Alienware Area 51m Upgrade Help Questions

Hello everyone, I’m so close to pulling the trigger on upgrading from my current Alienware 15 R1 laptop to the Alienware Area 51m! But I have a few questions regarding upgrades.

With the RAM I want it to have 64GB of Corsair Vengeance, but is it better to buy 4x16GB of it and put it in all four slots or just buy 2x32GB of it and put it in two slots? Which option is better and will both options run in dual channel mode?

With the drive I just want 1TB of SSD as that is more than enough for me and I won’t require any extra drives or to be running in RAID. Should I buy 1TB M.2 SSD or 1TB normal SSD?

How good is the screen on this laptop should I opt for the extra £100 for the G-SYNC option or not?

And finally what is the cooling like on this laptop? Will I need a laptop cooler for this beast and if so what is the best laptop cooler that will fit a laptop of this size?

And my configuration will have the RTX 2080 + i9-9900K.

Thanks!

 

For RAM, it doesn't matter if you get 4x16 or 2x32 but if you go for the latter you need to install them in either SODIMM 1/3 or 2/4 to get Dual Channel speeds

For the SSD, getting an m.2 will give you the opportunity to have a faster NVMe SSD whereas the 2.5 inch bay restricts you to SATA III speeds so I'd say get an NVMe m.2 SSD. The best one in both price vs performance ratio at the moment is the HP EX950

The screen is one of the best matte screens. Matte screens which are now the norm have a very dull look but this one is brighter with more vivid colors than any other matte screen I've seen. It puts MSI's matte screens to shame. The previous MSI GT75 matte screen that I had looked so dull compared to this. With GSYNC on or OFF it doesn't make a difference (to my eyes at least). GSYNC is useful when playing games that your GPU cannot sustain a framerate a high as your screen's refresh rate so maybe in the future it will make a difference once games become more demanding. It's not a must IMO

The cooling on this laptop is one of the better laptop cooling solutions. No . 1 is MSI's GT series and this comes next. A CPU re-paste and undervolt is a must though. A cooling pad in my experience only brings down the temps by a max of 5C and I personally don't like how my laptop becomes raised while using them so I stopped using them so IMO I would skip that.

Your configuration is great, I'd get the 9700K though as it is able to sustain higher clock speeds since it runs slightly cooler than the 9900K and is cheaper. The only thing it lacks is hyper-threading which I don't miss at all since my workflow doesn't make use of it. I just browse the net, play games, and edit a video or 2 now and then using Adobe Premiere Elements