Alienware Area 51m

[mid_gen]

Well, I've ordered the machine, and it's going to take a month to arrive. Not a good start, but I'd rather they tested it thoroughly (especially with the 3.06ghz p4). The support people have been very helpful as well.

Good so far, I'll be writing a full review once I've been using it for a while.

[Kulgan]

It's bloody huge!

K

[mid_gen]

True, but I'm not after a laptop as such, what I want is a 'mobile desktop'. The Area 51m fits the bill perfectly Damn thing outperforms my current desktop by fair old margin. Scary stuff =/

And...huzzah! just had confirmation from Alienware Tech Support that the Area51m BIOS does support Hyper-Threading.

I think I may just sit and spooge over two processors appearing on a laptop

[mid_gen]

And to confirm, it is bloody huge!

In fact, it's so big that my 17" Iiyama VM Pro screen is only 5mm taller than the TFT on this, and I'm talking viewable screen here, not the height of the laptop. It kicks ass.

It runs BF1942 nice and smooth in the TFT's native resolution of 1600x1200 with a little tweaking, ditto UT2k3, I'm well impressed with the performance, absolutely blinding.

Battery life is pretty dire, about 20 minutes with all the power saving gubbins turned off. Ah well, I wanted a mobile gaming machine, not a laptop, and that's what I got.

Love machine, delivered in a huge box with all the additional gubbins you could ever need (the logo'd everglide black attack pad was a particularly nice touch), and a nice solid ring bing folder with all the driver/recovery CDs and documentation. Class.

Thumbs up for Alienware, a class act.

[eclipse]

that does sound good. how big is the screen?

[mid_gen]

it's a 15" TFT, and like I said, it's only got 5mm less viewable height than my 17" Iiyama CRT

[Seahorse]

I think I may just sit and spooge over two processors appearing on a laptop

Does it still work now you have 'spooged' over it...