Dell Alienware Area 51M R2 vs M17 R3: Which One is Better in Gaming?

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This is the comparison of Dell’s Alienware Area 51M R2 and Alienware M17 R3. Both the laptops are great ones in gaming but here, you can see which one is better for you in terms of features, performance, and price range.

BUY NOW	BUY NOW
Dell Alienware Area 51M R2	Dell Alienware M17 R3
PROS	PROS
Tobii eye-tracking display. Immensely powerful CPUs.	Beautiful design and great build quality. Solid performance across the board. Nice features and components.
CONS	CONS
Expensive. Two power units.	Tragic battery life. Gaming power can’t keep up with the 4K display.

SPECIFICATIONS:

INTRODUCTION:

It is quite nice to do a comparison review between the two laptops, in case anybody is trying to decide between the two of these laptops to buy. In this comparison, we have M17 R3 which is Dell’s slim and light gaming laptop, and we have the Area 51M R2 which is the heavyweight gaming laptop with great performance. This is the laptop that includes a desktop processor that is upgradable. It includes a GPU that you can remove in exchange for another, also plenty of storage bays as well as two RAM slots.

By contrast, the Alienware M17 R3 being a slim and light laptop, most of this is soldered onto the main board of the laptop so the processor, the GPU, and the RAM, and the Wi-Fi card is all soldered on. So, when you’re buying a slim and light laptop, you need to make sure you buy exactly what you need when you buy this laptop. Whereas with the Alienware 51M, you can buy a laptop and upgrade it at a later date if you wish.

DESIGN:

Straight away, you can see the massive differences between these two laptops. They both have the same design language but looking at the difference in the deck, it’s quite a stark difference. Not only is the laptop quite a lot deeper it’s also quite a lot chunkier, especially around the hinge area of the M17 R3.

You can obviously see how much chunkier the area 51M is. When you lift the lids up, both of these laptops got the Tron ring, they’ve got the same sort of aesthetics on these laptops and they’ve both got the lit Alienware head as a logo. But, you’ll notice that you’ve got a 17 like sort of lightly embossed logo on the M17 R3 and you’ve got an A51 slightly embossed on the Area 51M. Honestly, the Area 51M looks like a much chunkier version.

Weight-wise, the Alienware M17 weighs 2.8 kilograms, quite a normal sort of weight for a 17-inch laptop, and add an extra 1.3 kilogram for the power battery, it’s quite a heavy package to be carrying around with you in a bag. The Area 51M on its own weighs 4.3 kilograms and with both of these batteries you’re taking another 2.1 kilograms, so in total, you’re taking 6.4 kilograms in weight. This really isn’t a laptop you’d be lugging around everywhere with you, it’s fine to carry around your house or nearby places but I don’t think that it is much portable like other gaming laptops. So, if portability is the sort of the key feature that you’re buying for a gaming laptop, then clearly you could probably be looking at the M17.

You’ve got a slightly longer grill area on the M17 R3, this is much shorter on the Area 51M R2 but they have got the same sort of hexagonal design across the two. The power button is on the right on the M17 and on the middle in Area 51M R2.

DISPLAY:

On screens, they are offering the same sort of options between these two laptops. So, you’ve got a choice of between 144 hertz and 300 hertz, I think there’s a 360-hertz panel. Both of these are great screens, both these are the 144-hertz options, and my choice when buying any of these laptops is to go for the 144 hertz. The great advantage of the M17 R3 is if you buy the 144 hertz, you get g-sync but you can also press function f7 and switch to Optimus. So, you get slightly longer battery life by doing so and the Area 51M is more like a mobile UPS, so that’s not even worth worrying about which gives a terrible battery life but if you switch the M17 to the Optimus mode, you will likely give up four and a half hours of light use with a laptop.

FEATURES:

Neither of these laptops is the highest-end option available, these are both quite mid-range for their respective laptops. With the M17 R3, we’re looking at a 10th generation 10750H 6-core processor with 12 threads and the 2070 Super from NVIDIA for the graphics card. On the Area 51M, we’ve got a desktop chip and in this one, I’ve chosen the 10700 which is an 8-core 16 thread processor and the reason I chose this is when you choose the high-end configurations with a laptop, the fans will run fast to cool the processor and all and for the GPU, I’m using the 2070 Super from NVIDIA and the one thing that’s disappointed me is on this laptop, it’s only have 115 watts and the M17 R3 is have 150 watts. So, the actual GPU performance between the two is exactly the same but when you’re buying such a powerhouse like this, I expect it to be at least 150 watts but if you buy the 2080 or 2080 Super, they put a much bigger thermal budget on it. So, if you are looking at to get the ultimate performance out of this, then I would recommend upgrading to that at least the 2080 and personally 2070 Super even 115 watts is more than adequate for what I need. The good thing about that is this laptop runs incredibly quiet.

