In short – don’t buy the Area-51m because you want to upgrade it in the future. The cooling system can get quite loud, but that’s certainly nothing new for high-end laptops, particularly those with desktop-class components. But Alienware still has to release details about how new GPUs will be sold or if and when that replacement program will come to fruition. We check over 130 million products every day for the best prices. The Area-51M may be a gaming laptop, but I can see people using its grunt for more serious work. Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 (8GB GDDR6); Intel UHD Graphics 630 —with screen brightness set at 50 percent and volume at 100 percent until the system conks out. Playing games is what the Area-51m was designed to do, and it does that job excellently. It is 8.5 lbs with the 60 watt battery which Alienware knows will never be ordered with this machine. Receive mail from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors? If you’re after the fastest frame rates you can get, you probably prefer a high-refresh rate screen, but if you are more into visual presentation and eye-candy, more resolution is appreciated, especially for non-gaming applications. For a performance focused beast, that's not too shabby. And that merely leaves me with more praise for Acer's exceptional thermals than for anything Dell has showcased here. You can also add Nvidia's G-Sync frame-rate-synchronization tech. Tobii’s eye-tracking tech comes bundled with the 144Hz display option. You could use this laptop to grind through 4K video editing, batch edit huge numbers of files, or run professional software like AutoCAD with nary a hitch. Sign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors. (The display is not something you’ll be able to upgrade after the fact.). You could spend just as much on a gaming desktop and end up with a system that’s not much quicker than this Alienware. The settings are handy, as well. But, that TactX keyboard? With a 17-inch screen and a thickness of 1.2 inches, the new flagship of Dell's premium gaming division tips the scales at nearly 9 pounds. You can use it to navigate your desk with only a glance or control special features in select games. It uses the Alienware Command Center, a software interface that controls backlighting, fan speed, and overclocking, and ties those features to specific games (if you’d like). The most prominent design feature is the gigantic rear exhaust, with its hexagonally patterned grates for ventilation, surrounded by a single ring of LED light that makes the whole assembly look a bit like the engine of a sci-fi spaceship. The 720p webcam on the Area-51m is solid. Please refresh the page and try again. On the right side of the laptop, you’ll find two USB 3.1 Type-A ports. Far Cry 5 and Rise of the Tomb Raider are both modern, high-fidelity titles with built-in benchmarks that illustrate how a system handles real-world video games at various settings. Sign up to get breaking news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more, plus the hottest tech deals! Yet there was one moment that broke the mundane proceedings with a rush of enthusiasm from everyone present – Tyler, Dell’s Frank Azor, and the entire crowd. Sometimes the fans run audibly even while you’re doing nothing. The Razer Blade (2019) is a prime example. It will wow everyone in your gaming sight lines—and in your blast radius. While most laptops have weak bass, the low-end thump in this song was very strong. Like while gaming, the cooling can get loud when doing other tasks. Built-in eye tracking. Audio controls are now built into Alienware Command Center, and choosing from the default Alienware mode to “Music” added a bit of volume but did little else. Competing machines here were using 8th Gen CPUs, Core i9s in the case of the MSI Titan and Aorus X9, and and i7 in the Origin. Better yet, along the left side of the keyboard are five macro buttons to which you can assign any keystroke, shortcut, text block or combination of keystrokes you want. The company tells me that this is necessary for the light-up touchpad. The Alienware Area-51m weighs a whopping 8.54 pounds, and is 1.7 inches thick at its deepest point. Alienware has a reputation for crafting unique and awe-inspiring computer designs, and the Alienware Area-51m is proof that the manufacturer hasn’t lost its touch. Civilization VI at ultra? There are two dedicated hardware clickers, and the trackpad itself is responsive and accurate, even if it is a bit too small for our tastes. This works in over 130 games, including Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Final Fantasy XV, often for moving the camera. So manufacturers have opted for modified "Max-Q" versions of Nvidia's graphics chips that limit their performance to accommodate the cramped, hot interiors of a thin laptop.