When you are tapped to be the VJ for a major band’s high-profile tour that hits numerous cities across the globe, having a powerful notebook by your side to help run the show is a huge benefit. Having three powerful notebooks is an even bigger benefit. Markus Heckmann, who served as the VJ during the 2004 30th anniversary tour for the band Rush, found this out first-hand.

Three Alienware Area-51m 5500 notebooks traveled with Heckmann and the rest of the 2004 Rush Tour throughout North America and Europe during an arduous 45-city schedule. The Area-51m 5500 notebooks helped power the visual effects for every concert of the tour. The hectic schedule presented a number of challenges that tested the reliability and performance of the Area-51m 5500 notebooks, especially during shows held outdoors in a variety of climates.

“Fortunately, the Area 51m’s have performed flawlessly for the 45+ shows of the tour, so we have never needed to use the backup system,” said Heckmann. “They made it through hot outdoor shows in Arizona, chilly nights, and high-humidity weather. This is in contrast with our prior tour where we did not have the luxury of using Alienware technology.”

According to Heckmann, the Area-51m 5500 notebooks withstood more than just demanding weather conditions during the tour, demonstrating remarkable durability.

“The Area 51m’s have been reliable in our semi-hostile environments. We had beer and water flying at us, so they got sprayed a bit which didn't hurt them,” commented Heckmann. “Plus they were transported in cases on the trucks from city to city. It was sometimes surprising what they could take.”

Heckmann works for Derivative, which makes Touch, a cutting-edge series of software products for designing and performing live visuals. Touch was used throughout the Rush tour and runs best using the power of a next-generation system like the Area-51m 5500.

“Touch is tuned to exploit the combination of fast CPUs and highly pipelined graphics processors via its open node-based architecture,” said Heckmann. “You can put any amount of objects, motion, simulation, textures, and movies in a Touch synth, so we spend time optimizing it to run as fast as possible. The Alienwares make this a lot easier as they are highly-tuned high-performance machines – right out of the box.”

Heckmann is impressed by the fact that Area-51m 5500 notebooks are fully optimized right from the outset and do not require any tweaking.

“When you unpack the Area 51m from its box and start it up, you are good to go. It’s already optimized,” said Heckmann.

The VJ also appreciates the Area-51m 5500's combination of desktop power and flexibility in a mobile platform, rating it highly in comparison to notebooks from other manufacturers.

“The size of the Area 51m is great considering what hardware is running inside. Performance was throughout the tour very stable and we had no blue screen or hardware failure during that time. A nice treat is also the option to replace your video card, which is missing in so many other notebooks,” said Heckmann.

As Rush fans throughout the tour came to find out, the pairing of VJ Markus Heckmann and Alienware helped to deliver an exceptional concert atmosphere.