Alienware Area 51m Review | One Of The Most Powerful Gaming Laptop

Alienware Area 51m Review

The Alienware Area 51m review, this is one of the most powerful gaming laptops in the market. So let's find out what makes it one of the most powerful gaming laptop in the market.

The Alienware Area 51m is one of the most powerful gaming laptops currently available, With desktop-grade i9-9900K CPU and RTX 2080 graphics.

It should be able to run anything we throw at it, so let’s find out what compromises we’ve got to make for crazy levels of performance and who something like this is for.

Detail Specification Alienware Area 51m Review:

I’ve got the highest configuration available here, so Intel’s 8 core overclockable i9-9900K CPU, RTX 2080 graphics, definitely no Max-Q here, and 64gb of memory running in dual channel.

It’s got a RAID 0 array, along with a 1TB hard drive. For network connectivity, it’s got 2.5-gigabit ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 5.

There are a few different configurations available, such as with i7-9700 CPU, RTX 2060 or 2070 graphics.

The 51m is available in two colors, lunar light or dark side of the moon, also known
as white and dark grey, and I’ve got the latter.

The machine feels extremely well built and solid, and while there were no sharp edges the front corners were a bit sharp.

The maximum weight is listed at 3.87kg on the Dell website, though I found mine to be
more. My scales only go to 5kg, so measuring the 330-watt brick separately was about 1.5kg.

While the second 180-watt brick was over 700 grams, so all up we’re looking at over 6.3kg for this beast.

The dimensions of the laptop are 40.2cm in width, 32cm in-depth, and 4.2cm in height at the thickest point, so definitely on the larger side for a 17-inch machine.

Honestly completely expected given the insane hardware inside, though to be fair the screen bezels are still on the thinner side all things considered.

I’ve measured the color gamut using the Spyder 5 Pro, and my results returned 96%
of sRGB, 67% of NTSC and 72% of AdobeRGB.

At 100% brightness in the center I measured 310 nits with a 950:1 contrast ratio, so pretty decent for a gaming laptop, though I would have liked to have seen other screen options.

When it came to backlight bleed however there were some glow areas, though I never noticed these while viewing darker content, but the results will vary by laptop and panel.

There was minimal screen flex as it’s quite thick, and the with hinges out towards the
corners made it feel very sturdy.

As you’d expect from such a heavy machine opening it up one finger is no problem, and
this is despite it being way more back heavy due to the cooling, however due to the larger size it still felt fine, if heavy, on my lap.

The 720p camera is found above the display in the center. This is what the webcam looks and what the microphone sounds like with the fans at maximum, which is honestly how they’re probably going to run most of the time.

But seriously it’s because I wasn’t able to disable them after some changes I made but I’ll talk more about that soon.

Below the screen there’s also Tobii eye tracking, it was my first time using it and it seemed to work well.

Alienware Aria 51m Keyboard:

The keyboard has per-key RGB backlighting which can be controlled through the Alienware Control Center software. It’s got 2.2mm of key travel, and a bunch of programmable macro keys.

I liked typing on the keyboard, the presses seemed a tiny bit clicky, here’s how typing sounded to give you an idea of what to expect.

There was almost no keyboard flex while pushing down hard, the body felt extremely solid. I didn’t like using the touchpad, I often found gestures and sometimes press weren’t registering.


It’s got Synaptics drivers and physically separate left and right-click buttons so doesn’t click down itself.

For a machine of this price, I think a precision touchpad would have been better, granted for gaming you’ll likely be using a mouse anyway.

The touchpad does at least have RGB lighting, so there’s that.

Fingerprints show up quite easily on the matte interior but as a smooth surface they were easy to clean, but I’d expect this to be far less noticeable on the white version.

On the left from the back, there’s a wedge lock slot, air exhaust vent, USB 3.1 Type-C
port with Thunderbolt 3 support and this also offers DisplayPort 1.2, USB 3.1 Type-A port and 3.5mm mic and headphone jacks.

On the right there are two more USB 3.1 Type-A ports and another air exhaust vent on the back there are large air exhausts towards the left and right corners.

Then for the I/O from left to right there’s a HDMI 2.0 and mini DisplayPort 1.4 output, 2.5-gigabit ethernet port, Alienware graphics amplifier port, and the two power inputs.

The whole back also has this RGB lighting trim, which will of course come down to personal preference but I liked it, and you can customize the color and effects through the software.

On the front, there are two speakers found towards the corners.  They still sounded quite clear even at higher volumes and there was a little bass present, overall they’re definitely above average.

Here’s what we’re looking at with maximum volume and music playing, and the latency on results were looking good.

