*OFFICIAL* Alienware Area-51M R1 Owner's Lounge

Dell.co.uk (UK) have today the ALIENWARE 51M for sale with the "NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2080 8GB GDDR6 (OC Ready)" and "9th Generation Intel® Core™ i9-9900K (8-Core, 16MB Cache, up to 5.0Ghz w/Turbo Boost)"

and I notice, with despair, "17.3" FHD (1920 x 1080) 144Hz Anti-Glare IPS Display w/ NVIDIA G-SYNC + Tobii eyetracking technology"

FHD? In 2019 ? FOR £3,800 ?!!!! Seriously they want to sell to people that have never seen a 4K screen, and have never seen the colours on the AUO 4K panel - there is no other explanation!

I hope they release a 4K IPS 120Hz version soon. Fingers crossed.

 

No dark side of the moon for UK yet , I'll definitely be holding off to see what improved screen choices there are if any in the coming months.

 

You can choose the Dark Side of the Moon but only on certain configs,,, but they work out £200 MORE :S

 

You can spec a lower end model to the same as the £3799.99 model for £3,373.98... Alienware's pricing is bonkers

 

I can't find it, is it only with 2080 then? That would be overkill for me, the whole laptop is overkill for me if I'm honest haha

EDIT: Never mind I found it, and totally agree about the pricing, thats crazy.

 

Nice find. Funny how they had to use one of the least demanding games out there to show off it's power. I know it's popular, but seriously? Fortnite?

 

I have to agree.
I’ve never played Fortnite and have no desire to so I’m not even sure if those results are good or bad given the hardware.

 

When i play Fortnite (on 2560 x 1440P epic settings uncapped frames) i get 80/90 FPS. Also would like to now how the RTX performs against Pascal and if 2 cores extra (probably not) would make much a difference.

 

Just posted this on Zephyrus s x701. Maybe useful for comparison with full 2080. It should be better.

Source is from Indonesian Tech YouTuber.

 

https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/alienware-area-51m

FULL REVIEW + Benchmarks !!!

the laptop continued its commanding performance on our synthetic benchmarks, achieving 92 fps on Rise of the Tomb Raider, toppling the 63-fps premium gaming laptop average. Even the MSI Titan with its own RTX 2080 was no match at 76 fps. Equipped with GTX 1080 GPUs, the Aorus X9 and Origin PCEon 17-X notched 73 and 69 respectively.

When we ran the Hitman test, the Area-51m maintained its lead with 143 fps. It edged out the Titan (140 fps) while blowing past the Eon 17-X and X9, which tied the 96-fps average.

The Area-51m achieved 105 fps on the Grand Theft Auto V benchmark, surpassing the 75-fps category average. The Titan remained in second place with 91 fps, while the X9 (86 fps) and Eon 17-X (55 fps) settled into third and fourth.

On the Middle-Earth: Shadow of War test, the Area-51m produced 132 fps, topping the Titan (112 fps), X9 (99 fps) and the category average (86 fps).

As far as virtual reality, feel free to whip out those Oculus Rifts and HTC Vives. The Area-51m cruised through the SteamVR performance test, maxing it out at 11.

I was surprised to learn that the Area-51m comes with an integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU. When you're not gaming or doing some other GPU-intensive task, Nvidia's Optimus technology kicks in and switches to this lesser graphics chip.





3d Mark Firestrike
Alienware Area-51m - 23212

 

Spongy doesnt automatically mean they can be compressed deep enough. But I can only speak about the pads they used on the 15R3/17R4 because I tested thermal pads on these heatsinks. The old versions had the thicker white soft pads, but those where worse than the 0.2mm harder but thin pads.

All pads that I saw from Dell except the white soft pads had the cloth mesh inside which isnt great.

Another problem is that one of the manufacturers of heatsinks for Dell, sometimes do not remove properly the plastic sheets between the heatsink and thermal pads. Already experienced this in 3 machines myself and read some complaints about this from other users. Mostly of the GPU VRM pads.

