best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

going thru the process, of reinstalling Nvidia drivers, my nvidia control panel , though can be seen in the Control Panel, wont open , so surround cant be set up on the 4 monitors, and i cant seem to find a way to uninstall The NVidia Control Panel and re install ..

best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

A 4k gaming monitor is a must-have for any and all people who want the absolute best in gaming visuals. A 4K gaming monitor boasts four times the number of pixels in a 1920 x 1080 display, and it allows for gamers to see the smallest details of games with incredible clarity. If you are serious about an immersive gaming experience, you"ll want a 4K gaming monitor.

Dell has always been committed to its monitor technology innovation and continues to set the standard. The Alienware 55 OLED Gaming Monitor is the world"s first 55-inch OLED gaming display, and it boasts a variety of features thanks to its iconic design.

Dell’s 4K gaming display is one of the best gaming monitors available. 4k monitors boast astonishing image quality and an "almost infinite" contrast ratio. These monitors immerse you more deeply into every environment and create a gaming experience unlike any other.

best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

For those new to Blur Busters, I am the co-author of a peer reviewed conference paper (along with researchers from NOKIA, NIST.gov and Keltek) on successfully photographing display motion blur which several websites have now adopted, including RTINGS, TFTCentral, SWEclockers, HDTVtest, etc.  The most prominent site of these, RTING.com, credits me (here, here, and in the Credit Screen of the below YouTube) for my invention in inexpensively photographing display motion blur.

Here is a popular TestUFO Animation demo of motion blur from persistence (MPRT). Click on the animation for a bigger animation. The background looks different depending on which UFO you look at!

For this optical effect, view this on LCD instead of CRT or plasma. If using motion blur reduction (e.g. ULMB, BFI, or interpolation), turn that feature off temporarily for this animation demo. Another great TestUFO animation is TestUFO Persistence-of-Vision.

Warning for flicker-sensitive people: There are other animations further down on this page that utilize flicker to demonstrate scientific principles of display motion blur behaviour.

Persistence (in milliseconds) is also known scientifically as “MPRT” in research papers (Google Scholar search). Quoted as a number, MPRT100% and persistence often mean the same thing by modern virtual reality scientists and newer display engineers. For example, Chief Scientist at Oculus, Michael Abrash, wrote a famous blog article that use the “persistence” terminology.

Motion blur on modern digital displays are reduced via strobing or black frame insertion (BFI) to lower persistence. Many LCD gaming monitors use strobe backlights (such as ULMB) that flicker at the same frequency of the refresh rate, in order to reduce motion blur.

Also, OLED screens used for virtual reality also do this type of rolling scan. This includes the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, as well as Samsung GearVR compatible smartphones. When a GearVR smartphone is inserted into a GearVR compatible headset, they run in a special low-persistence strobed mode.

Many newer displays, especially OLED displays and modern TN gaming monitors, have the majority of their GtG pixel transitions complete in a tiny fraction of a refresh cycle. This makes GtG an insignificant percentage of MPRT. Such displays exhibit behaviour that closely follows Blur Buster’s Law.

It is guaranteed that there can’t be less motion blur than this number, no matter how good your vision is. This is the motion blur you get when GtG pixel response is instant (0ms). In the real world, motion blur can be worse than this, due to finite pixel response. This is before any additional blur is added, such as GtG limitations (additional smearing/ghosting) or display source limitations (camera blur or slow camera shutter) or human vision limitations (natural motion blurring).

This is the Blur Busters simplification of the MPRT formula found in this scientific paper. We use MPRT100% instead of MPRT90% (in the scientific paper). A120Hz ideal sample-and-hold display with 0ms GtG has identical motion blur (MPRT100%= 8.333ms) as a 1/120sec photo shutterfor the same physical panning velocity of full frame rate material.

We preferMPRT100%at Blur Bustersfor math simplicity and to match human-perceived motion blur on modern ultrafast sample-and-hold displays. Whereupon 240fps at 240Hz perceives exactly the same motion blur as a 1/240sec camera shutter photograph.And it is also easier for blogs to calculate from TestUFO motion tests.

These are additional blur-like artifacts above-and-beyond the guaranteed minimum motion blur mandated by Blur Busters Law. See LCD Motion Artifacts and LCD Overdrive Artifacts for examples.

Just like a guitar string that is plucked, high-Hz strings are blurry while low-Hz strings noticeably vibrate. The same is true for display blur versus stutter — Blur Busters Law is simply a function of frequency.

For low Hz where the Hz is so low, the normally high-frequency stutter no longer blends seamlessly into display motion blur. If you stare at www.testufo.com on a common 60 Hz LCD screen, you will see higher framerates tend to show motion blur while lower framerates tend to stutter (vibrate).

However, once the stutter is high-frequency (e.g. 60fps or 120fps) the 60 or 120 stutters per second vibrates so fast, it just blends into motion blur. The “stutters-blends-to-motion-blur” effect is more easily understood in this variable refresh rate simulation, if viewed on a common LCD (non-strobed):

The threshold blending between stutter and blur will vary from human to human based on their individual flicker fusion threshold on the stutter vibration. Blur Busters Law for high frame rates (240fps) will tend to be motion blur due to ultra-fast 240Hz “stutter” blending into motion blur. While Blur Busters Law on low frame rates (15fps) will tend to be stutter amplitude instead of motion blur.

