Alienware - Area-51 m5700 review
a laptop for gamers on the move
Review date: 03 January, 2006. Review by: IT Reviews Staff
As with all Alienware products, the Area-51 m5700 stands out in a crowd, although it doesn't shout "look at me" like many of the range, given its Xeno grey finish with contrasting dark grey rubberised grip areas. But you still get the glowing blue eyes on the Alienware alien head logo when you switch it on. Because it uses a mobile CPU with lower cooling requirements, the Area-51 m5700 is a lot thinner than its vast m7700 sibling.
The system we looked at came with a Pentium M 770 (2.13GHz) 533MHz FSB processor but you can save money by going for a slower one; choosing the M 760 2.0GHz saves you £172. Supporting the CPU is Intel's fully featured mobile chipset, the i915PM, and 1GB of PC2-4200 DDR2 memory in two 512MB modules to take advantage of the dual channel memory controller. This combination gives the m5700 outstanding performance, as shown by the Sysmark04SE score of 168. Alienware offers a choice of memory configurations; up to 2GB or down to 512MB.
Lifting the lid reveals a 17-inch Wide-XGA screen which is great for watching movies with its native 1,440 x 900 resolution. But to get the best out of any gaming experience it would be worth paying the extra £76 to go for the Wide-UXGA screen with its 1,920 x 1,200 resolution, as gaming is what the Area-51 m5700 does best.
This is because the graphics are driven by Nvidia's GeForce Go 6800 chipset which, until the recent introduction of the Go 7800GTX, was the number one mobile graphics chipset.
With 256MB of GDDR1 memory clocked at 300MHz (600MHz effective) and a core running at 324MHz, this is one laptop on which you can play most of today's games at high resolution, and with most of the detail settings on high. Running 3DMark05 at 1,024 x 768 resolution gave a score of 3,744, while FarCry at the same resolution ran at 60.6fps with all details set on very high.
To connect to an external monitor there is only a DVI port (no VGA port) so you will need an adapter if your monitor has no DVI socket. There's an S-Video port so you can connect to a TV. To go with the impressive graphics performance there is equally impressive audio performance thanks to the integrated Intel High Definition (24-bit) audio chip with its 7.1 surround sound support.
For storage Alienware provides a number of options: single SATA drives from 60GB up to 120GB (our sample had an 80GB, 5,400rpm drive) and dual (yes, if Sir wants two hard discs in his notebook he can have them), either in a pair of non-RAID 60GB or two RAID 0 arrayed 80GB drives. There's also a 4-in-1 Flash card reader and a new Express Card slot which is for the next generation of plug-in cards; at the moment there's only a limited number of cards that fit this slot.
As you'd expect with a notebook like the Area-51 m5700 there are several ways to connect it to the outside world; integrated V.92 modem, Gigabit Ethernet and Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 networking. Added to these are three USB 2.0 ports, three audio ports, a 4-pin Firewire port and an S/PDIF port.
When tested with MobileMark05 the Area-51 m5700 gave a battery life of 150 minutes for the Productivity test and 135 minutes for the DVD Playback test, which is about average for this class of notebook. Apart from the pre-installed Windows XP operating system, the only other software provided was a copy of the Battlefield 2 game, but the Alienware site provides plenty of other options.
Verdict
More subdued to look at than some of its siblings, the Area-51 m5700 is a highly specified but expensive mobile gaming platform which is just about light enough to carry around.
Company: Alienware
Contact: 0800 279 9751
