The CPU inside the Alienware is a 3.6GHz Prescott CPU with Hyperthreading technology. Whilst this is undeniably a powerful chip, its heat means that with your Alienware plugged in, the cooling fan will almost always be turned on. On battery power, providing you are doing nothing, the fan spins up for a couple of minutes occasionally before powering back down, and the chip runs at a slower 2.94GHz. Three cooling fans keep the notebook cool on the underside and there is a fourth for the disk drives. As you might expect, when playing a game the fan noise is much louder than you might be used to on other machines.
Since the CPU flap can be easily accessed from the bottom, it is conceivable that you could upgrade the CPU easily by yourself should you so desire.
As well as a powerful CPU, the Alienware also comes with 1GB of Dual Channel PC2-4200 DDR-II memory. This runs at 533MHz and thus provides an excellent level of bandwidth.
The graphics processor (GPU) is particularly powerful on the Area 51, an nVIDIA 6800 Go running at 330MHz core and 600MHz DDR3 memory.
Storage is taken care of by two 60GB 7200rpm Hitachi notebook hard drives in RAID 0. These are kept cool by a small fan above the drive hatch.