Even 1000 Hz PWM still unfortunately produces visible artifacts. We cannot see high-frequency flicker directly, but PWM side effects (stroboscopic effect) up to 10,000Hz are still visible (research paper):

Unfortunately, there are many situations where we don’t want motion blur forced upon us by the display above-and-beyond natural human vision blurring. This includes virtual reality headsets. Oculus and other manufacturers found that low-persistence reduces nausea in virtual reality. They cannot add additional motion blur without increasing nausea. So stroboscopic effects are currently the lesser of evil for most people.

This is why the equivalent refresh rate (e.g. 75 Hz) flickers a lot more on strobed LCD displays than on CRT/plasma displays, because you’re comparing square-waved strobing (e.g. ULMB) versus curved strobing (e.g. CRT).

We simply use use overkill BFI/strobe rate to compensate for the lack of flicker curve-softening (phosphor fade). Thankfully, 120 Hz square wave strobing (ULMB or LightBoost) still flickers a lot less than an old 50 Hz or 60 Hz CRT.

However, ultra-high frame rates at ultra-high refresh rates (>1000fps at >1000Hz) manages to come very close. This is currently the best way to achieve blurless sample-and-hold with no flicker, no motion blur, and no stroboscopic effects.

Also, real life has no flicker, no strobing and no BFI. Today’s strobe backlight technologies (e.g. ULMB) are a good interim workaround for display motion blur. However, the ultimate displays of the distant future will fully eliminate motion blur without strobing. The only way to do that is ultra-high frame rates & refresh rates.

The limiting factor is human-eye tracking speed on full-FOV retina-resolution displays. As a result, with massive screen 4K TVs, 8K TVs, and virtual reality headsets, higher refresh rates are needed to compensate for degradation of motion resolution via persistence.

the sweet spot for 1080p at 90 degrees FOV is probably somewhere between 300 and 1000 Hz, although higher frame rates would be required to hit the sweet spot at higher resolutions.

Higher frame rates are definitely better for visual quality. They also are power hungry, so it will take a while to solve that for standalone HMDs. I think 240 Hz/eye is a good short term target and agree with 1kHz+ for the long run.

Higher resolution displays:The same physical motion speed travels more pixels per second. This creates more pixels of motion blur for the same persistence (MPRT).

In the most extreme future case (theoretical 180+ degree retina-resolution virtual reality headsets), display refresh rates far beyond 1000 Hz may someday be required (e.g. 10,000 Hz display refresh rate, defined by the 10,000 Hz stroboscopic-artifacts detection threshold), and also explained in The Stroboscopic Effect of Finite Frame Rates. This is in order to pass a theoretical extreme-motion “Holodeck Turing Test” (becoming unable to tell apart real life from virtual reality) for the vast majority of the human population.

However, for general CRT-quality sports television watching, 1000fps at 1000Hz would sufficiently approximately match 1ms CRT phosphor persistence, for a flicker-free sample-and-hold display. Technologically, this is achievable through interpolation or other frame rate amplification technologies on an ultra-high refresh rate display.

The Vicious Cycle Effect also applies to stutters that are no longer hidden by other defects such as display motion blur. For example a 1ms stutter is an 8 pixel stutter-jump at 8000 pixels/second, which is a slow one screenwidth per second on an 8K display. Smaller stutters becoming human-visible again with extreme display and graphics quality improvements.

This will eventually be necessary for virtual reality, but also useful for huge wall-sized retina displays needing blur-free motion. It will take time, but fortunately, it is closer this century than many think. Experimental 1000 Hz displays now exist.  For example, ViewPixx has a 1440 Hz DLP projector for display research, and there are several other vendors.

Beyond niche/indie manufacturers already selling ultra-high-Hz today, we currently expect mainstream-manufacturer 480 Hz gaming monitors to hit the market by year 2020, and mainstream-manufacturer 1000 Hz gaming monitors to hit the markets by year 2025.

It will be challenging for graphics processors to generate the ultra high frame rates necessary for future 1000+ Hz gaming displays of the 2020s and 2030s.

Solutions are being accelerated out of necessity by virtual reality research. For example, Oculus’ asynchronous time-warping and spacewarp technologies converts 45 frames per second to 90 frames per second at low GPU processing cost via clever 3D interpolation tricks.

Dr. Morgan McGuire (NVIDIA scientist who agreed on 1000+Hz) wrote an article for RoadToVR about foveated rendering algorithms as well as real-time ray-tracing or beam-tracing with real time de-noising. This can be another potential alternative to ultra-high frame rates.

In addition, future lagless 3D interpolation technologies with geometry-awareness and parallax-reveal capabilities, may potentially convert 100fps to 1000fps with no visible artifacts for 1000Hz.

best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

Alienware came to E3 2017 packing eye-opening announcements, and none was more impressive than its upcoming Area 51 systems with AMD Threadripper and Intel Core X processors. These super-high-end configurations are, for many gamers, the definition of a dream machine. And we had a chance to look at them on the show floor.

Alienware’s unusual aesthetic has some functional benefits, as well. It allows a simple, straight avenue for airflow through the case, with intake coming in the bottom, and exhaust flowing out the top-rear. And plugging a headset or controller into the forward points, which are sloped towards the user, is easier than with most standard setups. It’s even easier to pick up the Area 51 than most rectangular cases.

Shape aside, the Area 51 is not overly boisterous. Its sleek, gray side panels don’t scream for attention as loudly as the tempered glass windows and sculpted plastic front façades found on some competitors. Still, the system does include a triad of AlienFX lighting on each side, as well as some touches along the front. These light strips can coordinate with other Alienware peripherals through a bundled software interface.

