3. Alien Dissection

The Area-51 m9750 comes with a 6.45 amp-hour battery. This is huge by notebook standards, but not so big when considering that this system has SLI graphics and two hard drives configured in RAID 0 mode.

SLI seems a little extreme for notebooks, but this desktop replacement isn’t exactly designed for ultimate portability. While it’s certainly lighter than many of the earlier models it replaces, mobile types still won’t likely want to lug one around an airport or educational facility.

The Area-51 m9750 SLI system uses two NVidia GeForce Go 7950GTX processors, each with 512 MB of GDDR3 video RAM. While the "Go" series is designed for reduced power consumption, one has to wonder if a desktop graphics core exists that could provide even more performance than two mobile parts without imparting a larger penalty in battery life or heat output.

All that graphics power wouldn’t mean much unless it has a powerful CPU to back it up. Alienware provided this configuration with a 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 mobile processor.

Alienware offers up to 4 GB DDR2-667 to support 64-bit operating systems, but our Windows XP Pro configuration included "only" two gigabytes. While this memory speed might seem slow to desktop users, it’s at least a match for the processor’s FSB667 CPU interface.

Added drive performance comes from a RAID 0 array of two Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160 GB hard drives, each at 7200 RPM. Pairing the drives in RAID 0 allows peak throughput up to twice that of a single drive without sacrificing capacity: the result is a total of 320 gigabytes of fast storage space.

Backups are made easy through a DVD burner that supports 8x single layer and 4x dual-layer speeds for both +RW and -RW media.

A Blu-ray disk player would be a nice pairing with the system’s high-definition display, but anyone considering the upgrade must add $600 to the unit’s price.

A final note about this configuration concerns the software, specifically drivers. NVidia’s stance on SLI is that one must use an nForce SLI chipset to enable it. We’ve known from the outset that this was a marketing-driven requirement and that SLI would support Intel chipsets with a driver hack, but we’ve never encouraged users to violate the driver license agreement. Yet here we have a large OEM using two NVidia graphics processors in SLI on a rather old Intel chipset, making us wonder what it would take to get the graphics giant to extend this compatibility to other platforms.