Alienware Area-51 m9750: Power Gaming on the Go

Actual Gaming Performance

We have selected a group of modern games for testing with our laptops - at least, those that can actually run games. We have dropped most of the 0xAA results for this article because the m9750 has more than enough power to run with antialiasing enabled. In a few charts we have multiple results at different settings from the m9750 as well, just to show how it performs when graphical settings are maxed out.










In a couple games (Battlefield 2 and Far Cry), the m9750 is clearly CPU limited even at the maximum 1920x1200 resolution. As these are older, less demanding titles that's not too surprising, and we will probably be dropping both from our testing in the near future. In the more demanding games like Company of Heroes, F.E.A.R., Oblivion, Quake 4, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. the performance boost that SLI gives the m9750 can make a huge difference in terms of playable resolution. However, there's one game that clearly doesn't benefit from SLI, at least right now. Supreme Commander scores about the same on the M1710 and m9750, and the decreasing performance with increasing resolution clearly shows that we're not CPU limited above 1440x900. This brings us to what is arguably the biggest problem with the Alienware Area-51 m9750.

In a word, the difficulty is drivers, specifically SLI enabled drivers. If you recall earlier, we mentioned that the m9750 uses an Intel 945PM chipset. Alienware uses a custom motherboard that is able to run both graphics cards with x8 PCI-E connections, but the non-NVIDIA chipset still presents a problem. It's no secret that NVIDIA is able to run SLI on a variety of chipsets, but their drivers have normally locked support to their own solutions. NVIDIA created a special driver release for Alienware that enables SLI for the 945PM platform; unfortunately, that driver hasn't been updated since March.

SLI (and ATI's CrossFire) have often been in a chicken vs. egg race when it comes to supporting new games. Sometimes a custom profile in NVIDIA's drivers is all that's necessary, but frequently additional driver updates are needed in order to support the latest titles. In the case of Windows Vista, GeForce 7000 series cards are still waiting for proper SLI drivers. Needless to say, the GeForce Go 7950 GTX certainly doesn't have a higher priority for NVIDIA's driver team than all of the desktop SLI owners. Alienware currently has a beta Vista driver that's supposed to enable SLI support on some titles, and hopefully a full release driver will be available sometime in the near future. However, it's only a matter of time before the driver gets outdated again; how long and how frequently NVIDIA will continue to update the GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI drivers is anyone's guess.

To drive the point home, consider the recently released Bioshock. Yes, we installed the game on the m9750 and gave it a whirl. Initially, performance was absolutely atrocious. We tried a hacked driver from LaptopVideo2Go that allowed us to install the v163.44 "Bioshock" driver on the m9750, but while it did technically work it appears to have broken SLI support in all titles and it didn't fix the Bioshock performance issues we were encountering. Then we decided to disable SLI in the driver control panel, and performance suddenly became perfectly acceptable. Unfortunately, we encountered graphical artifacts - black squares would appear frequently in place of textures - so we decided to go back to the "official" 94.23 drivers. Those drivers also exhibit the same problem with black squares appearing in place of certain polygons/textures, and SLI needs to be disabled to get Bioshock to run properly for the time being.

The bottom line is that video driver updates are a fact of life when it comes to gaming, and they are even more critical if you're running a multiple GPU configuration. Quite a few people have been disappointed of late with NVIDIA's driver release schedule, but at least we can be reasonably certain that SLI will eventually be supported in Windows Vista. Considering how many people are likely to own one of the GeForce Go 79x0 SLI laptops, we would imagine that driver updates will occur less frequently, so it might be months after the release of a new game before proper driver support becomes available. Remember, the last driver update is from March of this year - 5 months ago. So we're looking at a laptop that targets the gaming enthusiast but will only get new drivers perhaps twice a year.

None of this is really Alienware's fault; they just use NVIDIA hardware. And NVIDIA might actually prove us wrong and start releasing more frequent driver updates. We wouldn't be willing to place any bets on NVIDIA doing that, however, which makes it more than a little difficult for us to recommend the m9750 to gamers that want to play all of the latest and greatest games. Of course, for those that have their favorite older titles that they repeatedly play, the drivers are already fully functional and this isn't as much of a concern. Professional gamers might find just what they're looking for in the m9750, but we're not professional gamers so we can't say for sure.