Alienware Area-51 m17x, m15x Announced

The Alienware Area-51 m17x and m15x gaming laptops, which incorporate the latest NVIDIA GeForce 8800M video cards, a feature called BinaryGFX for switching between integrated and dedicated graphics, and Intel Core 2 Extreme processors, will become available during the first quarter of 2008, the company announced yesterday.

The Alienware Area-51 m17x sports a 17-inch display supporting a 1080p (1920-by-1200 pixels) high definition resolution. The screen is managed by dual Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX or dual Nvidia 8700M GT graphics cards operating in SLI mode. This high-end laptop provides up to 640GB of data storage, plus an expandable Smart Bay hard drive option. The m17x ships with a Blu-Ray burner and supports up to 4GB system memory. In addition, it has the 1GB Intel Turbo Memory option for better system responsiveness. The Alienware’s upcoming notebook provides 802.11a/b/g/draft n wireless connectivity and an optional built-in TV tuner.

According to the NotebookReview’s report, the m17x will be priced at $5,628 when configured with two NVidia GeForce 8800M GTX video cards, the Core 2 Extreme X7900 processor at 2.8GHz, 2GB of DDR2 667MHz RAM, a 400GB HDD, the Turbo Memory module, a Blu-Ray writer, and an internal TV tuner.

The smaller Alienware Area-51 m15x has a 15.4-inch display also providing 1080p resolution. This notebook will come with the single Nvidia GeForce 8800M GTX card, a Blu-Ray burner, up to 320GB of storage, also with an expandable Smart Bay hard drive option, and up to 4GB of memory. Pricing for this laptop is currently unknown.

BinaryGFX technology in the Area-51 m17x and m15x laptops allows users to switch between dedicated graphics or a power-saving integrated GPU, depending on need.

The Alienware’s m17x and m15x will be available in black or silver colors with the SkullCap design (groove style lid) or the Ripley smooth lid (with single groove in the middle). These notebooks will ship with Windows Vista Ultimate operating system.

Source

[...] The recently announced Area-51 m15x is based on the Intel PM956 chipset and comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Extreme mobile processor, depending on customer’s choice. The incorporated Nvidia’s top of the line GeForce 8800M GTX mobile graphics card has 512MB of dedicated video memory. The “world’s fastest notebook GPU” is compatible with DirectX 10 games and manages the notebook’s 15.4″ 1920-by-1200 or 1440-by-900 widescreen display. [...]