On the left-hand side of the laptop, the Area 51M at the bottom, you’ve got a microphone and a headset jack. The slim & light M17 only getting a headset jack then they both have a USB 3 port followed by on the Area 51M, you have a thunderbolt 3 port and on the M17, you’ve got a sort of flipped down ethernet port. Again looks very similar on the right side, main difference between the two, the Area 51M has a full-size SD card slot whereas the slim & light M17 only got a micro SD card slot.

At the back, this looks very similar, we’ve got HDMI-2 ports, mini display port on both of them, and on the M17, we’ve got the Thunderbolt 3 port and also has power delivery on this laptop. In the same area on the Area 51M, we’ve got the full-size ethernet or RJ45 slots then moving over we’ve got the Alienware graphics amplifier port and then lastly a single power adapter on the M17 and we’ve got the double power adapters on the Area 51M which leads me onto a big difference between the two and that is obviously the power delivery. The M17 has a single power battery which came with a 330 watt but it could vary depending on your configuration. The Area 51M came with a 330 and 180-watt power battery and if you want the full power of this laptop, you will need to use both those batteries.

The first thing you’ll notice that they’ve now changed the keyboard on the Area 51M R2. The keyboard is the same as the M17 R3, I mean you’ve got the nice tactile chiclet keyboard with a dedicated number key and macro keys up at the top, it’s a really lovely keyboard and of all the gaming laptops I’ve used, this keyboard is by far my favorite of all the actual laptop keyboards out there.

Trackpads wise, the M17 R3 comes with a Microsoft precision trackpad, it’s quite large and it’s got inbuilt clicks. So, you click on the actual pad itself to activate it. In comparison to the Area 51M, you’re getting a much smaller trackpad with dedicated click buttons and it’s a Synaptics trackpad and the reason for that is this one lights up. So, as you touch it, you’ll notice the actual trackpad itself is an RGB trackpad and you can change that in the Alienware command center and you’ve got a number of different options for that. So, if you want the RGB trackpad, you can go for the Area 51M. The better trackpad of the two is probably the M17 R3 from my use between the two unless you really like having the dedicated click buttons.

They are both good speakers but the Area 51M destroys the M17 with regards to the fullness of sound and the depth of sound, it’s a much nicer speaker system on the laptop. If you’re going to be doing some serious listening to music you’ll probably use a set of speakers or a decent headset but if you are using the laptop speakers, the Area 51M is definitely cut above the M17.

They’re both very easy to open up. With the M17, you can see quite a large area which is obviously the vapor chamber cooling on the new models, decent size fans but everything’s very difficult to get to because the motherboard is flipped. So, if you want to replace something, you do have to take the entire motherboard out to do. You have got one SSD slot and another M.2 PCIe 2280 and then lastly over on this side, we’ve got 2230, so you’ve got a 30 millimeter SSD. So, they’re usually in smaller capacities but there’s no option often. We’ve got 86 watt-hour battery and this is changeable and then you’ve got your downward-firing speakers and some forward-firing speakers that’s why they’ve got a pretty good sound.

With the Area 51M, instantly you can see that you can fit in decent GPUs and desktop CPUs, and the thickness of these two fans that’s about an inch higher than the M17, so you’ve got much deeper fans in this chamber pushing that air out the back which is why they run a lot quieter and why they can pump out a lot more heat. So, you’ve got desktop CPUs and much bigger GPUs in these machines. It’s quite difficult to take these apart, there’s a lot to take out but they’re well labeled. There is a good guide on the Dell website and remove the CPU or replace the CPU or GPU. There is a two RAM slot that is not soldered on so you can replace those and it can go up to 3200 if you put the right RAM in. They come with 2933 out of the gate with Dell unless you upgrade it. In the Wi-Fi card, we’ve got a Killer card in the Wi-Fi and you can change that. You’ve got your 80 millimeter M.2 PCIe slot, the second one is running across the board. We’ve got a 2.5-inch bay over on the right, now the good thing is even if you don’t have the hard drive from Dell, they provide the brackets and the cable so you can add your own that is good.

