Alienware Autopsy: Dissecting the Area-51m Gaming Laptop

[AndrewFreedman]

The Alienware Area-51m is the most upgradeable laptop we’ve seen in a long time. So we gave it the teardown treatment and removed the storage, CPU, RAM and GPU.

Alienware Autopsy: Dissecting the Area-51m Gaming Laptop : Read more

 

[rabbit4me1]

Come on give us something interesting please we seen this since Roswell

 

[charleshook357]

Wonderful article , really cool

 

[coolitic]

Ah, it's like going back to pre-Dell Alienware

 

[acelaya35]

As someone that works for an all Apple company, I LOVE this. I hate the fact that hardware in general is moving farther and farther away from user serviceability. Replacing the Voodoo Banshee in my Gateway machine with a GeForce 256 is what set me on this path to begin with. If that had never even been an option I have no idea where I would be today. This is great, and the fact that is coming from a high volume company like Dell, and not a boutique builder is even better. Dell could have turned Alienware into a label, like HP did with Voodoo but it's nice to see that they let that team stretch their legs a bit more. I'm not saying Alienware wasn't toned down by Dell but this project took some serious money to develop and bring to market, and Dell did it.

 

[Giroro]

I want to see that thermal grease replaced with liquid metal

 

[MetzMan007]

Had Question for the ya. I just ordered my Area 51m, but i ordered it with OUT a spinning 2.5inch drive, just with 2 x 512gb M2's. i was wondering if the 2.5inch drive bay would be able to fit the 5tb Seagate 15mm drive, i am guessing it would not be able to fit into the 9.5MM HDD cage but do you think it would actually fit into the drive bay. or would it better just to go with a 2 TB standard SSD. Just trying to plan ahead.

 

[AndrewFreedman]

Had Question for the ya. I just ordered my Area 51m, but i ordered it with OUT a spinning 2.5inch drive, just with 2 x 512gb M2's. i was wondering if the 2.5inch drive bay would be able to fit the 5tb Seagate 15mm drive, i am guessing it would not be able to fit into the 9.5MM HDD cage but do you think it would actually fit into the drive bay. or would it better just to go with a 2 TB standard SSD. Just trying to plan ahead.

I don't think it's gonna fit in there. Everything is in its spot, and that thicker drive will probably take up too much room.

 

[mrmeineck]

where is the second m2 slot? I appear to be blind

 

[mrmeineck]

aah. spotted it

 

[melvis72]

Reminds me of day when I had my XPS M1730 and switched the video card from the GTX 8800 SLI to the GTX 9800 SLI.