A look under the hood
Laptop keyboards always look smaller than expected when set against chassis that take in 17-inch LCDs. There's ample space to rest your palms and forearms as you type on the smooth keyboard which has, subjectively, just the right amount of travel. The trackpad is responsive enough but the buttons directly underneath are a little too stiff and consequently require firmer pressure than we would like. A separate number-pad could have been included here, we feel. There's a button directly above the 'pad that disables its usage.
A further four silver-coloured buttons give access to email, internet, a media player, and, interestingly, a fourth button that controls the laptop's speed credentials. Unplug it from the mains supply and the Pentium M 770 will tick along at 800MHz (6x133MHz FSB) run off 0.8V. Press the speed-toggling button and speed is decreased to 660MHz (6x110MHz FSB), along with a slight drop in fan speeds but no change in voltage. It's a handy way of changing speed/noise profile at, literally, the touch of a button, although even at 800MHz and battery-powered, the laptop produces very little sound.
Alienware offers the customer a choice of only one screen size on the Area-51 M5700, that being 17-inch wide-aspect, but you do get the choice of resolutions. The sample shipped with a WXGA screen, that is, 1440x900 pixels, and, with an optional price premium of £76 at the time of purchase, you can upgrade to a WUXGA screen, with a tasty 1920x1200 resolution. Given a direct choice, we'd opt for the latter, although an interim WSXGA+ setting (1680x1050) wouldn't have gone amiss. The screen carries what Alienware dubs ClearView technology, and whilst its bright and even across the entire LCD, it's not quite as sharp as, say, the TrueLife screens from Dell. The screen doesn't suffer/benefit from (delete as appropriate) from the X-Glass/X-Black reflective coating found on Sonys and Rock notebooks.
Alienware adds in a customised GUI to give Windows XP Home SP2 a hi-tech look, and you have the choice of four skins that fall under the AlienGUIse banner. In terms of appeasing the gamer, the company has chosen to go with NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Go (non-Ultra) 256MB PCI-Express graphics card on the m5700 which chugs along at 325MHz core and 600MHz DDR1 memory. For the asking price of £1800 on this model, we would have liked to have seen at least the Ultra variant, clocked in at 450MHz core and 1100MHz memory and, quite possibly, NVIDIA's all-new GeForce 7800 GTX Go, considering that the m5700 is still marketed as a pre-order laptop.
Turning it over shows us that the various internal components can be accessed by removing one of two covers. The bottom holds four tiny speakers and a separate subwoofer that provide reasonable sound.
The smaller cover hides the laptop's hard drive(s). The sample shipped with a single 80GB Fujitsu 5,400RPM model with 8MB of onboard cache, but you can, as an upgrade, specify 2x80GB drives at the time of purchase, pre-configured in speedy RAID0 mode.
The much-larger cover hides all the tasty goodies. There's an all-in-one heatpipe-based heatsink that covers both CPU and GPU simultaneously. The small-ish fan rarely kicks into action unless the laptop is under long-term load, and thanks to the low-power nature of both processor and mobile graphics card, the Area-51 m5700 is one of the quietest laptops around. Alienware equipped this model with 1GByte DDR2 memory running at an effective 533MHz. However, taking into account the dual-channel nature of the Sonoma platform, we were surprised to see a single 1GByte module, instead of 2x512MByte sticks. We reckon this is an oversight on Alienware's part, though. Wireless connectivity is provided by Intel's trusty 2200BG mini-PCI card (which falls short of the Intel 2905ABG card required for true Sonoma compatibility), but there's no Bluetooth either as standard or offered as an upgrade.
The m5700 uses a 4400mAh Lithium-Ion battery that lasts for around 3.5 hours when the laptop is run in the mobile power-saving mode that reduces clock-speed to 800MHz
Software
The review model's software package may not be representative of the final bundle offered by Alienware. The system configurator offers a wealth of additional software, although the laptop simply shipped with Windows XP Home SP2, Nero SmartStart, CyberLink PowerDVD v6, and Kaspersky Anti-Virus. Alienware also included its AlienRespawn recovery kit and fUnc mouse mat, along with a Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer mouse that was, annoyingly, designed solely for right-handed users. This bundle, if carried on over to shipping models, will appear relatively light in comparison to other laptops that retail between £1500-£2000.
Warranty
As standard, there's a 1-year warranty on all shipping Alienware Area-51 m5700 laptops. The warranty includes 24/7 Free Phone telephone support and a collect-and-return service should the laptop require maintenance. Upgrades to 2-to-3-year warranties are offered with price premiums of £169 and £219, respectively, both including VAT. We'd like to see 3-year warranties built into the laptop's price at this top-end of the market, though.