 

This review lost all credibility for me when she neglected to mention a single negative thing other than price; she comes across as just excited a company sent her a laptop to review. She also said, "The refreshed Alienware Command Center continues to impress." That's enough for me, hahaha.

 

There didn't seem to be mention of temps of the CPU/GPU only how hot the actual laptop got in certain areas. Unless I missed it.

 

Heat
For such a large laptop, the Area-51m stayed pretty cool all things considered. That's due to the company's Alienware Cryo-Tech v2.0 system that uses a mix of fans, clever design and components to keep the laptop from overheating.



Towards the bottom of the laptop is a large cluster of honeycombs hiding several fire-resistant, liquid-crystal polymer high voltage fans. The fans bring in air through the bottom and expel the resulting hot air along the sides and the back of the notebook, away from where your hands usually reside. In addition to the fans, the Area-51m has a whopping 8 heat pipes and several copper fin stacks to assist with heat dissipation.

So I wasn't too surprised at the relatively cool temps after spending 15 minutes punching through the enemy line in Battlefield V. The touchpad measured 84 degrees Fahrenheit while the center and undercarriage rose to 102 and 106 degrees, respectively. It's several degrees above our 95-degree comfort threshold, but compared to other laptops in this weight class, it's downright chilly. And despite playing a fairly-taxing game, I could barely hear the fans.

After a brief cooldown period, we reran our heat test, only this time with a 15-minute HD video. This time when we measured the touchpad, middle and bottom hit temperatures of 84, 86 and 84 degrees.

 

I agree - just throwing the first one out there i could find that's all

 

Notebookchecks tests show RTX 2080 (Clevo 9700K) performs reliably about 20-25% faster in games than the AW 17 R4 with GTX 1080

https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDI...-Laptop-GPUs-Performance-Review.401266.0.html

 

Reading through this now, good find!

 

No doubt I'm still missing it but where does it mention the specific CPU and GPU temps during the tests? I can only see touch pad and udnercarriage etc.

 

No mention of temps, what a bunch of boneheads. One of the most important aspects and they simply mention external heat. Urgh

 

PC World tested the MSi GS75 with 2080 Max-Q....with RTX on in Battlefield 5 @ 1080p ultra and DXR set to ultra the performance dropped from 90fps to 45fps

 

RTX is a joke though at this point and time, why give up over half your performance? I always choose RTX off on my desktop

 

That review looks more like an advertisement for Alienware...

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

Other than the biased review the pictures of the system are beautiful, so excited to get my hands on it.

 

Yeah, me too. I'm anxious to see more reviews for the Area-51m specifically start popping up. I wonder why there's only a single one so far, even PC World didn't get one to review, hmm...

 

Just ordered my system. After having the AW17 full specced for a few months.
Decided on selling it when i saw this bad boy getting announced.

Specs on my config:

Alienware Area 51m CTO

9th generation Intel® Core™ i7-9700 (8 cores, 12 MB cache / 4,9 GHz with Turbo Boost)
Windows 10 Home 64bit, Engels, Nederlands, Frans, Duits, Italiaans
NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 2080
Dark Side of the Moon
17,3" Full HD (1920 x 1080) 144Hz IPS-beeldscherm with antireflectivecoating, NVIDIA G-SYNC and Tobii eyetracking-technologie
16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR4, 2400 MHz
512GB RAID 0 (2 x 256GB PCIe M.2 SSD's)
Killer Wireless 1550 2x2 AC en Bluetooth 5.0
Alienware TactX keyboard with AlienFX led-verlichting in RGB per key, anti-ghosting, n-key rollover, VS/Internationaal
Lithium-ion battery (90 W/u)
180 W power supply and 330 W power supply
Killer N1550 Wireless

Quite a few bucks, hopefully a unit without problems. I always get screens with dead pixels in them for some reason.... Thank god for Dells excellent support.