Alienware also displayed an Area 51 system stuffed with two Radeon video cards (no – they weren’t Vega). Gamers can order the rigs with up to two Nvidia GTX cards in SLI, or up to three AMD Radeon cards in CrossFire. Quad-card setups aren’t supported. At least, not yet.

Alienware’s Area 51 is among the most popular gaming desktops available, yet it’s also full of clever ideas rarely found elsewhere. Its massive, unusual case has practical benefits, and its internal layout is among the cleanest in the business. The new Area 51, packed with up to 16 cores, looks ready to conquer all challengers when it’s released in late July.

best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

The Alienware Area-51 7500 desktop PC packs quite a punch, even when it’s not stocked to the gills with every high-end option offered. Our test system represents a good balance between price and performance, making it a good pick for anyone looking to buy a new system. Read on to find out how the new P2 enclosure with Core 2 Duo water cooled system stacks up.

One of the icons of the gaming PC community is the Alienware PC. Sure, building your own system might be cheaper, and to some more fun, but nothing earns respect like a huge, honkin alien head for a PC case. The Alienware case has always broken away from the norm, and the most recent case is no exception. You want lights? You got 5 software customizable ‘zones’ of multi-LED goodness. You want cooling? Four strategically placed fans and CPU liquid cooling good enough for ya? Wanna make that case pretty? Choose from a variety of colors, all sporting no less than three alien heads. Now that’s style!

The Area-51 7500 uses the Asus P3N32 motherboard with two 16x PCI Express slots. The front mounted ports include two USB 2.0, one FireWire, headphone and microphone ports with backlit labels for easy access in the dark. On the back you have ports galore. 2 PS/2, Digital Optical out, Digital Coax out, parallel, eSATA, 7.1 analog outputs plus microphone in, 2 USB 2.0 ports and 2 gigabit ethernet ports. Internally, there are two 16x, two 1x, and one 4x PCI Express slots, along with two legacy PCI slots. There are four internal SATA on-board that support RAID 0, 1, 1+1, 5, and JBOD, supporting native command queuing. Two extra SATA connectors used by the Silicon Image controller chip. One odd side-effect of this is that in order to add an extra hard drive, you have to configure it to be recognized as a striped array of disk size = 1. There are 4 DIMM slots, meaning a max of 8 GB of memory, though Windows XP will only support up to 4GB, but at least this system is Vista upagradeable. There are two IDE connectors and one floppy connector.

The P2 chassis is truly an innovative leap in case design. Sure, it may take some getting used to, having a gigantic, glowing alien head as your office centerpiece, but once you get past the gaudy exterior, the engineering really shines through. The front drive door pulls forward, then rotates to reveal 5.25” bays with two overhead LEDs for lighting. The Alienware insignia on the door’s front side doubles as the power button. Below the door are the “always exposed” front mounted ports. The alien eye-like front grills hide behind them yet more LED’s and the 120mm intake fan. Along the side, as the ‘eyes’ stretch to the back of the chassis, the grill conceals two more fans. The rear of the unit has the water cooling output fan. Alienware has removed the cord management system found on the P1.

Alienware bundles two interesting applications with all their systems. The first is a limited version of ObjectDock dubbed AlienGUIse, which changes the appearance of the windows interface. Everything from window borders and fonts, to wallpapers, icons, and sound schemes can be changed. This version only allows switching between the default Alienware themes, which, while nice, add processor overhead and waste screen space. Uninstalling this was easy and resulted in no system problems. The second application is the AlienFX controller, which allows the user to customize the case’s lighting scheme. There are 24 colors to choose from and each of the five zones can use any color. Themes can be saved, and loaded later. We expect more enhancements to be one the way, as the “Advanced” mode is disabled and inaccessible, and the theme idea just wreaks of custom themes for different applications. One small bug we found involved the AlienFX lighting software. The software reports a time out in some cases when then system restarts without power down completely. Closing and reopening the application seems to take care of it, though.

Our system was configured exactly as we ordered it, and we had only one minor issue out of the box. The installed Nvidia drivers officially supported by Alienware were a couple versions behind the Forceware version. This wouldn’t have been a big issue, if only for the fact that the shipped drivers did not allow the video card to be taken out of SLI mode, as they did not support Nvidia’s new control panel application. This is required in order to drive more than one monitor, and our dual monitor setup wasn’t going to be put to waste due to a driver issue. We installed the official Forceware drivers and installed them. Upon rebooting, any attempt to open the Nvidia control panel resulted in the control panel crashing before it was even visible. In desperation, we uninstalled and reinstalled the driver in Safe Mode, rebooting between each step. This worked like a charm, and we’ve had no other configuration issues to speak of.

These are some impressive numbers. We ran all tests using the default values on a single monitor with SLI enabled. In real world performance, we have been running FEAR, Battlefield 2, and City of Villains at 1600×1200 with most sliders at maximum values, and we still maintain playable frame rates. We should also point out again that this system is not the highest end you can configure, but represents a second tier gaming system from the venerable PC maker. Needless to say, we were very pleased with the performance.

Simply put, the Alienware Area-51 7500 is an excellent all around PC worthy of serious attention. While a similarly spec’ed self built rig will run approximately $400 cheaper, it’s impossible to ignore the craftsmanship of the internal wiring, the unique bells and whistles, the fine configuration job, and the ease of a single source for support issues, should you ever have any. When the dust has settles, you will welcome our uber-gaming rig overlords, and their glowing eyes of pwnage.

best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

The first thing you notice about Alienware’s new Area-51 refresh is that it’s a freakin’ triangle. Yeah, you heard me right—Alienware is bringing its Area-51 desktop line back from the dead, and the thing is shaped like a triangle. Pythagoras would be proud.

