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Alienware Area-51 m9750 Review August 09, 2007 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: With two GeForce Go 7950 GTX GPUs running in SLI, dual 160GB HDDs in RAID 0, 2GB RAM, and a Core 2 T7600 CPU, the Alienware Area-51 m9750 notebook is more powerful than many desktop PCs. The most incredible part is the system is only 1.5" thick. Read what else makes this system unique in today's review!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 11 ) |
The first generation of so-called “gaming” notebooks dramatically improved the situation by offering faster processors and better graphics, but these systems were still ridiculously heavy, ten pounds or more in most cases, and thick, 2.5+” wasn’t unheard of. These desktop replacement notebooks were far too bulky for extended use on one’s lap or the seatback table on an airplane.
Alienware’s latest gaming notebook, the Area-51 m9750, is poised to change all this. The Area-51 m9750 is designed to deliver extreme levels of performance along with portability. The system fuses two GeForce 7950 GTX cards running in SLI along with dual hard drives and Core 2 Duo processing power all in a slim 1.5” chassis that tips the scale at just 9 pounds. It’s a remarkable achievement that quite frankly has us giddy about the future of gaming on the go. Let’s go over what makes this system so special.
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Napa inside
While the Alienware m9750 was just released in June, unfortunately development of the system predates Intel’s Santa Rosa platform and as such the m9750 relies on Intel’s older Napa platform. If you recall, it was the Napa platform that originally launched with the Core Duo processor in early 2006. Later on it was adapted to support Core 2 Duo Merom processors.
The Santa Rosa platform was just released in May and is built around Intel’s PM965 Express chipset. The biggest addition for enthusiasts is no doubt the chipset’s 800MHz bus support. By going from 667MHz to 800MHz, bandwidth to the CPU improves by 20%.
The chipset supports Intel’s Dynamic Front Side Bus Switching, which allows the front-side bus (FSB) to be lowered to 400MHz to save power when the CPU isn’t being taxed; on previous chipsets the FSB ran at full speed at all times. Santa Rosa processors also support Intel’s Dynamic Acceleration technology, which is designed to speed up the performance of single-threaded software applications. In these cases, the second processing core shuts itself off while the core that’s being used slightly overclocks itself in order to increase performance.
The chipset also supports the draft-n wireless spec.
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Because the Alienware Area-51 m9750 uses Intel’s Napa platform, the system lacks support for Intel’s latest and greatest mobile CPUs like the Core 2 Duo T7700 and Core 2 Extreme X7800, but the system supports CPUs up to the Core 2 Duo T7600, which runs at 2.33GHz (just 67MHz shy of the T7700 and 267MHz slower than the Core 2 Extreme X7800) and has a 4MB L2 cache. Honestly while it’s been a few months since Santa Rosa debuted, the platform has gotten off to a slow start, with only a limited selection of notebooks based on the platform available on the market to date.
And as any gamer in the know will tell you, with today’s latest games it really is the graphics subsystem that is crucial to delivering fluid frame rates: having the world’s fastest CPU won’t deliver better graphical eye candy in upcoming games like Crysis. For these games you’ve got to have lots of graphics horsepower. It’s here where the Area-51 m9750 really delivers.
| The Graphics Subsystem | Page:: ( 2 / 11 ) |
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.
| Display, CPU, and Storage | Page:: ( 3 / 11 ) |
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.
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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.
| Cooling and audio | Page:: ( 4 / 11 ) |
Dealing with heat
Alienware uses a mixture of copper and aluminum heatsinks to keep everything cool. We have a strong suspicion that heat pipes are also used. Vents are then strategically located on the bottom and sides of the notebook’s chassis to supply cool air to the system. Alienware uses a large number of these vents, which are dotted all across the bottom of the system towards the back where the GPUs and CPU are located.
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These vents act as an air intake, circulating cool air into the system in order to cool hotter running system components like the GPUs, CPU, and hard drives. This cool air passes over these components to keep them cool.
From there an exhaust fan blows hot air out the back of the case. A separate group of large vents is located on the back of the system for this purpose.
