Alienware Area-51 m5550i

Specifications

Price comparison

Reviews for the Alienware Area-51 m5550i

Alienware's m5550i Notebook Means Business
Source: Tom's Guide Archive.org version
Make no mistake about it, Alienware makes distinctive notebooks that are head turners and the Area-51 m5550i is no exception. It is not a bleeding edge gaming enthused notebook unlike many of its Alienware brethren. In comparison to the monster gaming notebooks from Alienware like the Aurora m9700, this notebook's graphics performance comes off as a bit puny. But as an office notebook, now that's another story. With graphics performance that is superior to many office notebooks and a wickedly powerful CPU this notebook will lay waste to many office applications with ease (in office speak - "improve your overall productivity").
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Leistung gut, Mobilität mangelhaft
Single Review, online available, Short, Date: 04/09/2007
Rating: performance: 80% mobility: 50%

Comment

NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600: The NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 is a middle class video card of the 7000 series and suited for games of the year 2006. The performance is very similar to ATI X1600 / X1700. Compared to the desktop 7600 it is clearly slower.

Only some 3D games with very low demands are playable with these cards.

» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Graphics Cards and the corresponding Benchmark List.

Intel Core 2 Duo: This is the Core Duo and Core Solo successor with a longer pipeline and 5-20% more speed without more power consumption. As an addition to the Core Duo design there exists a fourth decoder, an amplified SSE-unit and an additional arithmetical logical unit (ALU).

The Core 2 Duo for laptops is identical to the desktop Core 2 Duo processors but the notebook-processors work with lower voltages (0.95 to 1188 Volt) and a lower Frontside bus clock (1066 vs 667 MHz). The performance of equally clocked notebooks is 20-25% lower than Desktop PCs because of the lower Frontside bus clock and the slower hard disks.

T5500:

» Further information can be found in our Comparison of Mobile Processsors.

15.40":

15-inch display variants are the standard and are used for more than half of all laptops.

The reason for the popularity of mid-sized displays is that this size is reasonably easy on the eyes, often allows high resolutions and thus offers rich details on the screen, yet does not consume too much power and the devices can still be reasonably compact - simply the standard compromise.

3 kg:

With this weight, a laptop is rather heavier than average. Devices in this range shine more with screen size and performance than with mobility.

Alienware: Alienware was founded in the USA in 1996. The European headquarters is located in Ireland. Alienware has been part of the Dell Group since 2006. The product range mainly focuses on gaming laptops and desktops, which are developed and manufactured by Dell. The trademark is a slightly futuristic design with an Alien as the logo. Additionally, workstations for private and business customers are sold.

As with every brand, there are also some points of criticism with Alienware. Some customers have complained about the high prices of the products, while others have criticized the quality of customer services. There have also been some reports of problems with the reliability and durability of some Alienware products. However, many customers have also had positive experiences with the brand and appreciate the powerful gaming computers.

» Further information can be found in our Notebook Purchase Guide.