Editor's Note: This article was corrected on 8/29/06 based on information from Alienware. The original name for this laptop that the company supplied us with—Aurora m5550—was incorrect. The review has been updated with the correct name, the Area-51 m5550.

Alienware makes some of the coolest-looking laptops in the market, but the company has usually been one of the last to get its hands on the latest and greatest components—especially those from Intel. Until now, that is. Having been bought by Dell has its privileges, and the Area-51 m5550, one of the first notebooks to receive the latest Intel Core 2 Duo mobile CPU (code-named "Merom"), perfectly illustrates these benefits. The laptop's 2.33-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7600 processor is the fastest one available so far, but this performance-driven media laptop is hot in more ways than one.