Today we bring you a review of our second Alienware gaming laptop computer, the Area-51 m9750. It should be fun seeing how Alienware managed to enhance about the m9700 I tested back in June. You know it's going to be badass, so let's see if it is 'Darth Vader badass', or more like 'Anakin Skywalker in Episode III badass'.
Featuring an Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 processor with 1GB total graphics memory between the two NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950GTX GPUs and 2GB of RAM, you much better believe this laptop will spank fairly a lot any other mobile system you put it up against. Let's see what's what!
Measuring 15.65" x 11.75 " x 1.5" and weighing in at a really conservative figure of 8.50lbs, the m9750 is a little slimmer than the Aurora m9700 we had on the test bench a couple of months back. It's nevertheless a massive laptop, and most likely not your first option to lug about the subway. But, as everyone knows, these gaming laptops are much more desktop replacement than anything else, so most people will be okay with the truth that this baby most likely won't move as well far from your desk.
I must say that when I unboxed the m9750, I was a small disappointed I didn't get the same pimpin' color scheme from the previous model. I suppose the black is nevertheless cool, but not '1337' such as the Conspiracy Blue m9700. A couple of cool things Alienware included with this new laptop computer are its claims that the finish is both fingerprint- and scratch-resistant. These are two fairly cool features, and though I didn't spend a lot of time purposely trying to scratch the laptop, I did notice that fingerprints weren't really all that visible.
Again like numerous other models, embedded within the lid is really a raised alien head logo, with blue LEDs illuminating the alien's eyes. I'm nevertheless not a huge fan of the bright LEDs and wish there was some kind of switch to dim or turn them off totally. I guess it's not too shabby if it's facing your wall and you can't see it near the screen.
The m9750 also has a lot of Instant Access Buttons. These include shortcuts for programs including the Internet, E-mail, Windows Media Player, Power DVD, Windows Media Center, and also function keys for Play/Pause, Skip Forward, and Skip Backward.
The Aurora m9750's touchpad is of average size and consists of the scroll pad and one mouse button, though both left click and correct click were supported depending on where you pressed. The touchpad kind of reminded me of the MacBook Pro, but with that whole new-fangled 'two mouse button' point Apple is unaware of.
I didn't really care as well a lot for the touchpad on the m9750. As many individuals already know, I'm not the biggest fan of touchpads to start with (hello, Lenovo TrackPoint!) and this was no exception. As I mentioned earlier, Alienware made the laptop scratch- and fingerprint-proof, and to achieve this end, the laptop computer is covered having a texture that feels somewhat 'rubberized' for lack of a much better word. This 'rubbery' coating also extends onto the palm rest and touchpad, making it fairly unresponsive and clunky, and overall really slow to move. As such, I liked the m9700's touchpad better.
The m9750 runs fairly quietly under normal circumstances, but before you start to tension the system, it can get pretty loud!
I ran a program known as Orthos, which is based on Prime95, to stress the m9750 in order to see how warm you will probably have it to obtain. Wow, was I surprised! I installed Intel's Thermal Analysis Tool (TAT) which is a fairly great technique for measuring temperatures on Core 2 CPUs. When I started the TAT using the system at idle, I was amazed to see that each core of the processor was reporting 62 Celsius. That struck me as kind of high, but it wasn't until I began running Orthos that I truly saw how hot the m9750 runs. After 1 minute of running Orthos, TAT reported 80 Celsius. Within five minutes, we had been up to 83 Celsius per core.
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Writer of this Projeksiyon article is Asli Mana. For more information about Projeksiyon types look at our Sinevizyon sites.