When you think about gaming laptops, you probably think high-end, bulky, RGB-laden devices that can break your back and your bank at the same time. However, what you probably don’t think of, is a device that lets you switch out its processor and GPU on basically a whim. In an era where companies are trying to make your smartphone replace your laptop, Dell wants your gaming laptop to replace a full-blown gaming rig. That’s what the Alienware Area 51m promises to bring into the mix of high-end gaming machines. We’ve had the Area 51m for a while now, so let’s take a look at what this gaming laptop (starts at Rs. 2,99,590) is like.

Nowhere do I love writing about specs as much as on high end gaming rigs because these just boast of some of the most insane specs. Here’s what the Area 51m comes packing:

Dell was kind enough to send us the high-end variant of the Area 51m to review, with just the storage being a 512GB NVMe SSD + 1TB SSHD, and 32GB of RAM.

If I were to sum up the design of the Area 51m, I’d say ‘think Alienware, but more streamlined.’ That’s basically my opinion of what the Area 51m looks like. It’s a very Alienware design, and that’s not bad, a lot of gamers like the distinctively unique design that Alienware brings to the mix, but Dell has clearly changed the design a bit and made it look a lot better than other Alienware devices.

Display

The display here is a 17-inch Full HD panel, with a 144Hz refresh rate and Nvidia G-Sync, which, if you’re buying a laptop at this price, are most likely things you care about and want. Anyway, the only complaint I have with this display is that it’s not very bright. It’s bright enough indoors, and might actually hurt your eyes at night if you don’t lower the settings, but outdoors, I have doubts about the brightness. Still, the display does have a matte finish, and is rated to be anti-glare so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Gaming on this display is awesome. I played all the games that I usually do on a gaming laptop including Far Cry 5, Battlefield V, and PUBG, along with Apex Legends this time around, and it’s really fun playing these games on this display.

Oh, the performance. Let me put it this way. A Core i9-9900K, 32GB RAM, 8GB Nvidia RTX2080. What do you think the performance is like? If you’re thinking “insane” you’re right. This laptop handles everything like a champ, and it doesn’t break a sweat running basically any game on the highest of settings. Even with Battlefield V’s ray tracing turned on and graphics set to Ultra, the laptop easily churned out over 80-90 FPS at all times, and I loved it. Setting the graphics to Medium resulted in even better frame rates of well over 100 FPS.

PUBG was basically a walk in the park for the Area 51m, with the laptop getting well over 150FPS in Ultra settings, and sometimes breaching 200FPS as well. Even with intense gunfights, grenade explosions, and a lot of smoke grenades, PUBG runs completely smoothly on this laptop.

I also put the Alienware Area 51m through some benchmarks, and it went through them with flying colors as well. In 3DMark Time Spy, the laptop scored a whopping 9,802 points which is definitely pretty awesome. In PCMark 10, the Area 51m scored 6,911. Clearly, the laptop is a heavyweight, both literally and metaphorically.

Keyboard and Trackpad

The Area 51m comes with a full sized Alienware TactX keyboard, which even though it’s not truly a mechanical keyboard, does manage to give a very nice experience. Typing on the keyboard is a great experience, unless you absolutely want a clicky keyboard, you’ll not have any issues with this one.

Note: Dell did not let us open the laptop, so we don’t have pictures of the internals here.

The Area 51m’s GPU is mounted on a removable module that can be replaced with any other GPU (as long as Dell sells it mounted on a module). The CPU, on the other hand, is basically a typical PC CPU. It’s locked into the motherboard with a very desktop-like CPU mount, so whenever you feel like you need to upgrade the CPU on this, you can just pop open the lock, and add the new CPU in. That’s it.

In terms of I/O, the Area 51m has everything covered. It comes with so many ports I doubt you’ll be able to use them all in a normal use-case. There’s a 2.5Gbps ethernet port, 2x USB 3.0 Type-A SuperSpeed ports, 1x USB 3.0 Type-A SuperSpeed port with power sharing, 1x Thunderbolt 3 port, an HDMI 2.0 output, a miniDisplay port, a headphone/mic combo port, a dedicated headphone jack, and an Alienware graphics amplifier port as well. Clearly, you’ll not run out of ports on this laptop no matter what you’re trying to do.

Speakers

The Alienware Area 51m comes with front firing speakers, and these are pretty damn loud. I really liked the sound from these units, especially thanks to the really well balanced output they have. The highs and lows are easily audible, there’s no crackling of sound even at highest volumes, and the speakers do seem to have a pretty wide soundstage.

Even though I found these speakers good enough for casual gaming, if you’re playing a game of PUBG, or if you’re playing at a more than casual level, I’d still recommend a good pair of headphones to go with it. These speakers are loud, but they don’t beat headphones.

The Area 51m is a beefy looking laptop, it has beefy specs, and as such it should have a big battery. Dell has fitted this unit with a 90Whr battery, and with that powering both the Core i9 and the RTX 2080, the battery life does take a major hit if you’re doing intensive tasks or maybe even playing games.

In conclusion, the Alienware Area 51m is definitely a power packed, feature packed gaming laptop that does everything you’d want a gaming laptop to do and then some. It runs every single game on the highest of settings, it has the latest 9th-gen processors, the latest RTX graphics cards, up to 64GB of RAM and so much more. Starting at Rs. 2,99,590, the Alienware Area 51m is a pretty solid laptop but it does have a lot of competition to cope with. There are laptops from Asus, MSI, and others that bring similar specs at a similar price as the Alienware Area 51m, but none of them bring the modularity, so the question is, are you willing to put your faith in Dell’s claims of a modular future for your gaming laptop? If so, the Alienware Area 51m is definitely not going to disappoint you.

Note: The Alienware Area 51m isn’t yet available to buy from the Dell India website, but you can check out the configuration and other details at the below link.