But let’s talk the interior first. Underneath the hood, the 2014 incarnation of the Area-51 is a beastly machine. Alienware’s announcement matches up with some other news you might’ve read this morning—Intel’s new high-performance Haswell-E Core processors. The Area-51 has them, with both six- and eight-core Intel Haswell-E processors available. While many games still use only one or two cores and Intel’s four cores have been the standard for PCs in recent years, we can expect that to change now that both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are eight-core machines.

On top of that, the new Area-51 features up to 32GB of top-of-the-line DDR4 memory and support for up to three Nvidia or AMD video cards. We haven’t run any official benchmarks yet of course, having had only brief hands-on time with the Area 51 earlier this month in San Francisco. However, from the specs alone I can guarantee this is one powerful machine.

The system also features some standard high-end rig commodities: liquid cooling, nine different programmable lighting zones, and factory overclocking. The interior is surprisingly roomy, giving you plenty of room to upgrade components later (though you probably won’t need to for a long while). You also get an updated Alienware Command Center, used to both monitor temperatures and adjust overclock settings, voltages, and the like. It’s a relatively sleek presentation of something that’s typically intimidating to non-enthusiasts.

But back to my first point—it’s a for-the-love-of-all-things-holy triangle. I mean, not entirely. There are those little cut-outs at each angle which I guess makes it an awkwardly-shaped hexagon. Let’s not lie to ourselves, though. This is a triangular computer.

I can hear you now: “Are you insane, Alienware? A triangle computer? What, are you too good for rectangles? Four sides just not aerodynamic for you to reach top speed on the Information Superhighway?”

There’s a ritual in my apartment. It happens every day. Some USB device (I’m not even going to bother trying to pick one) needs to be plugged in, but my two front ports are occupied. I need to crawl under my desk, wonder why I don’t sweep under my desk more often, pull my computer away from the wall, search for an open port, find the cable again, and then plug my clearly-made-up-for-this-example device in.

No, but seriously, getting to a normal PC’s rear I/O panel is a nightmare. The Area-51, by contrast, just tilts away from the wall. You grab onto the top handle and pull forward, rotating it up onto one of its corners and allowing easy access to the rear. As an added benefit, the sloped front panel is also easier to plug into than a traditional vertical panel.

And what better to accompany this oddly-shaped computer than the first-ever 34-inch curved monitor—another new product from Dell, Alienware’s parent company, featuring a 21×9 aspect ratio and a 3440×1440 resolution.

The Area-51 is certainly one of the oddest computer designs in recent memory, and befitting of its name. Whether the thing packs the performance you’d expect from its (undoubtedly expensive) price tag, we’ll have to wait until units start shipping in October to know. If you’re in Seattle for PAX this weekend, however, you can swing by Alienware’s booth and check it out.

best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

When it comes to pre-built desktops, I’ve nearly bought an Alienware Aurora several times over the years, because the company’s toolless upgradable chassis and bang-for-the-buck has been pretty hard to beat. Now, the Alienware Aurora R11 and R10 Ryzen Edition have also become a way to get Nvidia’s extremely hard to find RTX 3080 and 3090 GPUs — and they’re like no RTX 3080 or 3090 you’ve seen.

The boards and cooling have been tweaked by Alienware itself to be shorter than any RTX 3000-series card we’ve heard about yet, at just 267mm (10.5 inches) in length, the better to fit into smaller cases like the Aurora R11. Believe it or not, Nvidia’s own RTX 3080 Founder’s Edition is actually one of the smallest cards on the market at 285mm (11.2 inches) long, and this is even shorter.

Plus, Alienware says its custom 10mm-heat-pipe-and-vapor-chamber solution, with dual fans, only takes up 2.5 PCIe slots. It uses a standard pair of 8-pin power connectors, instead of Nvidia’s 12-pin cable.

Of course, the new cards don’t come cheap, adding $825 to the base price of either Aurora, or an additional $1,625 for an RTX 3090. Still, you could walk away with a full RTX 3080 PC for as little as $1,800 — after adding the 1,000-watt power supply. (Dell ships a 550W PSU by default, but Nvidia recommends 750W or higher for these cards.)

Personally, I’d recommend spending at least $2,000 to make sure you’re getting 16GB of RAM and a solid-state boot drive, and I might drop an extra $100 for a faster CPU unless you’re pairing this PC with a fairly high-resolution monitor. I’m currently running a RTX 3080 in a rig with a slightly slower processor and a 1080p screen, and benchmarks suggest my CPU is what’s holding back the framerate.

Speaking of screens, though, Alienware also has a new set that might intrigue you, including three new gaming monitors and a new 360Hz 1080p panel for the Area-51m laptop that’ll cost you an extra $150. (It also requires an RTX 2060 or better; we’re seeing configs with it as low as $2,419.99.)

Meanwhile, the Alienware 25 (AW2521H), Alienware 27 (AW2721D) and Alienware 38 (AW3821DW) monitors will start at $899.99, $1099.99 and $1899.99 respectively when they arrive next month.

While their screen sizes should be pretty obvious from their names, they’re separated by more than a vast expanse of pixels: the Alienware 25 is a blazing fast 360Hz 1ms Fast IPS G-Sync monitor with a fairly standard 400-nits of brightness and 1080p resolution, while the Alienware 27 has a 240Hz, 2560 x 1440 1ms Fast IPS panel with 98 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, G-Sync Ultimate and DisplayHDR 600 certifications (though it’s rated at a typical brightness of 450 nits, FYI).

