CES 2019: Alienware Area-51m Is Out of This World

Alienware is pushing the boundaries of gaming laptops at this year’s CES with the reveal of their thinnest gaming laptop and an out of this world Area-51m gaming notebook that brings all the power of a desktop to a laptop.

A redesign to Dell’s Alienware’s flagship models was on the cards for a while and this mammoth 17-inch gaming powerhouse more than lives up to its hype, with Dell calling it “the world’s most powerful gaming laptop.”

This monster machine has an Intel 9th-Gen desktop processor — Intel Core i7-8700 (six-core), Core i7-9700K (eight-core), Core i9-9900HK (eight-core) — the fastest gaming CPUs on the market today.

It also contains Nvidia’s GPU, with options up to the most powerful GPUs for laptops: GeForce RTX 2080.

What makes this laptop even more special is the ability (and in fact encouragement) to swap out outdated tech for newer processors, hard drives, graphics cards, and more with clear instructions and easy to use screws provided.

This is revolutionary in a gaming laptop, but the run of the mill for most desktop gamers.

The Area-51m has a more muted style that Alienware’s previous flagship models, ditching the sharp angles for curved edges, thin bezels, soft RGB LED lighting, and light in weight — only 4kg — despite its hefty innards, thanks to its magnesium alloy chassis.

The 17.3-inch 1080p display ranges from a basic 60Hz refresh rate to 144Hz with Nvidia G-Sync plus Tobii eye-tracking hardware below the screen.

Alienware is offering single, dual, or triple storage options from 256GB to 3TB, as well as up to 64GB DDR4 RAM, as well as numerous ports for additional storage, graphics options, and more.

In order to keep the machine running smoothly, the Area-51m features numerous vents including hexagon-shaped vents on the bottom and is cooled by Dell’s proprietary Cryo-Tech 2.0, which is also used on the new m17.

It isn’t likely that battery life will be that fantastic — with desktop level components inside it stands to reason that desktop power will be required.

The Area-51m has a 90Wh battery and requires two power adapters to run at full speed, a second adapter is included with options up to 330W.

Pricing begins at $US2,549 and it’s slated to begin shipping on January 29th, international pricing and availability haven’t been released. Find more details here.