Alienware Area-51m 7700

We were interested to see what an Alienware notebook would be like, and in a simple, one word summation: OMFG.

Alienware, while still quite new to our Antipodean shores, gave Atomic their first PC in the country to review, the Aurora FX-55. The verdict  was spot on: the PC was an awesome bit of gear but priced higher than you’d want to dish out -- unless of course you have the cash and like a good riced up PC.

Having looked at a PC, we were interested to see what an Alienware notebook would be like, and in a simple, one word summation: OMFG. The first thing you notice with the Alienware Area-51m 7700 when you pull it out of the box is that it’s a freakin’ monster of a thing. It weighs a ton (a ‘ton’ being 5.7kg in this case) and like something you’d happily shield yourself with in a riot – it’s wide, long and thick enough to arrest projectiles.

So physically it’s a mammoth, but the internal specifications of the Area-51m 7700 notebook also put most PCs to shame. It’s a monstrous thing, with a 3.6GHz LGA775 Pentium 4 CPU and 1GB of Dual Channel DDR2 as its base. This is all raw performance stuff though, but the notebook’s awesome to game and watch DVDs on. It sports a 17in widescreen SXGA+ LCD with a native resolution of 1680 x 1050 and Clearview coating. This transflective coating enhances the brightness and contrast of the display, making it excellent for watching DVDs, but the notebook’s real display skills lay in gaming. It has a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 PCI-E graphics card installed, which allowed the 51m 7700 to score a highly impressive 1869 3Dmarks in 3Dmark05 running at its full resolution and a testament to its graphical prowess. If for some reason you don’t like the screen or want more, the Area 51m 7700 also comes with DVI and S-Video out.

But the Alienware love-fest doesn’t end there. All of this is further augmented with two 60GB hard drives in [I]striped RAID configuration[/I] offering a combined 120GB of storage (yes, it is still a notebook) plus a multi-format DVD burner, supporting all + and - R/RW formats including dual layer discs. Continuing on, the Area-51m’s got four USB 2 ports and two mini-FireWire ports.

There’s also a front-panel for playing audio CDs or controlling the machine when it’s powered off, including a funky blue LED digital clock, and the back of the lid has blue-glowing eyes in the Alienware logo. These are small, but extremely funky touches to what is essentially a bland-looking notebook.

It is no surprise though that the battery-life of the Alienware is next to non-existent, as the battery technology needed to keep this thing going for a few hours hasn’t been invented yet.

In this impressive configuration the notebook is selling for $5199. That’s a fair bit to outlay, but it’s probably worth revisiting the specs above and comparing it to your own PC before damning it as it’s actually good value for such a highly configured machine.

Now for a real surprise. Alienware are not the only vendor in this market selling this notebook. Local vendor TodayTech sell this model to resellers as barebone notebooks (whitebooks) although without the Alienware badging.

With both Alienware and Todaytech you can configure to order. This notebook chassis is designed to be user-upgradeable with a minimum of fuss from the base, and within minutes you can have the hard drives, RAM and CPU bare and ready for your own upgrades.

As it is though, the Area-51m is an absolutely beastly machine -- not much of a stunner to look at, but performance that simply cannot be matched by any other notebook.