CES 2019: Alienware Area-51M gaming laptop with modular CPU and GPU upgrades announced

Alienware is looking to deliver a PC gamer's dream. The Area-51M is a gaming laptop with modular parts for upgrades like a desktop PC.

Alienware Area-51M gaming laptop

A gaming laptop with user-replaceable parts

The Area-51M will allow user upgrades on CPU, GPU, storage and RAM

The Alienware Area-51M wants to bring the convenience and fun of upgrading a desktop PC. They look to have the CPU, GPU, storage and RAM to be easily accessible and upgraded by the users themselves.

Alienware is looking to change the gaming laptop market. They want to focus more on the gaming side of things and not the laptop aspect. "Gaming laptops" focus on being thinner, lighter while compromising some performance. However, user upgrades are little to non-existent.

The Area-51M, in concept, looks to unlock the potential of a fully modular laptop. According to Alienware, they asked their engineers to build a "monster" and they came back with the Area-51M.

The laptop hits on two major problematic trends set by manufacturers. First, they want to go away from the rend of sacrificing performance for portability. The other is that there are no room for major part upgrades.

On the Alienware Configurator website, the most premium setting you can get will have an 8-core Intel Core i9 9900K desktop processor, Nvidia RTX 2080 mobile GPU, and a 144Hz display.

Price and availability

The most premium configuration with a Core i9 CPU and RTX 2080 will cost USD 4,000

This setting will cost USD 4,000. However, if you tweak the specs, you can get lower prices starting at USD 2,549. You can start at the lowest priced configuration and then just add components in the future.

There's no word on the availability yet.

What do you guys think?

Source: The Verge