Digital Trends

Alienware Area-51 m9750 January 2nd, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We pulled the m9750 out of its box and were immediately smitten with its chassis. We’ve seen numerous Alienware notebooks before and have thought they looked a bit cheesy and plasticy, but not the m9750. We love the all-black exterior as it goes hand-in-hand with “bad ass,” and the smooth rubberized surface is totally cool. There are the obligatory alien eyes that glow blue as well as the molded grips that all come together in a package that looks fast as hell just sitting still.

We set it down on our desk and then opened the single box with all the extras. We took out the massive AC adapter brick and plugged it in. The system booted directly to Windows Vista and did not require activation, meaning it was not sent to us as if we were using it for the first time. It most likely was sent to other media outlets, as UAC was disabled, which is not how it is by default. We didn’t mind, as we have UAC disabled on our home system.

Since this is a gaming notebook, our first task was to get some games on it. Since its GPUs are a bit old, we decided not to punish it with Crysis, but rather loaded up some games we thought would run decently, namely Portal, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Bioshock. We then installed Fraps to see what our framerates were while playing.

Portal played like an absolute dream, which is not surprising given its sparse environments. We were able to run it at our LCD’s native 1920x1200 resolution and framerates were smooth and very playable. We averaged around 45fps, but it went as high as 70fps in some spots.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare ran worse, but was playable. We had to enable “dual videocards” and even then we had to play at 1024x768 to keep a consistently playable framerate. We could not get Fraps to work on this title though, but we started at 1600x1200 and kept lowering the resolution until it was playable.

Bioshock ran about the same as Call of Duty 4. We had to run it at 1024x768 and though our framerate was consistently over 50fps, it would plummet for a few seconds any time we entered a room full of water. After a few seconds of hitching it was playable, however. And though we could have lowered the resolution even further, we didn’t want to because of the terrible aliasing.

While gaming we noticed the system got very hot and the fans were angrily exhausting extremely hot air from the rear of the unit. The fans were loud too, and we could easily hear them over the games we were playing.

We installed nVidia’s nTune utility to measure temps, and the measurements we saw confirmed that the GPUs do indeed get insanely hot. Both GPUs idle at relatively modest temps of 61C and 71C. Yes, one GPU is hotter than the other, most likely because it’s close to the CPU or chipset. Under load however, we saw the cool GPU get up to 78C and the hot GPU get up to 93C.

One GPU was always hotter than the other, and it got up to 93C during gaming. Yowza!

We also tested the CPU temps, and they were very respectful for a notebook. The CPU idled at 62C and got up to 74C under full load. Yes, these temps are hot, but its par for the course on a notebook given the lack of space and relative size of the cooling apparatus.

Note that we aren’t complaining about the temps really, as the system was rock-solid throughout testing. Despite the high temps we never suffered a lockup, reboot, freezing or any behavior associated with over-heating.

Battery life

Of course, this is a desktop replacement notebook and is not designed – at all – to be run on batteries. Still, we decided to see what kind of battery life we could squeeze out of it. The results were interesting. When gaming, we got 37 minutes out of the battery. We then recharged it, and just shuffled some MP3s until the battery went dead 50 minutes later. One cool thing was when we charged it back up and turned it on it told us that it had saved our “state” to disk before the battery died, so we were able to resume our session of Windows with no hassles.

Audio and Media

The m9750 includes a pretty impressive sound system that actually gets loud. There are two speakers at the very front of the unit, plus a small subwoofer underneath the notebook. Though we didn’t hear thumping bass, the audio was much better than anything we’ve heard on a notebook before. Our only complaint is the volume knob on the side of the chassis has to be spun, and spun, and spun to make any discernable difference in volume. Going from max volume to low volume takes about 45 seconds of spinning the volume knob, which is ridiculous. The knob needs to be much more sensitive in our opinion.

There are also hookups on the right-side for 5.1 audio, including three mini-jack ports for center, front and surround speakers, which is cool.