Then there’s the Alienware 38, a 144Hz, 3840 x 1600 1ms Fast IPS monitor with a 2300R curved screen, a 21:9 aspect ratio and 95 percent DCI-P3 coverage, G-Sync Ultimate and the same DisplayHDR 600 cert (and 450-nit typical brightness) as the Alienware 27. All three monitors come with a pair of HDMI 2.0 ports, a DisplayPort 1.4 (which you’ll need to use for maximum refresh rate), a bevy of USB 3.2 ports, and an ambient light sensor for auto-adjusting brightness.

The Alienware 25 had previously been tipped as one of four 360Hz monitors to support Nvidia’s new Reflex Latency Analyzer feature for what could potentially be a slight edge in e-sports, and as we predicted, it doesn’t come cheap.

best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

The Alienware Area-51 has long been the gaming behemoth that sits at the top of Alienware"s gaming desktop range. This year, the Area-51 has a radical and unmistakable new design that sets it apart from both its predecessors and its competitors. Officially revealed a few weeks ago in the US, we finally got to go hands on with the new Area-51 system with its eye-catching triad chassis at a hands-on event in order to bring you some first impressions.

Based on the outlandish shape, you might think the chassis led the overall design of the system, Alienware"s EMEA MD Bryan Joyce revealed that the shape was actually decided last. Instead, the chassis was designed with optimal thermal management in mind, along with improved ergonomics. It"s also designed to lean back and forth on its base, allowing easier access to the front and rear ports, which will be a god send for anyone who has struggled to find the USB ports on the back of their system.

The internal fans blow air across the components at an angle, while the angled back allows for a larger exhaust for the hot air to escape. For anyone who places their desktop close to a wall, this also allows greater clearance between the back of the system - letting the fans vent more hot air. Alienware promises the internal cable management will also enable maximum airflow. Gaining access to the internals should be a breeze, with quick release side panels held in place by clips. The storage drives are separated on one side of the chassis, which again helps with cable management and airflow. We discovered that the side panels are in fact interchangeable, so you won"t need to remember which panel corresponds with which side when you put them back on.

The chassis is a welcome departure from the boxy desktop designs of old and the system felt extremely well constructed. As usual you can customise the system"s array of LED lighting to your heart"s content using Alienware Command Center for up to 512 trillion colour combinations. Games developed using the AlienFX API can also control the lighting for you for added immersion.

The basic model starts at £1,299, but as you would expect you can configure the Area-51 to your liking. If you want the very best, you can specify the Area-51 with an Intel Core i7-5960X 8-core processor overclocked to 4.0GHz. The Area-51 will support triple graphics cards as well, as you can opt for three Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 GPUs, three AMD Radeon 290X GPUs or even two Nvidia GeForce Titan Z GPUs for a quad-GPU set up and these will allow the Area-51 to output a staggering three 4K displays. The Area-51 chassis supports full-length, double width cards so your upgrade options aren"t restricted and the Area-51 has a generous 1.5kw PSU that will accommodate most upgrades. The Intel X99-based motherboard will also support up to 32GB of DDR4. In terms of storage, you can opt for up to a 512GB SSD and a 4TB hard disk.

We came away from our time with the Alienware Area-51 excited. The chassis design alone was enough to get our attention but we"ll need more time testing to see what impact the Triad design has on thermals beyond just looking good. We"ll be getting a review sample in as soon as possible to put the Area-51 through its paces.

best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

Originally unveiled at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, the Alienware Area-51m gaming laptop has finally landed in the UK. And it’s made quite a splash, not least due to its massive bulk. This is one laptop you wouldn’t want atop your lap: it weighs nearly 4kg and needs not one but two chunky power bricks to run at its full potential.

Then again, the Alienware Area-51m has one big advantage over smaller, sleeker rivals: it is, by a huge margin, the most powerful laptop ever tested at Expert Reviews, and while it may not be light, it’s a heck of a lot easier to lug around than a desktop system. So what’s the catch? Well, do you happen to have a spare £4,000 handy?

Dell’s Alienware brand produces some of the most desirable – and expensive – gaming hardware on the market, and the Alienware Area-51m is its new flagship laptop. Its 17.3in display has a Full HD resolution and a 144Hz refresh rate, with support for Nvidia’s G-Sync technology and Tobii eye-tracking software.

The internal specs are even more impressive. The model I tested is powered by a desktop-class Intel Core i9-9900K processor (released in late 2018), with a base clock speed of 3.6GHz and overclocking potential up to a stratospheric 5.5GHz. There’s also 32GB of RAM (expandable to 64GB) and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU with a dedicated 8GB of GDDR6. Storage is split between a 512GB PCIe SSD and a 1TB hybrid drive.

The closest buyable model to this configuration of the Alienware Area-51m costs £4,000 from Amazon (or £3,999, if you want to get specific). That puts it well out of reach for most gaming enthusiasts. Even some of the most expensive desktops in our list of the best PCs don’t cost that much.

Admittedly, the Alienware Area-51m is much easier to transport than a PC. With a decently-sized backpack, you can take it anywhere. Indeed, it’s a lot more portable than the Acer Predator 21X, a ludicrous £9,000 gaming laptop that arrived at the Expert Reviews labs inside what appeared to be a bazooka case. It’s much more up to date too: the Predator 21X’s Core i7-7820HK CPU looks laughably underpowered compared to today’s gaming laptops.

