Alienware Area-51m
Price: £3,799 from fave.co/2uY3Lf8
Alienware’s Area-51m flagship gaming laptop is big, thick, and fast, a return to form that should reassure people who got worried when the company unveiled the thin-and-light Alienware m15 last year. The new Area-51m might be the first gaming laptop to bring the Holy Grail of features to consumers: upgradeable graphics and an upgradeable CPU.
Our review unit is the highest-end SKU, which starts at £3,799. For slightly more modest budgets, the lowest-end model starts at £2,199, which is nothing to sneeze at.
Surprisingly ‘light’ and ‘small’
If we told you the Area-51m was surprisingly light and small, you’d probably think we’d lost our minds. Naked, the Area-51m tipped our scale at 3.87kg. With its two power bricks, it’ll take you to 6.2kg.
Considering what’s inside of it (see our specifications list on page 43), it’s almost light. We looked around at a few competing 17.3in designs: some of them start at 5.4kg, and with power bricks will top 7.7kg. The Area-51m is, in fact, lighter than its predecessor, the Alienware 17 R5, which weighs 4.42kg. The company said it achieved this by using a mostly magnesium body that allowed it to shift weight from the body to the cooling components. The plastic bottom lid helps, too.
You may also be shocked to find that the Area-51m is relatively small, at least in width and height – 402.6x319.14x42mm. However, it’s almost a half-inch deeper than comparable laptops thanks to its signature-Alienware big behind.
What the Area-51m’s desktop CPU brings
There are two standout features on the Alienware Area-51m: the replaceable desktop CPU, and the replaceable GPU. First, let’s get into the socketed CPU and why it matters.
Once upon a time, most large gaming laptops used mobile socketed CPUs. Beginning with the 5th-generation Broadwell chips, Intel dumped socketed CPUs for all-mobile CPUs. That
