The 2nd Best Gaming Laptop

Gamers will love this one.

Alienware Area-51 m9750

Today we bring you a review of our second Alienware gaming laptop, the Area-51 m9750. It should be fun seeing how Alienware managed to improve on the m9700 I tested back in June. You know it's going to be badass, so let's see if it's '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 better believe this laptop will spank pretty much any other mobile system you put it up against. Let's see what's what! 

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 Design

Case and Design
I have to say that when I unboxed the m9750, I was a little disappointed I didn't get the same pimpin' color scheme from the previous model. I suppose the black is still cool, but not '1337' like the Conspiracy Blue m9700. A couple of cool things Alienware included with this new laptop are its claims that the finish is both fingerprint- and scratch-resistant. These are two pretty 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 in the lid is a raised alien head logo, with blue LEDs illuminating the alien's eyes. I'm still not a huge fan of the bright LEDs and wish there was some kind of switch to dim or turn them off completely. I guess it's not that bad if it's facing your wall and you can't see it sitting in front of the screen.

Keyboard
The Aurora m9750 comes with a full size keyboard, including a number pad on the right, for a total of 99 keys. The keys were silent and depressed easily.

The m9750 also has a bunch of Instant Access Buttons. These include shortcuts for programs such as the Internet, E-mail, Windows Media Player, Power DVD, Windows Media Center, and also function keys for Play/Pause, Skip Forward, and Skip Backward.

Display
The m9750's display is very bright and crisp, just like the m9700. The contrast is excellent, due much to the 'Clearview' glossy coating of the LCD. Native resolution was 1920x1200 (WUXGA), which in my opinion is slightly too high for this size LCD (17') for daily use. If you bought this laptop primarily to game though, you would be disappointed if you didn't choose the WUXGA resolution. I realized after a few hours of use that every day tasks such as checking email or writing a Word document were a little tougher than normal because I found myself squinting on occasion to see the screen. Alienware must have taken this into consideration because they offer a 1440x900 (WXGA+) resolution for those who may not game as much.
The glossy coating definitely improves contrast and sharpness, but at the same time, there are many times where the glare and reflection is just flat out awful (which is mostly when using the m9750 in areas with high levels of light). I found that the m9750's screen looked best when gaming at night, with the lights out. It provided a very immersing gameplay experience with no glare and rich color.

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Alienware Area-51 m9750

Technical Details

• Series: AREA-51
• Model / Part #: M9750 Laptop LCD Screen
• Laptop LCD Screen Size: 17 Inches
• Laptop LCD Screen Resolution: WUXGA
• Laptop LCD Screen Finish: Glossy or Matte (Depends upon availability)
• Laptop LCD Screen Type: CCFL

ONLY   $189.98