Laptops Arena

When you are on the market looking for gaming notebooks, you have to make sure that you are willing to spend quite a lot of money because these laptop have powerful components inside which can cost a lot.



The Alienware Area-51 m17x is one of the best gaming notebooks that money can buy. The starting price is $3849 but the unit reviewed costs $5899. The unit is based on a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X9000 processor and 4 GB of RAM. The total storage capacity of the hard drive is 500 GB and as for the video performance we can say that the unit has 2 nVidia GeForce 9800 M GT graphics card with 512 MB of video memory. The 17 inch display has a native resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels and it is covered is a glossy display which provides beautiful images with sharp and bright colors. Using this laptop in a powerfully lit environment could be a torment as glossy screens tend to reflect almost anything that is in front of it.  Aside from the integrated stereo speakers, this laptop also has an integrated subwoofer which means you can hear bass very well on this unit. Even when you turn up the volume, it could still cover a big room with no need for external speakers.

The fully sized keyboard is great and it also comes with a dedicated numerical pad. There is some flex registered in the keyboard area but none where the numerical pad is located. The touchpad is matte and it has a rubberized finish and it feel very pleasant to the touch. However, since this is a gaming laptop, it is much better to use an external mouse as your hands will get all tangled up during gaming if you have to use the touchpad and the keyboard at the same time. The selection of ports and features is always satisfying on a 17 inch laptop so it has to be even better on a 17 inch gaming laptop. The unit has 4 USB ports, an S-Video port, a HD TV tuner, an Express Card slot, a HDMI port, a FireWire A and a FireWire B port, a Kensington lock slot, an Ethernet port, an infrared port receiver, a SmartBay modular bay, a 7-in-1 media card reader and a headphones out and microphone in jack. Battery life is never too good on a laptop that has a Core 2 Extreme processor and dual nVidia GeForce graphics cards. This unit will stay on for one hour and 5 minutes with the Windows power management profile set to “power saver”. This is because the components inside will eat up a lot of battery life. The unit offers excellent gaming performance. Too bad it’s going to be difficult to carry the unit around and brag about it to your friends because the unit weighs 11 pounds. The fans are pretty loud and the keyboard does show signs of flexing but it compensated with the good selection of ports of ports and features.