this video from ces is brought to you by dbrand their prism screen protectors and
grip cases protect your phone that's pretty much all there is to it check
them out at the link in the video description so let me put it this way this is the
alienware area 51m and in the words of
our alienware rep which if he wasn't such a nice guy who's very credible i
would find very hard to believe yes Linus it has a full
core i9 9900k processor in it i went
really because everything that i know about size and
heat and how much you need to get rid of
how much of it a 9900k would produce would indicate that that sort of thing
would be basically impossible and that's even ignoring the rest of the completely
over the top specs of this thing so it can be equipped with up to a an rtx 2080
ti graphics card with six gigs of gddr6 memory that's gdr6 right yes it's got
what i'm assuming dual NVMe boot drives
and raid zero do you have a two and a half inch expansion drive in here surely
not the two and a half inch drive in here uh okay it's it's got a 1080p 144 hertz
panel which might not be that impressive today but it's thin bezel and there's a
plan for later this year to upgrade it to 240 hertz
and they've done all of this within like
i would say a fairly slim desktop replacement form factor
but it gets even crazier
because while desktop replacements are kind of a
replacement for the performance of a desktop they have never been a replacement for
the upgrade ability of a desktop and that is where they really surprised me
they're actually going to allow me to open this so i need my tool kit
where'd it go got it
and they're going to let us crack it open to see how they have achieved upgradable
graphics on this machine actually we're going to
move over here so couple things jump out at us right
away that's a 90 watt hour battery so in spite of the size we are still getting
right up against the limit to what you are allowed to put in a laptop in order
for it to be able to be carried on an airplane there's that two and a half
inch drive bay that we talked about before they
somehow managed to put four dimm slots on the bloody thing even though with 32
gig dimms upcoming that's not even entirely necessary we've got m.2
expansion slot right here number one and then i don't see number two here's an
m.2.5 something label i don't know what that's to do with but uh
i guess we'll find the other one a little bit later and
we've got cooling fans i think we're gonna have to go deeper so del says i
actually won't need help with that because they've provided a handy dandy
little key here for all the screws that i need in order to remove this um what
is this called again rip cage the rib cage okay cool so we need
14 l8s here we go
one ah
two ah
okay so now we're pulling off this back
shroud here that covers up the rear i o as well as these incredibly beefy
looking heat sinks so you can see they've got support for their external
graphics not that there's anything much more powerful than what's already in
here external display Ethernet dual
power inputs because hey that's a thing um let's go ahead and remove some more
screws get that rib cage off
there we go so we're disconnecting the battery now this is an important first
step
so we just pulled uh this appears to be
what the display output for the built-in display i don't know i'm kind
of guessing at this point but we're actually getting very close to being
able to get a better look at where we're going
with this here okay so these wi-fi antennas do i need
to pop these off yeah it looks like i might be able to hold on a second it
might be able to furnish it
this one though this one's got to go
shoop hard drive okay
this one we're good this one i'm getting caught but it's on
this i think we're good on that this guy's gotta go webcam
oh we're getting close i can feel it uh oh this hard drive cable management
actually has to come out there we go
oh these wi-fi antennas we may end up
needing to remove those but not a hundred percent sure yet
i think that's all that's holding us in right now yep okay
now there goes the cable management for that
sorry guys if it helps at all i feel really really
bad no i don't that was a lie
there's lies damned lies and then there's what i just said
and there it is so this right here thank you
so this right here is the secret sauce so here is and this
is not a standard desktop socket did you guys
create this socket standard this is a standard socket under here it
looks so low profile
you're sure right this
take it off i mean it should be the standard just dropping no no no yeah the the the lga standard
yes but this retention mechanism this is not standard
it's a veritable bounty of exciting tech things so first of all i don't know what
i was expecting well i do know what i was expecting because we've seen desktop
processors in laptops before and typically
they have just used the same mounting mechanism as desktop motherboards
because it's a lot of work to engineer your own and dell actually uh the folks
that i'm talking to here don't actually know if they made their own
mounting mechanism but i can tell you right now that that is not a standard
one and so that would lead me to believe that it is
entirely possible that they have actually created
their their own hold down for it here now the lga itself so that's the little
socket that the CPU sits into that is standard so theoretically there is
nothing that would prevent someone from buying a lower end processor out of the
gate and then actually upgrading it down the road a service that dell plans to
provide either themselves like you'll have to pay extra obviously but where
they come to your house and install it for you or as a kit that you can
actually do by yourself this is a really different way of thinking about laptops
you coming out baby yeah you are
you want to yeah i got it
all right here we go
i was totally wrong so it's just this ARM that's been changed i guess they
just wanted to save a little space here so that is a standard desktop socket and
check this out so all these thermal pads around here those are for the vrm
because as you can imagine cramming the right kind of power delivery for
this is a like Intel has 95 watt processors and then they have 95 watt
processors cramming the kind of power delivery you need for a proper desktop
CPU into something like this is not trivial and of course you're going to
need all of that cooled by the same heat pipes beefy fans and beefy heatsinks
that you have for the CPU itself but this
this right here is the proverbial money shot because i think that most people
over the next few years are not really going to need to upgrade a core i9 9900k
for gaming but graphics cards those keep
moving and that's where you're going to see you know a 30 or 40 uplift and
performance generation over generation that is as long as NVIDIA has their way
and this is the piece that dell says they would like
obviously bad stuff can happen the spec could change to such a degree that it's
impossible but that they would like to be user upgradable in the future now if
you're familiar with notebook graphics you will already know that this is not
an mxm module so that was the previous standard for upgradable or modular
graphics and laptops but NVIDIA in their
infinite wisdom is trying to kill it or not trying to kill it they have killed
it so dell actually leaned on the engineering prowess of their precision
team to just go well if you're not going to support the
standard then damn it i guess we'll do it ourselves so the idea here is that
you could remove this with a couple of screws and not only you remove this
right here and not only would you be able to change the performance you could
even change the outputs on this thing so you could support future display
standards like HDMI 2.1 for example
pretty flippin cool now all that's left is to um
leave you guys to put this back together because i've got another appointment thank you guys thanks
and also to tell you guys about our sponsor dbrand so dbrand is sponsoring
our trip here to ces 2019 their grip case is as you can imagine very grippy
it's Linus proof because otherwise realistically they wouldn't let me endorse it and it's got their super
clicky buttons as well as their trademark customizability so you got
your precision cut true texture 3m vinyl skins and pretty much any color you
could want the other big thing this year is they're prism screen protectors
they've got an applicator so it goes on super easily you get a perfect fit every
time and the impact resistance of this thing is quite frankly
it's you have to see it to believe it you put this thing on you hammer a nail
into a piece of wood with the face of your phone you take off the prism you've
got a dented ass prism but you've got a pristine screen
it's pretty much unreal you can check them both out at the link in the video description
so thanks for watching guys we are on our way to the next suite here at ces
2019 don't miss any of it by being subscribed to Linus tech tips