Thoughts
Alienware has come late into the game with its sleek desktop-replacement laptop that weighs in at 3.7kg. Pricing for the Area-51 m5700 models begins at £1369 and retail models will begin shipping in January 2006. Right now, then, the sample model is just that, and a £300 deposit is required when pre-ordering your chosen specification.Taking due consideration of the sample, Alienware has used a sensible array of components on the m5700. The 17-inch wide-aspect screen is great for watching DVDs and for playing games. There's little tearing and the image is bright and even across the panel, although not quite as good, subjectively, as Dell's TrueLife screens on its Inspiron XPS Gen 2. Alienware uses a slimmer chassis than Dell, and both house the excellent Pentium M CPUs from Intel, which offer a fine balance between mains-based power (especially gaming) and frugal battery life when in battery mode. Further, Alienware adds a distinctive feature by having a dedicated button to lower the laptop's speed and fan-speed, although we've consistently stated that it's already a very quiet package.
Where the Alienware Area-51 falls foul of the competition is with respect to 3D graphics. NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Go 256MB PCIe graphics adapter is no slouch, but the Ultra model, as specified by Dell, is significantly faster. The comparison Rock's Mobility Radeon X800 XT 256MB is faster still, so Alienware, pricing this particular sample at around £1800, really needed to out-specify the established hierarchy for DTR laptops. Matters would have been fine if one had the option of upgrading the video to the '6800 Ultra model, or even the more-impressive GeForce 7800 GTX Go, but that isn't the case. Another area of concern for a laptop that ships at this price is a basic 1-year warranty; we'd like to see 3 years as standard on such an expensive machine, and the accompanying bundle, should it stay the same for shipping models, is also rather substandard.
Alienware has had the time to see what the likes of Dell has done with its high-end laptops. Following on from that, it has also had the time to architect something better in the £1500-£2000 price range, and whilst the Alienware Area-51 m5700 has a number of decent features in common with the Inspiron XPS Gen 2 (now, incidentally, replaced by the similar XPS M170), which is still our current yardstick for measuring DTRs against, it simply fails to topple it. Alienware, then, needs to either reduce the price of this particular model by, say, 20%, or add-in a faster video card as standard.
The bottom line is that you can buy a similar DTR laptop from other vendors for less money. Alienware, whilst producing a solid product, hasn't done enough to wow us at the £1800 price attached to the sample model, and apart from a few signature touches, is too generic to standout from the crowd. Take away the laptop's badges and it could well be a Fujitsu-Siemens; both use the same chassis. Overall, then, good but not great.
Alienware Area-51 m5700
Alienware Area-51 m5700
