Externally, the first thing will strike you about the Area51 is its size. At 17” (40cm) wide by a foot (30cm) deep, this brings a whole new meaning to the phrase desktop replacement. It is also extremely heavy at 12.5lbs, meaning you will want to keep this notebook mounted firmly on your desk unless absolutely necessary. Stylistically, the Area51 has a very sci-fi look about it, with the alien's head illuminating blue when the unit is powered up. The rubberized “gill” design from previous Alienware notebooks is also carried over.
To the left hand side of the unit, there is an S-video port, 4 USB ports, two mini Firewire ports, audio jacks and a cardbus slots. Lifting up the rubber flap reveals card readers for Compact flash and micro drives, smart media, secure digital and Sony memory stick.
To the right there is the DVD ROM / CD-RW combi drive and what looks like a port for a second optical drive should you desire one for any reason.
At the back of the unit there are the vents for the notebook’s cooling system (a large copper slab) and to the right of that the power input. Next to this you find the legacy parallel and serial ports, as well as a highly useful DVI port. A combination Mouse/keyboard PS2 port, a 56k modem and a gigabit network port are found to the right of the DVI port, and on the far right hand side is an S-Video-in port for camcorders and the like.
To the front of the unit you will see media buttons including skip, power, open, play and pause, as well as volume controls. These do nothing with the system turned on, but allow you to use your notebook as a CD Player wilst it is powered off. Whilst this is a welcome gimmick, it would be nice if they could also be used to control WMP and Winamp within the OS as well.
The floppy drive is an external model, but then I suppose it will only be used for setting up RAID arrays during any required reinstallation in this day and age. In case you were wondering, the power pack is very large, and heavy.