In performance terms, the Alienware Area-51m’s closest rival is probably the Acer Predator Helios 500. This has a similar display to the Area-51m, and the model I tested came with a 2.9GHz Intel Core i9-8950HK CPU, 16GB of RAM and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics. At the time this made it was the speediest laptop we had tested, and although the Area-51m has now taken that title, the Helios 500 is far more affordable, as our review spec costs £2,300.

There are a number of 15in alternatives to consider too. The Alienware m15 (2018) comes with an Intel Core i7-8750H and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics, though at £2,450 it’s overpriced. Asus’ Republic of Gamers brand includes some solid contenders too, such as the Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701, which features a Core i7-8750H and RTX 2080 graphicsfor £3,200, and the £2,800 ROG Strix Scar III, which combines an Intel Core i9-9880H with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 2070 GPU. The Scar III is also one of the first laptops in the world to boast a screen with a 240Hz refresh rate – though whether you’ll notice any difference between this and a 144Hz panel is a question for another time.

With its imposing metal chassis, jet engine exhausts and ovular lighting, the Alienware Area-51m looks like a prop from a Star Wars film. But it’s not in a galaxy far, far away: it’s sat right in front of me and taking up a whole lot of desk space. Measuring 403 x 319 x 42mm (WDH) and weighing in at around 3.9kg, it’s as chunky as they come. The two whopping power bricks that are required to run the CPU and GPU at their full speeds make it even more cumbersome.

The model I tested came with Alienware’s “Dark Side of the Moon” finish, which has all the sheen of a cast iron pan. If you build your Area 51-m configuration at the Dell webstore you can choose the sumptuous, all-white Lunar Light colour scheme instead, but not if you buy from Amazon.

The “exoskeleton” (Dell’s term) of the Area-51m is made of a sturdy magnesium alloy that feels like it could stop a bullet. Sadly, the lid feels flimsy by comparison, and it features unpleasantly reflective bezels that border the 17.3in display. These can also be seen on the Alienware m15 and, as I said in that review, they’re a terrible design choice, looking tacky and distracting from the onscreen action. A webcam housed in the display’s forehead bezel can capture 720p footage at 30fps.

And let’s talk about those fans. For the Area-51m, Dell has created a thermal system that it calls “Advanced Alienware Cryo-Tech v.2.0”, which sounds awfully fancy and futuristic. This sucks in cool air through vents at the top and bottom of the base – you can actually see the fans working through the latter – and pumps out hot air at the sides and rear.

The usual array of heat pipes and finstacks also carry heat away from the main life-support systems. In day-to-day use, the fans can barely be heard, especially if the laptop is set to quiet mode mode via the Alienware Command Centre. However, switch to “Performance” or “Full Speed” modes and it’s just as obnoxiously loud as the Acer Predator Helios 500.

As for connectivity, there’s pretty much everything here that you could hope for. On the left edge, there’s a 3.5mm global headset jack alongside a 3.5mm combo jack; a little further up you’ll find a USB 3.1 Type-A port (with PowerShare capability) and a USB Type-C socket supporting Thunderbolt 3 and DisplayPort. Beyond the exhaust vent there’s a Kensington Security Slot, and two more USB 3.1 Type-A ports can be found on the right edge.

Around the back, meanwhile, sit HDMI 2.0 and mini-DisplayPort sockets, one Killer-branded Gigabit Ethernet port and a connector for an Alienware Graphics Amplifier – although with a top-spec system there’s really no need to add an external GPU. Finally, next to this are the dual DC power inputs for the Area-51m’s two power adapters. The alluring ovular lighting that surrounds the rear vents can be customised using the supplied AlienwareFX software, along with the glowing Alien head logos on the lid and base.

Gaming laptop keyboards are a tricky thing. For this one, Dell has come up with a chiclet-style version of the Alienware “TactX” keyboard design, with a full set of keys, including a number pad on the right-hand side and a column of programmable shortcut keys at the left. I get the idea, but this doesn’t seem like a natural place for them: I found myself looking down a lot just to check I wasn’t hitting these instead of the Shift and Ctrl keys.

Action-wise, each key has exactly 2.2mm of travel and elicits a satisfying clunk when pressed. Beneath, a steel back plate makes typing reassuringly solid right across the board. However, I don’t like the lack of spacing between keys: they’re so close together that you can’t even slot a credit card between the gaps. It’s all right for gaming, but I’d prefer a bit more separation between keys to help avoid accidental presses.

The keyboard also features per-key RGB lighting, customisable through the Alienware Command Centre. And I mean customisable: if you want to (and I don’t know why you would), you can set every single a key to a different colour. More practically, you can set the colours to highlight your most-used gaming keys, such as WASD.

Colour coverage is solid, with the Area-51m’s panel producing 94.6% of the sRGB gamut. Gamut volume is at 98%, which indicates a high level of overlap with the sRGB colour space that’s used for web content and most PC apps. Colour accuracy is less impressive though, with our display calibrator detecting an average Delta E of 1.99 – not up to scratch for professional-level video and photo editing. In particular, the panel has trouble with almost all shades of grey, and some shades of blue and purple.

Another letdown is contrast, which I measured at an unusually low 739:1. That means everything looks very slightly washed out; for comparison, the Alienware m15, Razer Blade 15 (2018) and Asus ROG Zephyrus S GX701 all have contrast ratios of around 1,400, and you can immediately see the difference. The panel’s maximum luminance of 324cd/m2 isn’t exceptional either: it’s bright enough for indoor conditions but if you’re playing beside a window on a sunny day, you’ll have to shut those curtains.