In actual operation, the cooling system Alienware has devised works quite well. Even under load the system works pretty effectively considering the amount of horsepower contained within the system. With that being said though, you won’t want to game on this system sitting in your lap while running in AC power mode for an extended period of time, as the underside of the chassis can get a little hot (although definitely not scorching hot) when the system is running at full speed. Of course, not even the most hardcore gamer is going to do this, when running in AC mode you’re probably going to have the system sitting on a desk most of the time.
When operating on the battery the system doesn’t generate much heat at all, especially considering the components within the system.
What you’re really going to notice more than the heat of the chassis itself though is the amount of hot air this system can pump out. Its exhaust system is pretty robust! It’s definitely better that this heat is pumped out the back of the system than on your lap though.
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Audio/speakers and networking
The audio subsystem of the Area-51 m9750 consists of two stereo speakers resting on the front edge of the chassis below the palm rest, and an integrated subwoofer on the underside of the chassis. Integrated Intel high definition audio is responsible for handling audio duties.
The speakers Alienware has employed are decent for a notebook, but honestly we were hoping for a little more in this department considering this is a high-end gaming laptop with the option of adding a Blu-ray optical drive for watching high-def movies.
In our opinion, the highs on these speakers are a touch on the tinny side, while the midrange lacks detail. In addition, the integrated subwoofer just doesn’t have the oomph to push really deep lows, and as a result lows sound a little flat. In all honesty, this was the one part of the system we were the most disappointed in. As we mentioned before, this system can be configured with a Blu-ray drive, giving it high-end media pretensions, but as it stands now the built-in speakers aren’t up to this task and you’d be better off using a nice pair of headphones with this system.
We have a feeling that Alienware knows this as well, as they offer really good audio output options on the Area-51 m9750, including an optical out on the side of the system chassis. This is a nice touch that we really applaud.
Networking duties are handled by an internal Intel wireless 4965 a/b/g/draft-n mini card. If you don’t care for draft-n support and want to save $60, Alienware also offers the Intel Pro wireless 3945 a/b/g mini card as the standard configuration. The notebook also supports Bluetooth 2.0 standard.
| Chassis layout, Keyboard, etc | Page:: ( 5 / 11 ) |
The Area-51 m9750 has a full-sized keyboard with dedicated numpad and arrow keys. The keys on the keyboard are fairly quiet while at the same time they still provide solid tactile feedback for a keyboard on a notebook – thankfully there are no mushy keys here.
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Located above the basic keyboard, right above the function keys are a set of touch-sensitive buttons for quick launching apps like Internet Explorer and your email. Meanwhile, pressing the “DVD”, “TV”, and “Music” buttons on the right-hand side launches the appropriate apps within Windows Media Center. Alienware also provides media buttons in the center for stop, rewind, fast-forward, etc.
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The keyboard is well built, there are no signs of flex and overall we were quite pleased with it. Critical buttons you’ll use frequently when gaming (WASD, shift, space bar, ctrl, etc) are appropriately sized and placed. Typing enthusiasts may be disappointed by the lack of dedicated pgup, pgdn, home, and end keys, and we wouldn’t mind if the tab key were a touch larger, but frankly these aren’t major criticisms in our opinion.
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The touchpad is nothing to write home about, at nearly 3” wide it’s wider than most touchpads on your typical notebook, but we wouldn’t mind if it were a little taller. As you can see it’s flanked by one large button instead of dedicated left and right mouse buttons. We’d prefer dedicated buttons but this isn’t a major gripe on our part.
One weird quirk we did run into with the mouse was its inability to respond after waking up the system from suspend mode. 95% of the time the mouse would fail to work within 10 seconds of coming out of standby mode: the rest of the system’s components would work fine, we just couldn’t navigate with the touchpad or even a USB mouse attached to the system. This problem occurred after we changed a few of the power settings within Windows. Once we changed the power settings back to default, the problem went away. How the two are related is unknown to us.
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The chassis design of the Area-51 m9750 is typical Alienware. At the top of the case, you’ve got their signature alien head with eyes that glow blue when the system is powered on. Meanwhile, the sides of the lid have a ribbed design, giving the system a sleek look when the lid is closed.