On the matte lid, there’s some A51 branding down the bottom and RGB Alienware logo towards the top which can be customized through the software.

Underneath there are air intake vents towards the back in this honeycomb sort of pattern, along with some rubber feet that could have done a better job of preventing movement considering how heavy the machine is.

The bottom panel can be easily removed by taking out just 6 screws with a Phillips head
screwdriver.

This gives us basic access to the WiFi card, two M.2 drives, four memory slots, battery and single 2.5-inch drive bay.

Everything else including the CPU and GPU
can be accessed by further removing the back plastic, and Dell has good guides for doing this available.

Upgradeability is meant to be a key selling point with this machine. As it’s using a
desktop socket the idea is that the CPU can be upgraded.

The potential issue with that is, at the moment the 9900K is the top of the line socket available, so if Intel stops using it next generation there’s no upgrade path there.

That said if you instead have got the i7-9700 model then you could go to the 9900K later. The GPU should also be upgradeable, at least in theory, we’ll have to wait and see.

Alienware designed their custom board for the GPU die rather than use the existing MXM standard.

At CES they mentioned how they were committed to this, so in theory we should have next-gen graphics options available,
but only time would tell.

I’d be skeptical of upgradeability and assume that nothing is confirmed until we see it.

At the very least though I don’t think we have to worry about it not having ample cooling and power delivery for future hardware.

Alienware Aria 51m Battery Performance:

Powering the laptop is a 90 Watt-hour battery. I’ve tested it with the screen brightness at 50%, background apps disabled, and all RGB lighting off.

While just watching YouTube videos it lasted for just 1 hour and 37 minutes, and this was despite using the Intel graphics, so quite a low result for this test.

I found the Intel graphics would be in use regardless of whether or not I disable G-Sync through the Nvidia control panel.

While playing the Witcher 3 with medium settings and Nvidia’s battery boost set to 30 FPS the battery lasted for 1 hour and 23 minutes in total, however 53 minutes in with 34% charge left the frame rate dropped down to 16 FPS until the end.

The battery is on the larger side, but with desktop-grade hardware don’t expect good battery life.

You don’t need to carry both power bricks with you, you can get away with just the smaller 180 watt one if you’re doing less power-consuming tasks, but for gaming at maximum performance you’ll want to use both.

I never noticed the battery drain with both the 180 and 330-watt bricks attached, and I had some comments asking me to test
ripping out both power bricks while gaming as some have reported their machines turn off.

I tried this both in a game at maximum settings, and also with the Aida64 CPU stress test and Heaven GPU benchmark running, however in each instance my machine was fine.

I can see why this could be an issue though, it’s using a huge amount of power under full load and removing that instantly could be difficult to quickly flip over to the battery.

But I wasn’t able to replicate that even with the GPU at 190 watts and CPU at 130 watts.

Thermal Testing:

Let’s move onto the thermal testing, as you’d expect with this level of hardware we’ve got some pretty serious cooling with massive heat pipes.

The Alienware control center allows you to run the laptop at stock settings, or also pick from two built-in overclocking profiles, 1 and 2, and these are the settings that each
profile gives us.

None of the profiles perform underwriting, they just boost clock speeds.
All of these tests are from combined CPU and the same time to fully load the system.

All tests were also run with the fans at maximum speed, but more on that later.

The Stress Test:

Let’s start with the stress test results, at stock down the bottom the CPU was thermal throttling at 99 degrees Celsius, as shown by the blue bar.

Simply by applying a -0.15v undervolted to the CPU we were able to drop the temperatures back by 12 degrees.

When we enable the overclock 1 profile in combination with the undervolted the CPU temperatures rise a couple of degrees, and the GPU also goes up by 4, if you recall earlier this profile also overclocks the GPU which equals more heat.

Stepping up to the overclock 2 profile which raises the 8 core boost speed by 100MHz we’re back to thermal throttling at 99 degrees.

As the higher tier overclock requires more
power I had to drop the undervolted to -0.075v to keep it stable in this workload, and then
when we add in the cooling pad we’re only seeing a small improvement to the GPU temperature.

The gaming results are a bit better comparatively in terms of temperatures, not quite as intense as a synthetic stress test.

Honestly, once we add the undervolted even the overclock 1 profile isn’t running that hot.

So I’d probably use it somewhere
around this level to keep it from getting too hot, as you’ll soon see we’re not getting much extra performance from the extra heat.

In any case, the cooling pad did at least make a bigger difference here compared to the stress tests.

There’s not all that much difference in terms of the CPU average overall 8 cores, maybe a 350MHz difference from the lowest result to the best result.

