The Alienware Area 51-m is one of the most anticipated gaming notebooks of the year with powerful desktop specs and the ability to upgrade. It's arrived in our lab, and we're taking our first look at its insides.
The first review came courtesy of our sister site, Laptop Mag. It praised its looks, performance and upgradeability but found it hard to recommend its high price tag ($2,549). We'll take our own look at it soon enough and see if we agree, as well as run additional tests.
Before we start testing, though, we popped off the bottom of the chassis to get a look at the internals. We'll get a better look at its upgradeability later (you have to remove the cooling solution to get the the graphics cards, for instance), but it should give you a taste of what's inside this thing.
After loosening six Phillips head screws, you can see all four SODIMM slots, the SSD (underneath a heat spreader), two sizable fans, the hard drive and a 90 W hour battery. We'll need to do more digging to see just how upgradeable this laptop really is.
In addition to the Gigabyte Aero 15 X9 we've already reviewed, we have some other gaming laptops with Nvidia's RTX graphics on the bench, so we'll have more to bring you soon.