 

I think that may well be a paid review, but it was the first thing with some actual scores i could see on the net !

I did notice the firestrike score was lower than a 1080ti that clocked up a 30k score, so unless i am missing something the performance on this new machine is poor?

 

It's a bummer that I can go grab an RTX 2080 Razer Blade 15 on Amazon and have it get here tomorrow, but we gotta wait a few more weeks (if shipping delays don't occur) for the Alienware

 

It seems the 3DM Firestrike score is low.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/nvidia-thread.806608/page-169#post-10855249

 

Heads up y'all, looks like there's a component shortage for these laptops. I asked support why these are shipping later than other RTX laptops, and that was their reasoning. I spoke to the number they gave for more info, and they say my order of an i9 9900k RTX 2080 is set to ship Feb 12th, and that they got stock filled yesterday and production has resumed. I asked if other configurations are shipping sooner than my i9, and they confirmed that this delay applies to all configurations, not just the i9, so no other configurations are shipping sooner. Take that how you will!

 

For the RTX 2080 Max-Q

 

Nope. AW Area-51M have RTX 2080 and 9900K = 23212 vs. Schenkers 15 inch model with same gpu but with weaker 9700K (24142).

 

Oh, hmm...I wonder what the cause of that is?

 

I suspect a thermal limitation of the i9. The i7-9700K consistantly scores better in benchmarks and games with constricted cooling of a laptop. Otherwise 930 points difference is 3.8%. Which is within fire strikes margin for error

 

That's because Dell makes they're stuff to order. So every order is "Custom". Hopefully there aren't any delays as Dell has a habit of not saying anything and hoping you don't notice.

 

Going to be a while before we see tests with re-pastes and pad replacements.

I've learned to not take these kind of tests seriously.

 

Yeah I digested the figures.. They seem very low..

 

Hi there again. Two years have passed since the AW17R4 launched, i sadly had to give it back due to multiple shutdowns caused by the overheating SSD. Now i'm back and i'm very interested in the 51M.
Here's why: it's actually the cheapest RTX 2080 laptop i can get in my country.
I'm from Austria and with the exact same configuration (i9, rtx2080, 144Hz G-Sync, no ram upgrade, no drive upgrade), except for the drive (in the US 1tbsshd and here its a 256gb nvme), it only costs 2978,98€ compared to 3649,99US$. Additionally i get at least 10% off because i'm a student (possibly even more, i'll just ask them to refresh the 15%-off coupon they gave me when i returned the last AW). So it'd actually be 2700€.
The RAM and drives are way cheaper to upgrade by myself.

(The next best option are clevos but they're at least 400-500€ more expensive and i don't like their chassis.)

The only thing that's stopping me right now are the limited display options. I'd love to have a QHD.

Any ideas why it's that much cheaper here?

 

Are you a math student?

 

@c69k wheres the mistake? and no i'm not.

 

Go for both discounts.

 

@c69k i can try that but pretty sure they don't combine.

 

Is the 15% also student discount? Mate, do both.

 

no it's not but i think i read somewhere that you can't combine the student discount with any other discounts

 

Call them, it is a lot of money. (10% or 15% vs. 25% off 2980 EUR) Or at least get a free (memory, SSD, Warranty .... etc. ) upgrade.

See, if they gave you 15% for trouble with previous laptop, use it. And on top of it you are a student eligible for a discount.

Tell them you study, have to spend money at parties and have exactly XXXX (-25%) EUR.

 

Dont waste your money on the i9. Go for i7-9700K.

 

I'll try that, i could actually use the extra cash

The difference are 150€ not 350$. would you still go for the 9700k?

 

Does the heat-sink size depend on GPU or CPU. I would go for the larger heat-sink LOL

 

I feel that the RTX series is like the GTX 400/500 series where everything was underwhelming. And Ray Tracing performance feels like when Tessellation came in. But the difference is, Ray Tracing premium is much worse.