Rather than tweaking for maximum performance, with these specs, I think it will be more important to make changes to keep it running cool instead.

In the stress test at stock we’re hitting thermal throttling, so just a lowly 4.5GHz all-core speed on the CPU.

Undervolting allows the CPU to hit the stock 4.7GHz all-core turbo boost speed of the 9900K, and then with the overclock 1 profile with the undervolted we’re able to hit the newly defined 4.8GHz all core limit.

It’s worth remembering OC1 doesn’t undervolted by default, but basically if I didn’t undervolted.

The overclock profiles were useless in this workload as we were already thermal throttling at stock with the fans maxed out.

Applying overclocks isn’t going to help us out without first dropping those temperatures, hence the undervolting being essential to properly utilize the overclock 1 and 2 profiles in this stress test.

Though this would not be the case in instances like gaming where thermal throttling is not hit, though of course depends on the game.

The GPU also sees a nice clock speed bump here due to the overclock this profile applies, and then a little extra boost with overclock 2 which further raises the clock speed.

With the second overclock profile the all-core turbo boost speed is raised to 4.9GHz, however we’re only getting a little extra speed here as I had to lower the undervolted to keep it stable.

We’re hitting thermal throttling here, so this isn’t all that useful and nor would be adding more voltage, and the cooling pad didn’t help this out.

The game tests saw similar clock speed changes, though we were able to reach the full 4.9GHz all-core turbo boost speed with the overclock 2 profile here with 2000MHz on the 2080.

These are the average TDP values during these same tests.

The takeaways are that we’re using a fair bit less power when undervolting is applied, which is why we see lower temperatures,
less power equals less heat, which equals more performance when thermal throttling is hit.

Otherwise, the RTX 2080 was pretty crazy, spiking up to 190 watts at times. Here’s what we’re looking at with Cinebench, for context many 9750H systems are lucky to
reach 3000 points based on my testing.

Not much of a difference between the tests
shown here though. It was sitting at about the typical 30-degree celsius average.

With the stress tests going the keyboard area is still quite cool, and only getting to 40 up the back.

In the same test with the fan maxed out it was a little cooler, only a little warm to the touch and quite impressive when you consider that in this test the CPU is thermal throttling at 99 degrees.

At idle the fans were only just audible. With balanced mode set, it was quieter
compared to most other laptops tested, so you do have the option of sacrificing performance and thermals for quieter noise levels.

Even with the fans at maximum while it is loud I’ve certainly had louder machines with much weaker specs that still ran just as hot, take the Aorus 15 for example.

You might be asking why I’ve tested different volume levels of fans without also testing the thermals, well buckle in because have I got a story for you.

Essentially, the Alienware control center software is trash, or at least that was my experience while using the latest version during my testing.

You need it installed to use the overclock profiles and control fan speed.

Basically, with the software installed, during both stress tests and while gaming, the GPU power limit would drop every few minutes.

Maximum power was 195 watts but the minimum was about 40, while it’s currently sitting at 50 with a 390MHz clock speed.

This means that it thought it was operating at 100%, though the performance would suffer during these periods.

You can see the historical GPU load bar is essentially the same, but the clock speed cycles up and down during these periods.

Yes both power bricks were plugged in, I even tried a clean install of Windows but the problem persisted as soon as I reinstalled the Alienware software again.

The only way to prevent this from happening was to remove the Alienware of controls and control center software.

By doing this, the fans were stuck at whatever I last configured them to, which in my case was maximum.

I also was never able to reinstall the os controls no matter what I did, all sorts of errors kept coming up no matter what order I did things in, and I don’t have time to keep doing fresh installs of Windows.

Basically after wasting over a day troubleshooting in the end I decided it was easier for me to manually apply the settings of the overclocking profiles with MSI Afterburner and Intel XTU and just leave the fans at maximum so that I wouldn’t have these dips in performance.

I couldn’t find very many instances of this issue happening to others, so it could just
be my unit.

There was one guy who posted online who seemed to think it was an incompatibility
with having MSI Afterburner installed, however I confirmed this was not the case after my clean Windows install.

Just to be clear it wasn’t a reset, I tried that too, then after I downloaded a fresh 1903 ISO and installed it from scratch.

This was one hundred percent some sort of software bug, in the control center if I swapped between the different profiles while in a low-performance period it would reset the state and the power limits would boost back up for a while straight away.

So while it should be possible for them to fix this, this issue severely impacted performance in my testing to the point where I had to rage quit trying to use it.

However, I believe the data represented here accurately shows what you’d get from using the software overclock presets normally, as I manually set the same settings that those use.

