Lunar lander: Alienware Area-51 m5700

By Chris Stevens on 07 November 2005, 11:34am

Alienware has always steered violently away from the lower-powered Pentium M processors, but now it looks like its creepy extraterrestial eyes have taken a long, hard look at the size benefits of Intel's lightweight chips and decided to use them after all.

This m5700 is a 17-inch widescreen laptop, so it's not immediately easy to see where the 1.66GHz Pentium M has saved on bulk, but closer examination reveals a thinner body than the Area-51s we've looked at previously. While the m5700 may lack the gaming clout of its Pentium 4 overlords, there is certainly enough horsepower in this chassis to drive a hard game of Battlefield 2.

Interestingly, the m5700 supports dual hard drives in Raid 1 or 0 configurations -- not something we're used to seeing on portable machines. This means you can pack a virtually contiguous 200GB of internal storage into the chassis. If that's not enough to entice you, how about this: once there's an Alienware in over 50 per cent of homes, Alienware will switch on the masterbrain and enslave us all. For all eternity. Here's to Alienware! -CS

Update: you can read our full review of the Alienware Area-51 m5700 here.