Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Alienware Area-51m: an exclusive look inside”.
This is Alienware’s new juggernaut of a gaming laptop and I’m gon na take it apart, because Alienware designed this one to be easily rebuilt. ( upbeat music ) With the new Area-51M Alienware is banking. That gamers will spend thousands of dollars on a 17-inch portable gaming rig, because this one can be upgraded like a desktop., I’m a desktop PC guy.. I’Ve never been able to imagine spending this much on a laptop only to watch it go obsolete after a few years, because you’ve never been able to swap out the graphics card until now. (, thoughtful music ). That is an Nvidia RTX mobile GPU that you can pull right out of the laptop and replace with another one.. That’S why we’re looking at a laptop that fits interchangeable, graphics, chips up to Nvidia, RTX 2080, the beefiest GPU there is.
And you can swap out the CPU too.. There’S a bonafide desktop processor socket that can hold up to an octa-core Intel Core i9-9900K, the fastest gaming CPU. You can buy.. That is a desktop Intel CPU.. Why is Alienware finally doing this now? I asked them and the company said it was growing so frustrated with the compromises of ever-thinner gaming laptops. It decided to do something thicker for once something upgradable..
We don’t use special screws. We don’t tape over screw heads and say it voids your warranty, none of that.. So when we thought about an idea of a customer upgrading these two components, the CPU and GPU, we knew that we needed to design from there out.. What surprised me most about the Area-51M is it’s built like a desktop too., The first time I cracked open the case of this early development sample.
I discovered that it’s logically laid out to the point. It shows you what to do. So right away. There’S this handy warning to make sure you disconnect the battery, so you don’t get electrocuted before you start definitely appreciate that.
91-hour battery, probably one of the biggest you can fit on an airplane. It’S got an extra cell on the back here.. Then there’s these fabric tabs. You don’t see these often inside laptops, unless you’re going to pull them apart, yourself.
And this plastic shroud here with all these different labels, tells me exactly how many screws and what size I need to get this off. So I won’t make any mistakes missing a screw and accidentally trying to break the plastic. As I pull it up. You should be able to just unscrew all these and get inside.. So I just took off that plastic shroud and here’s the cooling unit.. It’S got two giant fans and it looks like seven heat pipes.
Here. It even has. Oh, it’s even got the order in which the screws are torqued properly.
To put it back on again, that’ll come in handy.. Could you still make mistakes and screw up this laptop Yeah sure, but it didn’t feel any harder than building a desktop, PC. And Alienware says it’ll send out its own techs at first to ensure smooth upgrades likely for a small fee.. The bigger question is whether you’ll ever be able to meaningfully upgrade this laptop’s graphics, because Alienware is using its own proprietary Dell, graphics, form, factor cards or DGFF for short for those upgrades, and neither Nvidia nor AMD has promised that future chips will fit onto this board.. There Alienware’s refreshingly honest, it’s not sure., We’d like to be able to say yes. Right now, honestly, we have no idea..
The only thing we’re guaranteeing to a customer is: if they buy a 2060, they can go to a 2070 or a 2080.. So what I’m hearing is Alienware is only promising to let you upgrade to a slightly better GPU that you could have bought to begin with anyways. That’S not exactly what I was hoping to hear., But Alienware does say: it’ll make future chips work if it’s technically possible.. If it fits in the same form factor the same electricals, we think we’ll be able to pull it off. But at this point you know we don’t know..
I don’t have an Nvidia road map. I don’t have an AMD road map.. If you happen to have one pass, it along that’d be great., So we’ve got to take a little break and talk about the elephant in the room: listen to this., (, computer roars, ), I’m doing literally nothing on this machine right, now.! It’S just sitting there blinking at me., Mind you Alienware, sent me an early development unit and they say it’s gon na be fixed. It should be whisper quiet at launch..
Then there’s battery life, not great. Yeah. It’S not good.
( Joe and Sean laugh ). The battery life is uh, you know, we think that on a battery benchmark you can get three and a half hours. You and I both know.
That’S not a representation of real world use., So we believe and what I think we’ll be telling customers at CES is you’ll get. You know an hour 90 minutes., That’s really about it.. So no this isn’t a laptop you’re gon na use to game at the coffee shop or on your airplane tray table, particularly since you need two power supplies to get the maximum performance., You can think of it more as a gaming work station you’d lug around or A desktop that folds or as Alienware’s product director likes to say, –, I joke around.
With this and folks, it’s the first portable all-in-one we’ve made and we give you a free heap right, (, Sean laughs, ), I’m not yet sure the Alienware Area-51M is the future-proof gaming. Laptop I’ve been waiting for. Before I spend any of my own money on a PC like this.
I want to know the upgrades are there., But the thoughtful modular design inside this machine really gives me hope. The Area-51M ships this month on January 29th, starting at $ 2,549 for an entry level config with an RTX 2070 Core i7 CPU and eight gigs of memory. And look, I put it back together in 16 minutes.. So what do you think about this laptop? Would you buy it? Tell me in the comments below and if you like laptop news you might want to take a look at a little show called CES.
That’S happening in Las Vegas right, now. We’re there live .