Alienware says their chassis is made from a magnesium alloy to provide the strength and rigidity of steel while saving weight. Based on how rugged the system is, we believe it. Alienware then wraps this magnesium shell with hard plastic that is designed to resist fingerprints and scratches. After a few weeks of solid use, we can testify that Alienware’s chassis is indeed resistant to fingerprints, although we just couldn’t justify testing Alienware’s latter claim that the system is scratch resistant, we do have to return the system after all. We’ve had the system for over a month now and still haven’t seen a single scratch though. Over the course of day-to-day use, smudges do pop up from time to time, especially around the palm rest area, although these can be wiped off rather easily.
With proper maintenance, we feel pretty confident that this system will look just as good on day 900 as it does on day 1.
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The layout of the chassis itself is has its highlights and lowlights. The good is the aforementioned optical out, which is located on right hand side of the notebook, right next to the audio connections for surround speakers. Here you will also find a USB port and jacks for headphones and mic. Another neat feature you will find here is a volume control knob.
At first, you may think this is a bad idea, as you could easily bump the knob accidentally, but the knob is slightly recessed to prevent this from happening. In addition, the knob has lots of resistance built-in; brushing your hand along the side of the chassis won’t adjust the volume.
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On most laptops, you’ll usually find the optical drive on the right or left hand side of the chassis. Alienware doesn’t do this for the Area-51 m9750 however, the optical drive is located on the front of the system.
In our opinion, this location is less than ideal, as this can lead to issues opening the drive on your lap. Alienware has taken steps to prevent this from occurring, but it can still happen occasionally. On the left side of the notebook Alienware includes a pair of USB ports, an Ethernet jack, security lock slot, mini-Firewire jack, a media card slot and Express card slot.
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Around the back of the unit, Alienware provides an audio input, S-Video input and output, RJ-11 jack, coaxial input (for TV tuning), 1 USB port, and DVI and VGA connections. It’s important to note that the DVI connector is single-link DVI and not dual-link.
Alienware also mounts a 1.3 megapixel webcam on the chassis, just above the 17” display. For added flexibility, the webcam can be rotated slightly.
Battery life
As you’d expect in a system packing this much horsepower, battery life is lower than your typical notebook. We only got an hour and seventeen minutes out of our Area-51 m9750 system while wirelessly surfing the web. We then were able to run 3DMark 06 (including the CPU tests) looped for 55 minutes before the battery was completely drained and the system shut off.
| Company of Heroes and 3DMark 06 | Page:: ( 6 / 11 ) |
Company of Heroes
Futuremark 3DMark06
Notes
Normally when testing with notebooks we have to crank all the settings down and sometimes turn down the screen resolution – not so with the Area-51 m9750. With the exception of Lost Planet, we’re going to be testing this system at the same game settings we use for GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra cards! Clearly the m9750 system is up for the challenge, at 1920x1200 the system averaged 45 fps in Company of Heroes.
| FEAR, Q4, Lost Planet | Page:: ( 7 / 11 ) |
Quake 4
F.E.A.R.
Lost Planet
Notes
Seeing a laptop average 48 fps in FEAR at 1920x1200 with high graphics settings (soft shadows off of course) and 4xAA/16xAF is simply amazing. We were literally floored by the performance the Area-51 m9750 was able to maintain in that game. We have a feeling that Quake 4 performance is being held back by a combination of the driver, and it also looks like we’re CPU-bound. Regardless of the resolution we tried the frame rate was basically the same, and yes we did check to make sure vsync was off. You can also see that even on the battery, performance is similar to AC power, considering that the clock speeds are lower under battery mode, this is more evidence that we think we’re being held up by the driver.
| HL2 Lost Coast, STALKER, Oblivion | Page:: ( 8 / 11 ) |
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Oblivion
| Media encoding and rendering | Page:: ( 9 / 11 ) |
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9
DivX Converter
LAME MT MP3 Encoding
Cinebench 9.5
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 10 / 11 ) |
Pros
Performance: When it comes to performance, Alienware’s Area-51 m9750 is pretty tough to beat. The system packs dual GeForce Go 7950 GTX GPUs running in SLI mode – these are the fastest mobile GPUs on the market right now. On top of that, Alienware adds the Core 2 T7600 and dual 7200 RPM hard drives with 8MB cache running in RAID 0. Quite frankly, this system is more powerful than most desktop PCs!
