At the CES 2019, early this year, PC makers Dell and Asus showed off a new breed of gaming notebooks that could give many of the gaming desktops a run for their money. One of those notebooks, the Dell Alienware Area 51m is now available in India at a starting price of ₹2,99,590.
The Area 51m sports an all new design language, in line with the new industrial design upgrade introduced by Dell across all Alienware PCs and laptops. This is only the fourth major design upgrade in Alienware’s 22 years of existence, according to Frank Azor, VP and general manager, Alienware, Dell Gaming and XPS. The new design looks more inspired by science fiction movies and with the lid closed the Area 51m looks a bit like a spaceship. The thin bezel around the screen gives it a trendy look and is the reason for the notebooks’s smaller footprint. Even at 3.7kg, it weighs less than any of its predecessors in the same screen category.
In terms of hardware, the Area 51m has the makings of a full-blown desktop PC. It has got Intel’s 9th gen Core i9 9900K CPU (central processing unit), Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU (graphics processing unit) with 8GB RAM and up to 64 GB of RAM. The icing on the cake is that users can upgrade all three of these components. While the option to upgrade RAM has been available on laptops, upgrading CPU and GPU is not. Most gaming notebooks have these components soldiered on the motherboard, which makes upgrade difficult. In the Area 51m, they have been socketed on the motherboard. Dell is going to provide service installation for CPU and GPU upgrade on the Area 51m.
The powerful innards makes the Area 51m more powerful than most of the gaming notebooks which typically run on mobile CPUs designed for higher efficiency and low power consumption. There is ample space in the form of 1TB HDD to download and stock multiple AAA games simultaneously. The PC runs Windows 10 and has an Alienware’s new Command Centre which provides gamers CPU and GPU overclocking capabilities.
The Area 51m notebook has a 17.3-inch display with non-reflective matte finish on top. Most gaming notebooks usually have 15.6-inch display. A few like Acer have experimented with big screens.
Their Predator 21x had an even bigger 21-inch screen, but then it weighed two times more than the Alienware notebook. The Area 51m has a screen resolution of 1,920x1,080p, refresh rate of 144Hz and it supports Tobii Eye tracking technology, which allows gamers to control player actions in games like Far Cry 5 with eye and head movements.
