Where the Alienware Area-51 falls foul of the competition is with respect to 3D graphics. NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Go 256MB PCIe graphics adapter is no slouch, but the Ultra model, as specified by Dell, is significantly faster. The comparison Rock's Mobility Radeon X800 XT 256MB is faster still, so Alienware, pricing this particular sample at around L1800, really needed to out-specify the established hierarchy for DTR laptops. Matters would have been fine if one had the option of upgrading the video to the '6800 Ultra model, or even the more-impressive GeForce 7800 GTX Go, but that isn't the case. Another area of concern for a laptop that ships at this price is a basic 1-year warranty; we'd like to see 3 years as standard on such an expensive machine, and the accompanying bundle, should it stay the same for shipping models, is also rather substandard.

Alienware has had the time to see what the likes of Dell has done with its high-end laptops. Following on from that, it has also had the time to architect something better in the L1500-L2000 price range, and whilst the Alienware Area-51 m5700 has a number of decent features in common with the Inspiron XPS Gen 2 (now, incidentally, replaced by the similar XPS M170), which is still our current yardstick for measuring DTRs against, it simply fails to topple it. Alienware, then, needs to either reduce the price of this particular model by, say, 20%, or add-in a faster video card as standard.