PERFORMANCE:

The performance is probably the main reason that you could be choosing one over the other if it isn’t portable. To start with the M17, it is using a mobile 45 watt CPU whereas the Area 51M is using a desktop processor and is pretty much unlimited with the watts it can pull from that processor and the desktop processor in this model is the intel 10th generation 10700. In Cinebench, the M17 scored 3106 points whereas the Area 51M scored 4765 points. So, you can see where the desktop-class processor absolutely destroys the M17s 45 watt CPU, this is obviously because it’s such a chunky machine and it can really push the wattage with no problem at all. Both of these machines do have vapor chambers. we ran the Geekbench CPU, the M17 scored 1212 on single-core and 6069 on the multi-core and the Area 51M scored 1302 on the single and 8970 on the multi-core, so you get some really good figures. Now When we look at the GPU between these two, they are both 115 watts NVIDIA 2070 Super, so they are pretty much identical. I would have expected a better performance from the Area 51M, it will run cooler but other than that they’re exactly the same scores.

I run Time Spy on both of these, the M17 R3 got a graphic score of 8571 whereas the Area 51M got 8615, so absolutely the nominal amount of difference. Now when we’re looking at the Fast Stroke graphics score, the M17 got 22052 points whereas the Area 51M scored 2256 points. So, it is absolutely good with regards to the GPU performance with these graphics cards, if you get 2080 that’s where I think you’re going to see a bigger difference because the Area 51M allows a much higher wattage budget for that GPU.

The Area 51M has much bigger fans pumping out that hot air at the back, now that does two things; the first one is it obviously keeps the temperatures down on the internal components so it does run cooler, especially the GPU than the M17 but more importantly and particularly in my case, it has a much more pleasant sound. The M17 R3 being thinner and having thinner fans is quite a lot louder with a different pitch to the fans and the Area 51M has got just a nice ‘whoosh’ sound to the fans. So, if you’re using these and you’re gaming them for a couple of hours, the Area 51M is a much nicer experience unless you’ve got some sort of closed headset on then you can’t hear the fan noise anyway. It would just probably bother the people around you.

BATTERY:

Area 51M has a 330-watt battery, it is quite heavy weighing 1.3 kilograms, and in a lot of configurations, you’ll get at 240 which is a much better-sized battery to go with a laptop. When you get the Area 51M, not only do you get this 1.3-kilogram battery, you also get a 240-watt battery as well. If you’re buying these laptops bag wise, the Alienware M17 R3 will fit in most 17-inch laptop bags, the Area 51M realistically looking at an 18-inch laptop bag.

With regards to the battery, it’s a 90 watt. Although the battery is bigger than the M17 R3 because of the components used in this, the battery life is terrible on the Area 51M but if you have the G-sync and Optimus version of the M17, you do get a much longer battery life on four and a half hours. If you are looking between the two as well as the mobility is the extra battery life with the M17 over the Area 51M.

WHICH TO BUY?

To conclude, I love both of the laptops, their aesthetics, performance, and all the things. When it comes to the decision between these laptops then I would choose the Area 51M every time, it is incredibly bulky and it does need two power bricks and you need to take that into consideration but with regards to the build quality, the upgradeability, the speakers, it absolutely analytics the M17. Now, you do pay for that with the weight and the size of the laptop and it is quite a lot more expensive than the M17. This doesn’t mean that the Alienware M17 is not a good gaming laptop, it does have some pros like it’s a much thinner and portable version of the Alienware line up. So, you can also choose this one.

Expert reviews of Dell Alienware Area 51M R2:

By Tom’sguide
The Alienware Area-51m R2 is official, and it has the potential to make one of the best gaming laptops even…

By Gadgetoid
Overall the Area 51M has slowly gained my affection from something I didn’t really care for or understand, to something…

By Notebookcheck
The new Alienware Area-51m R2 carries over much of what made the original Area-51m great while making some major improvements in key…

Expert reviews of Dell Alienware M17 R3:

By Techadvisor
The Alienware m17 R3 is very quick, with a top-notch 300Hz screen, a great keyboard and typically impressive design, but it’s middling in some areas, it’s expensive and the high-end hardware will be overkill for lots of users.

By Maxigeek
Given its price, it is a heavy investment, but with the fact that it can be a true desktop replacement, it is easy to look at the benefits of the M17 R3, the question comes down to how often you will take it away from the desk, if that answer is often, you might need to look elsewhere, if the answer is hardly ever, then you are looking at your next laptop, without question.

By Tom’shardware
The Alienware m17 R3 is about as powerful as a gaming laptop can get while keeping under 1 inch of thickness, and has a great screen and striking design.

Arya

Hello! I'm Surendar Arya, a passionate tech writer from Uttar Pradesh, India. I'm a freelance contributor to the tech blog - The World's Best And Worst. My enthusiasm for technology drives me to explore the latest trends and innovations in the field. I take immense pleasure in guiding individuals on how to leverage technology for their benefit, making their lives easier and more efficient.