics
chip a snap.
We would have preferred a differ-
ent chipset, though. The SiS 648FX
limits this notebook to single-channel
DDR400. This memory-bandwidth defi-
cit appeared to handcuff the Area 51M
in our application tests. In Premiere Pro ,
for example, Toshiba’s gigantic Satellite
clocked in just a few seconds behindthe Area 51M despite the Alienware’s
faster Extreme Edition chip and
200MHz clock speed advantage.
Conversely, this laptop’s gaming
performance impressed us. The Area
51M managed to beat the Dell XPS
in two benchmarks: Jedi Academy
and 3DMark2001 SE. In other
games, it even elbows the Voodoo
out of the way.
Ah, but what if you dropped in
a new graphics card? Alienware
officials told us they’ve been
selling $200 upgrades to people who
bought the notebook with the older-
generation GeForce FX Go 5200. That’s
not too bad when you consider that
these dollars will give an old notebook
enough new juice to run games faster.
How much extra life will the upgrades
net? We’d guess about a year, but we’re
not sure, and even Alienware isn’t cer-
tain, given that PCI Express is on the
horizon. But one year is better than
none, and we applaud a company that
has finally delivered user-upgradeable
graphics to laptop owners.
The Area 51M doesn’t have quite
enough power to outmuscle the brutish
Dell XPS (reviewed on the next page),but on the plus side, it’s light enough
that you can actually carry it rather
than wheeling it behind you in a cart.User-interchangeable graphics, 3.2GHz Extreme
Edition Pentium 4.FORMULA 409FORMULA 51
Only supports single-channel RAM.$3,800, http://www.alienware.comMAXIMUMPC VERDICT 9
you’ve gone from a GeForce FX 5700 tobuzzing along at 3.2GHz. Also included
Alienware’s signature touch: The
alien head on the lid lights up
when it’s on or charging.