Display, CPU, and Storage

17” WUXGA Display

Alienware ships the Area-51 m9750 with one size display: 17” widescreen. From there, you can then choose between two configurations, a 1440x900 display which is the standard configuration, or Alienware’s 1920x1200 display with Clearview technology. This is the LCD our system was equipped with.

Alienware employs a glossy screen with a 16ms response time and the image quality of the display is excellent. Blacks are nice deep blacks, while whites are nice and bright; color reproduction is also quite good. The monitor does a pretty good job of maintaining these good looks from extreme viewing angles also. Color reproduction is excellent from the sides, so even if you’re not sitting in the sweet spot directly in front of the display, colors are still vibrant. From above things begin to look a little washed out, but definitely not terrible, while from below the image is definitely darker than other notebooks we’ve seen with glossy 17” displays. Fortunately you won’t be looking at the monitor from below very often unless you’re nodding off a lot.

With its 16ms response time the m9750’s LCD display is more than up to the task of handling fast-paced video/movies and gaming. Performing flinch movements in fast-paced games like Quake 4 and Half-Life 2 showed no signs of ghosting. We also booted up F.E.A.R. and observed no problems. With its native res of 1920x1200, the Area-51 m9750 is also perfect for RTS games like Supreme Commander and Command and Conquer 3. Here we should also note that text is razor sharp.

The bottom line is gamers won’t have any complaints with this display.

CPU, storage, and memory

As we mentioned previously, Alienware’s Area-51 m9750 utilizes Intel’s Napa platform rather than Santa Rosa, and as such it’s limited to just 667MHz FSB CPUs. In particular Alienware offers Core 2 CPUs ranging from the 1.66GHz, 2MB L2 cache T5500 all the way up to the Core 2 Duo T7600, which runs at 2.33GHz and has a 4MB L2 cache. This is the CPU our m9750 system shipped with.

Paired alongside the CPU is 667MHz DDR2 memory running with timings of 5-5-5-15. In terms of memory capacity, Alienware offers 1GB (2x512MB), 2GB (2x1GB), and 4GB (2x2GB) memory configurations. Our system shipped with 2GB of RAM, which should be plenty for most users in WinXP.

On the hard drive front, Alienware offers a plethora of options. Customers can order the system with a single hard drive in capacities ranging from 80GB all the way up to 250GB. Drive options include 5400RPM and 7200RPM, both with 8MB cache and NCQ. A 200GB, 7200 RPM hard drive with 16MB cache is also available. You can even order the system with a 32GB flash-based solid state hard drive! Solid state drives consume less power and run quieter than traditional hard drives, they also run faster.

Besides the single drive option, the m9750 can also be configured to run with multiple drives in a RAID array. Both RAID 0 and RAID 1 are available as options with all the aforementioned hard drives, including the solid state drive, or you can mix and match the 32GB solid state drive with the 200GB 7200RPM SATA drive.

The system we reviewed shipped with a pair of 160GB 7200RPM Hitachi TravelStar SATA hard drives running in a RAID 0 array.