Alienware Area 51 Review

We rarely cover gaming rigs here at Pocket-lint, but there's something so iconic and, well, downright insane about the Alienware Area-51 that we couldn't resist. Or maybe the Greys have taken over our brains.

Far from flying in from a land far away and making its home in a US desert, the space-age Alienware Area-51 could setup base in your home, if you have the space and ego to show it off.

You'll also need money, as the starting price of £1299 will quickly escalate when you cram in all the top-of-the-line kit.

Every Area-51 comes equipped with a factory-overclocked eight core 4.0Ghz Intel Haswell-E Core i7 K-series processor, but you can build from that by loading plenty more in besides. Liquid cooling, DDR4 memory, Gigabit Ethernet, multiple AMD/Nvidia graphics cards, even multiple hard drives - it's all available here.

The two side panels to the Area-51 come off with ease for access to graphics and RAM on the one side, hard drives on the other. There's space for three full-sizegraphics cards (AMD Radeon 290X, Nvidia GeForce GTX, or even dual GeForce Titan Z) and up to 32GB quad channel DDR4 2133Mhz RAM to ensure mad-crazy power. Up to four storage drives can be accommodated should you need them too.

The six-sided shape of the Area-51 means graphics cards' fans won't be pumping heat directly to a wall should the Area-51 be positioned as such, instead giving more breathing space for those heavyweight gaming titles to bring everything to the boil without needing to worry. Except for your electricity bill, that is.

Front and rear ports are also easily accessible, as the Area-51 can be literally tilted forward - it's really heavy though - to gain access to the rear. There are eight USB sockets to the back, an additional two to the front making 10 in total. Blu-ray, SD card, headphones and microphone 3.5mm jacks also all feature to the front. If you want to go the whole hog with audio then a optical out to the rear can be synched to a system for extra boom in the audio department.The exterior also shows off Alienware's usual coloured lighting, which adapts based on what you're running, alongside the recognisable Alienware "alien face" logo. The black slatted front panel doesn't exude the kind of geeky cool of the side panels, but does its job just fine - it's plastic, after all, for keeping the heat at bay.

Seems like the Alienware Area-51 has got the power to abduct you and place you in a gaming world like no other… if you've got the cash to fill its innards with the best kit on offer.

Alienware 13 Review

Alienware is back at it, launching its newest gaming laptop. However, you wouldn’t think that this notebook is fit for fragging foes just by picking it up.

The Alienware 13 weighs just 4.5 pounds, which is impressively light for a gaming laptop. It’s also roughly an inch thick, so you shouldn’t have any problems wrapping a single hand around the body if you lug it around with it packed underneath your arm.

However, there’s a price to be paid for better-than-average portability, and that shows up in the Alienware 13’s specs. While the Intel Core i5-4210U 1.7GHz dual-core CPU that comes standard with the Alienware 13 may be sufficient, Alienware’s decision to include an Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M GPU in its newest offering is a bit disappointing. You can’t upgrade either of these components, so you’re locked into them.

The 860M is no longer a part of Nvidia’s newest series of GPUs. Recently, Nvidia launched the GeForce GTX 980M, and 970M. The former GPU offers impressive performance, equating to roughly 75 percent of the power offered by the GTX 980, which is a desktop-based card.

The Alienware 13 will be available with one of three displays, all measuring 13-inches. The standard model includes 1,366 x 768 resolution panel. From there, you can upgrade to a 1080p model, or a 2,560 x 1,440 screen. Keep in mind that, the higher you go up on the resolution scale, the lower your battery life will drop. Plus, the GPU here, which isn’t a top of the line unit, will have to push even more pixels, which will bring down frame rates.

The Alienware 13 can be configured with a 500GB hybrid hard drive, a 1TB mechanical hard drive, or a 256GB or 512GB SSD. There’s also an option to pair a 256GB SSD with a 128GB SSD. The base model Alienware 13 includes 8GB of RAM, but you can double that to 16GB if you wish.

Related: Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 review

Port selection consists of three USB 3.0, Ethernet, mini DisplayPort, and HDMI 1.4. There’s also a special addition here, dubbed the Alienware Graphics Amplifier Port. This connection allows you to plug in an accessory made only by Alienware that lets you upgrade the Alienware 13’s GPU with a desktop graphics card.

Windows 8.1 is included by default, but you can go for Windows 7 if you want. Power is provided via a four-cell battery.

On the plus side, the Alienware 13 isn’t exorbitantly expensive. The company’s latest mobile PC gaming rig starts at $999, but the amount you pay will depend on how you configure it. You can order it starting October 28.

Alienware 17 - Best gaming laptop

Overview

The Alienware 17 is mostly unchanged since last year which isn’t a bad thing; it keeps the stealthy design, great build quality, AlienFX customizable lighting system and excellent gaming performance we praised it for previously. This iteration adds AMD’s flagship Radeon R9 M290X graphics card to the stable, which goes head to head with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 860M and 870M offerings. The GTX 880M still rules the roost in raw graphics muscle, but AMD’s offering comes at a significantly lower price point.
Build and Design
Alienware notebooks make a strong statement when it comes to design; this is a package deal. Its stealth-like exterior has subtle but noticeable angles that create a futuristic appearance. There’s no hiding this notebook’s bulk, however; the Alienware 17 is nearly 10 pounds and just under two inches thick; a typical non-performance oriented 17.3″ notebook is about two-thirds the weight and thickness.
The AlienFX LED lighting system is user-customizable with multiple different lighting zones; the lid has two, the keyboard has four, the touchpad is one, the Alienware logo below is another the display and the final one is the strip around the chassis. Each zone can be set to a different color, to morph between two colors or be turned completely off. The AlienFX system can be completely turned off by pressing the [Fn] and [F12] keys simultaneously, a good idea while on battery to preserve power. Alienware debuted the AlienFX system in 2009 with the original Alienware m17x and we’ve been a fan of it ever since; it’s truly unique and keeps the ownership experience exciting.