Again this issue doesn’t seem that widespread based on the lack of other instances I was able to find, I don’t expect it to be the norm.

Overall I’m pretty impressed with the performance of this machine, software issues aside.

Yes out of the box with stock settings it does run hot, and thermal throttles under a combined CPU and GPU stress test.

However with some simple undervolting it was possible to improve this quite a bit.

You do need to undervolted it though to get the most out of it, as we saw due to the thermal throttling the stock all core turbo boost speed wasn’t being hit under stress test.

This means enabling the overclock profiles is essentially pointless on the CPU side until we can bring the temperatures under control, though some extra GPU performance was still possible from these.

Combining the settings with undervolting though gave excellent performance without the temperatures being too crazy, so it would have been great if Alienware could
have incorporated this into their default profiles, maybe in future.

A cooling pad didn’t help out too much here, even while thermal throttling clock speed boosts were not seen, though interestingly the fans weren’t crazy loud either.

Don’t get me wrong, 55 decibels maxed out is on the louder side, but it was possible to lower the fan speed at the expense of thermals and when you compare it to other machines.

I’ve tested that reach the same noise levels with far weaker specs I think it’s fair.

I’ve tested these with a customized
version of the overclock 1 profile, so higher GPU overclocks but also a CPU undervolted.

As this is an enthusiast-grade machine I think it makes sense to try and get the most out of it.

Game Testing:

Battlefield 5:

Battlefield 5 was tested in campaign mode rather than multiplayer. At 1080p even RTX
was playing alright, with 60 FPS averages still reached at ultra settings.

While with RTX off, shown by the purple bars, we’re getting much higher frame rates compared to other machines.

Stepping up to 1440p and we’re still getting results better than what most other gaming laptops can provide at 1080p, though the RTX results are now about in line with 1080p results from those other machines.

At 4K RTX is pretty much a write off regardless of setting level, however 60 FPS averages were still achieved with it disabled at high settings.

This game seems to cap out at 144 FPS, and we were able to average this at 1080p and minimum settings.

Stepping up to 1440p still saw around 140 FPS averages at minimum settings, while maxed-out was still scoring above 100 FPS.

At 4K minimum settings were still playable with above 100 FPS, however for some reason maxed out the game would chug badly and wasn’t playable.

So not exactly sure what happened there, that’s the only game this happened in.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Testing:

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was tested with the built-in benchmark, and as a CPU heavy
game seems to benefit well from the 9900K.

Granted at higher settings the frame rate isn’t that high, but the difference is clearer at lower settings.

Moving up to 1440p and the results are still better than most other gaming laptops I’ve tested at 1080p, very nice results.

At 4K the frame rates are much lower as you’d expect, however I don’t think this game needs a mega high frame rate to enjoy, so you could still easily play it with lower settings.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider Testing:

Shadow of the Tomb Raider was also tested with the built-in benchmark, and again it’s no surprise that these are some of the best results I’ve ever seen from a laptop, with 120 FPS averages even at highest settings.

Even at 1440p, again like the other games, we’re seeing performance greater than what most other gaming laptops can reach at 1080p.

Things drop off quite a bit once we go up to 4K, however 60 FPS averages were still
possible in this test at medium settings, with not much difference at high.

CS:GO Testing:

CS:GO is a game that loves CPU performance, and was tested using the Ulletical FPS benchmark.

At 1080p we’re seeing crazy performance for a laptop, well I guess it’s not a laptop when it will crush your legs.

Anyway, 500 FPS averages with all settings at minimum.

At 1440p there was a larger decrease at higher settings, however still above 300 FPS and not too far below 500 at minimum settings.

At 4K we’re still getting better performance
than most other laptops at 1080p, again because of that insane CPU performance.

Far Cry New Dawn was tested:

Far Cry New Dawn was tested with the built-in benchmark, and as a game that likes CPU performance we’re seeing quite high results for this test, with 100 FPS reached ultra.

1440p was still performing most other gaming laptops at 1080p, while 4K was still capable of 60 FPS averages at ultra settings, with not too much of a difference at lower settings.

Fortnite Testing:

Fortnite was tested with the replay feature, and as a game that runs on pretty much anything when we give it top-end specs we’re getting pretty crazy results, with 400 FPS averages at low settings and still over 200 at epic.

At 1440p 400 FPS averages were still achieved at low where we’re more CPU bound, while epic was still sitting comfortably at 130 FPS.

4K was still able to reach 60 FPS averages at epic settings and was playable, with much higher frame rates possible depending on how far you’re willing to lower the settings.

Rainbow Six Siege:

Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the built-in benchmark, and with a 1080p resolution
ultra settings were still able to reach above 200 FPS no problem, with over 350 at low settings.

