The Graphics Subsystem

The Alienware Area-51 m9750 supports NVIDIA’s fastest mobile GPU: the GeForce Go 7950 GTX.

When reading that statement, you may wonder why we said this: clearly the GeForce 8M series, particularly the GeForce Go 8700M GT, is newer and faster right? While it’s true that the new GeForce 8M series GPUs are newer and support DirectX 10 shaders, these GPUs, like their counterparts on the desktop, are mainstream GPUs and lack the shading horsepower and memory bandwidth of NVIDIA’s high-end GeForce 8800 GPUs, which are so famously powerful right now.

For instance, NVIDIA’s fastest GeForce 8M GPU, the GeForce Go 8700M GT boasts a texture fill-rate of 10 billion pixels second. In comparison, the GeForce Go 7950 GTX tops out at 13.8 billion pixels/sec. In addition, the GeForce Go 8700M GT lacks the memory subsystem to really drive today’s latest games at resolutions of 1920x1200, which is the native resolution of the Area-51 m9750’s 17” LCD panel. With just a 128-bit memory interface, peak memory bandwidth of the GeForce Go 8700M is 25.6GB. The GeForce Go 7950 GTX has nearly twice the bandwidth at 44.8GB/sec.

What this means is as you begin to turn on eye candy features like anti-aliasing, which really eats up the GPU’s memory bandwidth, performance of the GeForce Go 8700M GT begins to suffer in comparison to the GeForce Go 7950 GTX, especially as you also increase the screen resolution. As a result, even in DirectX 10 games like the latest build of Company of Heroes or Lost Planet, the GeForce Go 7950 GTX actually delivers better performance, despite its use of older SM 3.0 shaders.

Alienware offers the Area-51 m9750 exclusively with the GeForce Go 7950 GTX: you couldn’t even order the system with a GeForce Go 8M GPU if you wanted. If you want even more performance, the system can be ordered with two GeForce Go 7950 GTX GPUs for SLI. This gives you up to 1GB of memory available and nearly 100GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth for graphics.

This is just an insane amount of graphics horsepower for a notebook that is just 1.5” thick, and this is the first Alienware notebook to combine Intel’s Core 2 CPU with the option of SLI, previously SLI was a feature Alienware only offered with AMD’s Turion 64 processor, where NVIDIA’s SLI chipset is used.

Our system was outfitted with two GeForce 7950 GTX Go GPUs running in SLI. Here it’s important to note that when this option is selected, Alienware recommends the use of Windows XP as the installed OS. This is because NVIDIA currently lacks a WHQL-certified SLI driver for Windows Vista. When running this OS, only one GPU is functional.

Graphics upgradeability

Because Alienware uses NVIDIA’s MXM graphics modules for the GeForce Go 7950 GTX, the graphics subsystem of the Area-51 m9750 can be upgraded when more powerful mobile GPUs are available. Alienware tells us they plan on offering an upgrade program to existing m9750 owners once more powerful mobile GeForce 8 GPUs are released by NVIDIA. How much the upgrade will cost and when you’ll be able to do it is obviously TBD, as the hardware doesn’t exist yet.

Another area of concern when dealing with mobile graphics is driver support. Here the Area-51 m9750 can use the standard ForceWare drivers NVIDIA provides on their website, but since Alienware’s drivers are slightly customized for the m9750, they recommend end users use the drivers in the support area of their website.