It can also enhance gaming experiences, and there’s a growing list of Tobii-compatible games out there. I tried IO Interactive’s Hitman (2016), which lets you control your field of view and aim at targets using only your eyes. At first it felt counter-intuitive, but after a few minutes I was comfortable with the way the camera tracked my gaze, and my colleagues thoroughly enjoyed watching me attempt to throw a hammer into a bin without moving the mouse. (I got it in on the third attempt if you must know.)

Another useful feature is “Clean UI”, which makes HUD details such as the mini-map transparent when your attention is focused elsewhere, only highlighting them when you’re looking at them. Other Tobii-enabled games use the technology in different ways: check out this video of Tom Ghost Recon: Wildlands from Tobii’s YouTube channel for a great example of Tobii eye-tracking in action.

If you’re into the more competitive aspect of gaming then there’s even a Tobii Game Analyzer, which monitors your eye movements in games like PUBG and DOTA 2 and provides insights to help you improve your gaming habits. Right now there are five laptops on the market with Tobii eye-tracking, and I hope to see that list grow, because it’s a neat feature and a lot of fun to play with.

Using the Alienware Command Centre you can even overclock it to 5.5GHz – but I don’t recommend this, because at this speed I found that all cores hit 100°C in less than five minutes. They then had to throttle down, leading to an overall decrease in CPU performance and frame rates. At any rate, the stock speeds deliver incredible performance without overheating; just remember that, to achieve its full potential, the laptop must be powered by both its power bricks.

It’s a record-breaker in terms of gaming results too. With its Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, the Area-51m raced through the 1080p Metro: Last Light benchmark on high settings at an average of 213fps – absolutely smashing the 155fps record previously held by the Zephyrus S GX701. In practice the panel’s refresh rate limits actual gaming performance to 144fps, but it’s an unarguable demonstration of the hardware’s capabilities compared to the competition.

To really put the Alienware Area-51m through its paces, I needed to find a more taxing game. After some digging, I settled on Hitman 2 – making this the second time Agent 47 has cropped up in this review! Released in 2018, Hitman 2 is ranked as one of the most demanding titles in the world by GameDebate and it also happens to have an in-game benchmark mode, a feature seen all too rarely in Triple-A games.

While not quite so outstanding as the CPU and graphics hardware, the Alienware’s 512GB PCIe SSD is a speedy performer. The AS SSD testing tool reported sequential read speeds of 2,152MB/sec and write speeds of 920MB/sec – good scores for a laptop. Performance will naturally be a lot slower on the 1TB secondary drive, but it has an 8GB cache that should help responsiveness.

There’s just one area where the Area-51m falls short: predictably enough, it’s in the battery department. On a full charge, and with the laptop set to its balanced performance mode, it gave me just 2hrs 20mins of video playback. Still, that’s not the worst result we’ve seen from a gaming laptop: the Predator 21X barely passed the one-hour mark. And there’s little reason why you’d be using the Alienware Area-51m in its unplugged state anyway – you’re hardly going to pop it open on the bus to take care of a few emails.

If you were gifted £4,000 by a benevolent but eccentric millionaire, on the condition that you were only allowed to spend it on a brand new gaming laptop, then the Alienware Area-51m would certainly deserve serious consideration. That’s a fairly specific set of circumstances, though, and if you don’t happen to be in such a lucky position this may not be the laptop for you.

More to the point, it’s extremely expensive. There are plenty of much cheaper gaming laptops out there that will deliver a great gaming experience without wiping out your life’s savings – and most of them are a lot more portable too. For that reason, I can’t recommend buying the Alienware Area-51m. Even so, if you can comfortably afford one... well, why not?

best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

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best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

In theory, the Dell AW3423DW has incredible reflection handling. It handles dim light sources well, and unlike other glossy screens, there aren"t any distracting reflections from strong light sources. However, bright light sources distort the reflections, as you can see in the bottom photo, and bright light sources affect the monitor"s performance. The OLED panel doesn"t have a polarizing layer, resulting in blacks having a pink tint when you have the display in a bright room. It also raises the black levels, effectively removing the near-infinite contrast OLEDs have, and if that bothers you, check out the LG 42 C2 OLED.

You can see what it looks like next to the LG 48 C1 OLED (left) and the ViewSonic XG2431 (right) here and you can tell that the Dell Alienware AW3423DW has a purple screen even when it"s off. Below are photos of the AW3423DW (left) and the XG2431 (right) displaying black images in bright and dark rooms:

For comparison, we also measured the black level in a bright room on the AW3423DW as 2.83 nits. The black level on the IPS panel of the Dell S2721QS is 2.31 nits, which means that the black level is actually look worse on the Dell AW3423DW than on other IPS monitors in bright rooms. Both of these monitors were measured in the same bright room with the screen on. All in all, the monitor performs best in dark rooms and the picture quality is worse in bright rooms.

best lcd monitors for alienware area51 free sample

Alienware has finally released the system, and its performance in CNET Labs more than lived up to expectations. Our review system included a host of upgrades that more than double the baseline model"s price and we can"t help but wish that a $4,000-plus laptop would have a slightly more sophisticated look. (Alienware"s occasional tweaks to its plastic, alien-head design haven"t gone nearly far enough.) Another oddity--Alienware insisted on providing the system with Windows XP, saying Vista video card drivers weren"t yet able to provide the optimal experience (although the Alienware Web site recommends Vista Ultimate). Still, this highly configurable system is great for hardcore gamers who want to ditch the desktop, and even better, it only costs about $200 more than the best Dell XPS M1710 we could configure, which lacked the dual video cards and had a lower screen resolution.