The 1440p results were excellent too, still able to reach 150 FPS at ultra settings with
high 200s possible at low settings.

At 4K while the results are lower, it should still be usable without issue, even low settings were reaching 144 FPS.

Watch Dogs 2 Testing:

Watch Dogs 2 loves CPU power, so no surprise that we’re seeing excellent results at 1080p, with 90 FPS reached at ultra settings, and 100 plus at high and lower.

At 1440p high settings was now only just below 100 FPS, while ultra was still running extremely well without any issues.

Honestly even 4K ran alright for me, I find a stable 30 FPS in this game fine, so 32 for the 1% low is at least playable, though you can still hit 60 FPS averages at high settings.

The Witcher 3:

The Witcher 3 was tested with hair works disabled, and while it doesn’t need a crazy high frame rate we’re still getting one here, with over 150 FPS at ultra settings at 1080p.

At 1440p ultra settings were still reaching more than 100 FPS, so it was playing perfectly fine while looking excellent.

At 4K the frame rates drop back quite a bit, however, even ultra settings still maintained a stable 60 FPS in this game.

If you’re after more games, check the dedicated gaming benchmark video in the top right corner where I’ve tested 15 games at all three resolutions.

Let’s also take a look at how this config of the Alienware 51m compares with other laptops.

Battlefield 5 Testing:

In Battlefield 5 I’ve got the Alienware 51m highlighted in red, and as expected it’s Both the 1% low and average frame rate are significantly ahead of even the closest competition, this thing is literally on another level.

Here are the results from Far Cry 5 with ultra settings in the built-in benchmark. Again the 51m is way out ahead.

Even the 92 1% low is ahead of the average frame rate most of these machines can provide, with the average at least 30 FPS higher than the closest neighbor.

Once more there’s a significant gap between the 51m and the other machines
due to the crazy specs inside.

So as we’ve seen the Alienware 51m is offering serious levels of performance, which is to be expected.

It’s a thick machine with a desktop overclockable 8 core CPU and full-on RTX 2080 graphics capable of running up to 190 watts. 1080p and 1440p gaming was no
problem at all, while many titles at 4K ran alright too depending on setting level.

As we saw earlier we’ve got the option of making some changes to improve performance, so let’s see how these performance boosts translate into games.

Far Cry New Dawn Testing:

Far Cry New Dawn was tested using the built-in benchmark at ultra settings.

There’s bars, with the overclock 1 profile in the green bars, then with the overclock 2 profile in the red bars.

We can see the overclock 1 profile is giving us the best results, as by default the overclock 2 profile seems to push it too far and cause higher levels of throttling, still better than stock results, but again I think the overclock 1 profile is a good sweet spot especially if you undervolted it.

So who is a machine like the 51m for?

Rather than your typical laptop, it’s more of a desktop replacement that also happens to be somewhat more portable.

For the insane power in this form factor the trade-off is of course a much higher price and a thicker and heavier machine that is expected to run hot under load.

You could of course build a mini ITX system with the same specs for far less, so it depends how badly you want the one portable unit with battery, screen and touchpad included.

While I’m a bit skeptical about the future upgrade paths it would make this a good feature of the machine if Alienware comes through, I’ve just seen these sorts of things not work out so well in the past.

So to conclude you’re getting insane desktop levels of performance in games from this desktop replacement machine.

I wasn’t a fan of the touchpad and there’s more bleed than I’d like, but otherwise there’s not much else to complain about. With this hardware it’s a given that the machine will be larger, heavier, hotter, and have poor battery life, it is what it is.

Despite running hot, the fans didn’t get much louder compared to many other gaming laptops with lower specs I’ve tested, and with some undervolting we could improve thermals and performance significantly.

I would have liked to have seen higher resolutions than 1080p though considering how much raw horsepower we’ve got available, though I guess as a desktop replacement maybe they’re assuming you’ll connect a larger external display.

Still though a nice 120Hz 1440p option or 4K for those that want it would have been nice, as we’ve seen in my testing many games ran well at 4K.

While the control center software worked well for everything else such as customizing lighting.

It was doing something strange to my unit that severely kneecapped performance
while gaming, to the point where I just had to remove it to stop having FPS dips.

Though as what appears to be a software bug I’d expect that to get fixed, assuming it even actually affects anyone else.

I’m very interested to hear what you think about Alienware’s Area 51m gaming laptop
slash desktop replacement down in the comments, based on the price it’s more of a niche product.

So is it something you’d consider getting? Let me know down in the
comments.

Thank you for joining me and I'll see you in the next one.