The Alienware 18 Area-51 is amazing to me for one simple reason: It’s downright miraculous that an 18-inch gaming laptop can be transformed into a full-blown desktop. Its nothing like the laptops Ive been using for the past several months that keep getting skinnier (and are now all but twins with ultra-thin smartphones). The Alienware 18 Area-51 is the gaming laptop that isn’t afraid to be loud. We — you, me and the casual gaming audience — aren’t its intended market. But, as a reviewer, I have the luxury of living with this 18-inch behemoth of a science fiction artifact for weeks on end.
The Alienware 18 Area-51 laptop can be a little intimidating when you first sit down in front of it but, I’m not going to lie – I sat at this thing for about five minutes and just had some fun. It is a computer I probably will never buy myself, but it’s the dream for many. That said, you really need to know what you’re going to do with it.
Large and heavy
One look at the Alienware 18 Area-51, and you know this isn’t a laptop that’s going to travel with you to the cafe or office every day. I’d looked at taking it on a long trip to the US, but I couldn’t. No one wants to walk around with something that weighs 9 pounds (plus a massive power brick) in a backpack. The Alienware 18 Area-51 Lenovo Yoga Tablet may be nothing more than a glorified desktop replacement that almost sacrifices portability — we hesitate to even venture out into the wild with it, truth be told.
I believe the industrial designers who made this laptop didn’t care what anyone would think about an 18-inch machine. It’s supposed to be beyond the world, and if I were they, I would have acted as they did. Build quality is extraordinary – completely premium and upmarket. That said, be careful of your toes around the notebook: It’s a monster.
The Alienware 18 Area-51 is a thing of beauty, but perhaps not in the way that you might think. The lid sports the RGB Alienware logo and the colour is Liquid Teal At the bottom we find there’s a hefty amount of cooling below and what looks like a clear plexiglas cover, which doesn’t shroud the cooling so you can actually see inside through the fan grid on top.
There are large vents and even more RGB lighting on the back, while nearly all of its I/O ports can be found there. The sides have more ventilation, and the left side contains a headphone/mic combo jack and an SD card slot. It also supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 for convenient wireless connections.
It’s clear that anyone who buys this machine will value power above portability. Like I said earlier, if you want the desktop performance in a less-than-portable chassis, there’s the Alienware 18 Area-51. I’ve seen people haul around heavy gaming laptops and even PlayStation 5s, so it wouldn’t surprise me if custom protective cases are eventually manufactured for the Alienware 18 Area-51.
A giant 18-inch laptop
As its name indicates, this notebook has an 18″ screen. It’s rare to find an 18-inch screen on a laptop, although I am seeing more and more laptops with 16-inch displays, focused on high-end content creation. Anyway, the 18-inch QHD+ display is massive, and I believe both creatives and gamers are interested in this much of a larger screen. The display is bright, big, and bold colours even if it’s not the fastest or most detailed.
That mammoth 18-inch display has several achievements attached to its name: first, it’s the fastest laptop display yet, kicking out with a refresh rate of 300 Hz. It’s also an impressive 500 nits bright and G-SYNC compatible with 100 per cent DCI-P3 colour coverage. Any games and videos you play look immersive, and websites like indianexpress. com Also take advantage of more screen real estate. It’s also easy to have multiple tabs open on the screen — which I as a news person do all day, every day — and the machine runs seamlessly. I also suspect they haven’t included an OLED screen here because serious gamers don’t like them — and I’m honestly not convinced about how much attention the Switch pro controllers get from Switch owners, let alone their level of play investment.
