Alienware are fairly new to Australian shores, but for any PC-addict it's been hard to avoid their familiar little-green-men styling on the internet where Alienware cases are extremely popular among case-modding and PC-styling communities. They're finally here now, and the Area-51m 7700 is the first product through the PC Authority Labs doors.

 

Initially, our first impressions were infused with deja-vu -- we've seen this notebook before (albeit without the aliens on the case). It is, in fact, the exact same notebook chassis as last month's pull-apart, build-your-own notebook from TodayTech, the D900T (April 2005, page 38). The D900T was a monster of a notebook with high-end specifications but still some leeway to go, but in the hands of the lads at Alienware it's become even more monstrous.

 

This model features a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 (in socket LGA775), 1GB of DDR2, dual 60GB hard drives in a 120GB RAID stripe configuration, a 256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 6800 PCI-E graphics card and a DVD +/-RW burner with dual-layer disc support. If that's not enough, the 17in widescreen TFT has also be upped with Clearview coating (excellent for watching movies) and also now has a native resolution of 1680 x 1050.
Like America, everything about the Area-51m 7700 is big. Big specs, big speeds, big resolutions, big capacities, and most back-achingly -- big size and weight. It was apparent with the D900T and equally apparent with the Area-51m, that at 5.7Kg this isn't something you want to be lugging around for any extended period of time -- it's a notebook for picking up from point A and dropping down at point B as quickly as possible.

 

But, the Area-51m's specifications do put most PC configurations to shame, so there's a certain trade-off for the immensity. The only surprise was that the battery was able to keep this notebook going for over an hour before conking out -- something we did not expect at all given the notebook's power-hungry feature-set.
As with the D900T, the front-panel allows you to play CDs without booting the system up, and when the machine's powered down it has a funky and sexy blue LED digital clock. The lid is different too, with blue LED eyes that glow when the notebook's powered. Annoyingly, if you hibernate the notebook the eyes cycle from dim to lit and back constantly, and we found this aggravating in our peripheral vision.

 

At $5199 this is an expensive notebook -- but when you compare the specs offered to any PC you can buy and then factor in that this is somewhat 'portable', then it's not so bad. Fortunately, Alienware offers site you're able to dumb this configuration down to save money. As it is though, this is an extremely powerful notebook for the money.