Slim form factor and lightweight: Weighing in at just 9 pounds and 1.5” thick, Alienware’s Area-51 m9750 combines powerful performance with a chassis that’s still portable enough to easily carry. This is all pretty remarkable in our opinion for a notebook that packs so much power and a 17” widescreen display.
A competing notebook from Sager, the NP9620, as well as the Falcon Northwest FragBook DRX (which is also based on the same Clevo chassis) both boast somewhat similar specs, including a triple hard drive option, but they weighs over 11 pounds and are 2.35” thick, making them larger than the Alienware notebook
Durable chassis: With its magnesium-alloy chassis and hard plastic, Alienware’s Area-51 m9750 is very solidly built. Despite its size, the 17” display doesn’t have a lot of flex in it, and the system’s matte black finish is resistant to fingerprints and minor scratches.
While no one intentionally sets out to abuse their system, the m9750 feels like it can take it
Upgradeable graphics: Since it relies on standard NVIDIA MXM graphics modules, the Area-51 m9750 can be upgraded to faster DX10 GeForce 8 graphics once they’re available. Keep in mind that the GeForce Go 8700 isn’t a build-to-order option at this time, as it’s actually slower in 3D games than the GeForce Go 7950 GTX.
Alienware has told us that they will be offering an upgrade program for m9750 owners who wish to upgrade their system once faster GPUs are released by NVIDIA.
Audio outputs: Besides the obligatory headphone and microphone jacks, Alienware also provides an optical out and additional outputs for hooking up front, center, and surround speakers. For adjusting system volume, Alienware also includes a handy volume control knob on the side of the system.
Cooling: The cooling system Alienware has implemented does a remarkable job of keeping the system cool considering the power of the components within the system. Feeling the palm rest, keyboard, and just beneath the display you’d never know there were multiple graphics cards and hard drives inside, and while the underside of the system can get a little hot after a 90 minute gaming session, it’s nowhere near what you’d expect.
Kudos to Alienware for pulling this off, all while maintaining such a slim chassis.
Cons
Napa platform: With the debut of Santa Rosa a couple of months ago, Intel’s Napa platform will be slowly going away. Santa Rosa offers improved performance thanks to its 800MHz FSB and Intel’s Dynamic Acceleration Technology, which is helpful for applications that are single-threaded, better networking with the inclusion of the draft-n wireless spec, and supports better power management technologies. Systems supporting the Santa Rosa platform and its new processors are slowly becoming available as we speak.
Disappointing Speakers: While the 2.1 speaker setup Alienware has implemented is more powerful than what most laptops offer, we still can’t help but feel that Alienware’s speaker setup could use a little more work. ASUS’ gaming notebook line, the G2 series, uses a similar 2.1 setup but with better results. Fortunately the speakers on the Area-51 produced very little distortion, even at high volume levels.
As we mentioned above, Alienware offers all the audio connections you’ll need to hook the system up to a more powerful speaker setup.
Front-mounted optical drive: Fortunately this didn’t become as big of an issue as we initially thought it would be. We’d still prefer it if the optical drive were located on the side of the m9750 chassis though.
Value: With an as-tested pricetag of $4,309, Alienware’s Area-51 m9750 certainly isn’t cheap. And while we do feel it’s priced competitively against the other notebooks in its class, $4,000+ bucks is a lot to spend on a Napa-based notebook now that newer Santa Rosa systems are slowly beginning to ship.
Of course, in the PC market there is always something newer and faster right around the corner. By the time desktop replacement Santa Rosa notebooks as powerful as the Area-51 m9750 ship, we’ll probably be antsy waiting for the first 45-nm mobile Penryn CPUs.
Battery life: With dual hard drives, dual GeForce Go 7950 GTXs running in SLI mode, a 17” widescreen display, and Core 2 T7600 CPU, the 12-cell battery used in the Area-51 m9750 has the impossible mission of trying to supply power to all these components simultaneously. The fact that we got an hour and seventeen minutes out of it is probably a small miracle.
You really can’t fault Alienware on this though, short battery life is the price you pay when you’ve got such powerful components. If you absolutely must have longer battery life, we’d suggest dropping down to a single GPU and hard drive, and stepping down to a slower CPU like the T7200, which runs at 2.0GHz and still has a 4MB cache.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 11 / 11 ) |