The Area-51 m9750 doesn"t stray too far from the typical Alienware design aesthetic. The familiar glowing alien head and ridges are on the back of the lid, the rest of the body is squared-off and chunky. A sleek, sophisticated desktop replacement, this is not. Lest you think a larger laptop can"t look good, HP has some excellent examples in the 20-inch HDX and 17-inch Pavilion dv9500t.

One design feature we liked was the Area-51 m9750"s matte black finish. Glossy laptops are fingerprint magnets, and we"ve always thought matte finishes looked cleaner and more upscale. Alienware calls the finish Stealth Black and promotes its scratch-resistant properties.

The laptop"s body is large enough to fit a full-size keyboard and separate number pad, along with a generous touchpad. The wrist-rest area may be the largest we"ve ever seen, but it almost pushes the keyboard too far back--there"s a full 5.5 inches from the front edge of the laptop to the bottom of the keyboard. It took a little getting used to, and some users may find it uncomfortable. A Webcam sits above the screen, and a series of touch-sensitive media control and quick-launch buttons reside above the keyboard, but the volume control is shunted off to a small wheel on the left side of the system--we"d much prefer a volume control somewhere on the keyboard-tray surface.

The 17-inch wide-screen LCD display offers a 1,920x1,200 native resolution, which is higher than the standard 1,600x1,200 resolution for a screen this size. That means that onscreen text and icons are extremely tiny, but also that you can fire up video games at superhigh resolutions. A lower 1,440x900 display is also available at a discount of $300. The screen looked great, with excellent detail, but lately we"ve soured on glossy screen coatings, finding the glare from ambient lighting distracting.

Including 802.11n Wi-Fi technology is almost a given for all but the cheapest laptops these days, but the system lacks mobile broadband, another feature we"ve become used to seeing. Still, gamers aren"t likely to trust their online matches to a slower EV-DO connection, so we"re not overly concerned by its absence, and besides, you"ll probably be at home on your local Wi-Fi network most of the time anyway.

As is typical for Alienware systems, the audio and video options are excellent, providing standard three-plug surround sound audio connections, along with an optical audio out. If our review unit included the optional Blu-ray drive, we"d prefer HDMI to DVI, but the DVI still provides for a high-resolution output if needed; you"ll just have to use a separate cable for audio. A basic, single-tuner TV tuner is also included, with coax and S-video inputs, but the gradual rollout of CableCard technology just makes standard PC TV tuners look even more archaic, particularly a standard-def NTSC tuner like the one offered on the Area-51 m9750.

A lot of the Area-51 m9750"s buzz came from its very reasonable starting price. For $2,099, however, you"ll have to keep your expectations in check. Your two grand gets you an Intel Core 2 Duo T5500, 1GB of RAM, a single GeForce Go 7950GTX GPU, and an 80GB hard drive. Not a terrible set of specs, but we can"t imagine any gamers being happy with just 1GB of RAM. Our review unit more than doubled that price, without even adding a Blu-ray drive. If you want to go even further, Alienware is jumping on the solid-state drive (SSD) bandwagon, offering a few SSD configurations. A single 32GB SSD drive is $500 (above the default 80GB drive), a combo of a 32GB SSD and 200GB standard hard drive is an extra $800, and a RAID 0 array with two 32GB SSD drives is a whopping $1,100 add-on.

As expected, the Alienware Area-51 m9750 and its dual GeForce Go 7950GTX cards pummeled the competition in our F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 tests, offering up 81.1 frames per second in Quake 4, even at a ridiculously high 1,600x1,200 resolution with anti-aliasing turned on. We looked at the low-end Alienware m5790 earlier this year, and that system"s single ATI Radeon x1900 pumped around half the frames in the same Quake 4 test. The twin video cards in SLI mode are clearly the system"s highlight, as the m9750"s Core 2 Duo T7600 CPU performed on par with other recent systems in more mundane benchmarks, such as CNET Lab"s Multitasking, iTunes encoding, and Photoshop CS2 tests (although the Alienware"s 7,200rpm drives helped it power ahead in the Photoshop test).

The (nongaming) performance differences between this and other high-end laptops, such as the HP Pavilion HDX or the Apple MacBook Pro, are small enough to have little real-world effect, and all these systems are near the upper end of currently available hardware--although Intel is currently prepping a Core 2 Extreme mobile processor and Nvidia has a new DirectX 10 GPU, the GeForce 8700M GT, both of which will no doubt be included in Alienware systems later this year.

The Area-51 m9750 ran for a mere one hour and 12 minutes on our DVD battery drain test, a short lifespan, even for a massive desktop replacement system. Of course, powering a 1,920x1,200 display and two GPUs isn"t easy, and we don"t expect laptop gamers to keep their systems unplugged for any length of time.

Alienware backs the system with a standard one-year warranty on parts and labor, including onsite service and 24-7 toll-free phone support. You can extend the warranty to up to three years for $300. Support options on Alienware"s Web site include live chat, an extensive knowledge database, and a page of drivers. Our review system also included Alienware"s typically excellent owner"s binder, and a Respawn recovery DVD, a $49 option.

Windows Vista Home Premium Edition; 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7200; 2,048MB DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz; 256MB Nvidia GeForce Go 7900GS; 120GB Toshiba 5,400rpm SATA/150