Full Review
Features and Design Storage Networking Giant display More ports than Los Angeles The back has audio-in, Coaxial, 56K, S-video in-and-out, USB, DVI and VGA connectors.
The Area-51 m9750 is designed to do one thing and one thing only – be the most powerful notebook ever made. Though it’s a gaming notebook per se, it has the hardware to be competent in all areas of PC computing, not just gaming. Let’s take a closer look at its specs.
Ready to Dual
The brain behind the outfit is a dual-core Intel T7600 processor, which runs at 2.3GHz and is one of the fastest mobile processors available. It’s an Intel based “Merom” CPU, meaning it’s just like the C2D processors available for desktops, and has 4MB of L2 cache.
Dual-GPUs
What truly sets the m9750 apart from other gaming notebooks is its dual-GPU SLI setup, which pairs two GeForce Go 7950 GTX cards together for enhanced performance in games. Both cards have 512MB of memory, so in total there’s 1GB of video memory. The 7950 supports Direct X 9 though, and has been supplanted by the new 8700M GT, which is a DX10 part (and also available when configuring this notebook on Alienware’s website).
No hardcore gaming notebook would be true to its name without massive quantities of storage, and the m9750 does not disappoint with its dual 7,200rpm hard drives striped into a RAID 0 array . In total they offer 372GB of super-fast storage and file access, and are way faster than what you’d have if Alienware configured it with the much more common 5,400rpm drives. If you’re the cautious type, you can opt to mirror the drives instead of striping them for increased data safety. The difference with a stripe setup is that if one drive fails you lose everything. With a mirrored setup, everything that is written to one drive is written to the other drive, so in case one fails you don’t lose your data. It should also be noted that Alienware is now offering the m9750 with optional Solid State Disks, which are insanely expensive ($1,100 for a 64GB drive) but very fast and cannot “crash” like a mechanical drive can.
The m9750 is built upon the latest Intel chipset platform, code-named Santa Rosa. That means it has a Merom processor (covered above) CPU, Draft-N wireless, and an 800MHz front side bus. Out of all these, the only spec that is really of any interest is the N wireless, as it’s shown to be significantly faster than 802.11g. The front side bus can also dynamically down-clock itself to save battery life, but battery life is not something to be concerned with on a notebook with this much power since it will be terrible regardless of what the FSB is doing.
The 17” display on the m9750 is something to behold. It’s not only large and widescreen, but its native resolution is an amazing 1920x1200. Alienware’s “Clearview” technology is employed to make the display richer and more vibrant.
The sides and back of the m9750 have more ports than we’ve ever seen on a notebook.
The left-side sports a security lock, Ethernet, USB, FireWire, SD card and an Express slot.
The right-side offers a volume wheel, headphone/mic ports, 5.1 speaker ports, an optical port and USB.
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by Carraillo on February 26, 2008:
“The webcam driver also crashes live messenger if you try to access webcam setting from it and the 1.3 megapixel picture quality does not come through. That is my only complaint though, system restore works fine.” More...