Alienware Area - 51

Forget everything you know.

With unprecedented gaming power and iconic, innovative design, the new Alienware Area-51 is the next evolution of high-performance desktop gaming.

Starting at $1699.99

What We Liked…

• Spectacular gaming performance
• Attractive, innovative design
• Powerful Command Center software

What We Didn’t…

• Enormous, potentially unwieldy case
• Not the highest CPU and productivity scores in the universe

Introduction & Design

For years—long before it was acquired by Dell, even—Alienware has made its desktops as distinctive in how they looked as how they performed. Its bleeding-edge systems have often been the technological embodiments of the company's name, complete with fins, curvy panels and doors, the distinctive alien-head logo, and prices usually about high enough to finance a round-trip ticket to Jupiter.

If the latest, completely revamped edition of the company's flagship Area-51 gaming desktop is surprisingly conservative in one sense—no fins or swoopy cutouts, and practically subdued case lighting—it's downright radical in its overall shape. And under the hood, this PC is Alienware through and through. It's also, though far from cheap at $4,499, a competitor to boutique gaming rigs costing a grand or three more.

What you'll notice first about the Area-51 R2 is that it almost entirely abandons the square boxiness that even boundary-pushing systems—including many of Alienware's—have long embraced. The bottom sections of the company's new "triad" chassis' front and rear panels protrude considerably more than the top parts do, with the panels' long, sloping side edges defining a distinctive shape that, when viewed from the side, looks like a plump triangle. (Okay, the short panels or lopped-off points between the other three sides mean it's actually more hexagonal, but the contrast is stark enough that the overall impression is triangular.)

Though the case runs a bit deeper than a standard full-size tower (the dimensions are about 22.4 by 10.7 by 25.2 inches, HWD), Alienware took great pains to point out to us that you won't necessarily need more space to stash the computer—that the design ensures adequate airflow and cabling space with the system pushed back against a wall. The angle of the rear panel and the bottom-mounted power supply (for plugging in the power cable) mean that none of the cables will require the two or three inches of additional space between the system and the wall that most large-scale desktops do.

Pop open the case (two latches at the top rear let you remove the left- and right-side panels) and you'll discover that the interior of the Area-51 has been given no less consideration. Two intake fans (one mounted on the top front panel angled downward, one on the bottom front panel angled upward) aim their air at the CPU/memory area and the graphics cards. The wiring is impeccably tied, arranged, and routed to help maximize both neatness and airflow. Pull off the other side panel, and you'll discover bays for housing up to five drives (three 3.5-inch, two 2.5-inch).As is traditional for Alienware, there's a complex lighting scheme that's divided into nine separate areas (three lights on each of the side panels, two running down either side of the front panel, and the backlit, alien-head-shaped power button), which can be controlled individually or collectively. (More on this in a minute.)

Features

Alienware rarely skimps on the components, and such is the case here. The $1,699 base model comes with a six-core Intel Core i7-5820K CPU, though it has no SSD and a single AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card. Bargain hunters should seek out the $2,549 step-up model, which boasts 16GB of RAM, pairs its 2TB hard drive with a 128GB SSD, and has an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 card.

Our $4,499 flagship test configuration is loaded with a 3.5GHz Intel Core i7-5930K processor, mildly overclocked to 3.9GHz instead of 3.7GHz in Turbo Boost mode, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM for all your basic processing duties. If you insist on eight cores instead of six, Intel's Core i7-5960X is a $600 option.

Your games will be driven by three(yes-THREE!!!) 4GB GeForce GTX 980 graphics cards, though because they consume most of the space on the custom Alienware X99 motherboard used in the Area-51, you shouldn't plan to have any space left over for adding other cards. (Sandwiched between the three PCI Express x16 Gen 3 slots are a PCIe x4 and a PCIe x1 slot, but they're blocked by the GTX 980 cards.) If this triple SLI setup isn't enough for you, you can get a quad SLI config by ordering two dual-GPU GeForce Titan Z cards instead for $1,050 more.

Three heavenly graphics cards

As for storage, there's a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro solid-state drive for installing games and apps and a 4TB Western Digital 7,200rpm hard drive for storing all your other files. Though optical drives are becoming increasingly rare these days, there is a slot-loading BD-ROM/DVD±RW drive on the front panel, in case you should need it.

These components receive plenty of support, too. A self-contained liquid cooling system keeps the CPU at safe operating temperatures. The video cards are held in place by a specially designed rear cage unit that makes them easy to release without use of a screwdriver.

The power supply is another custom Alienware model, rated up to 1,500 watts (a good thing, given all those video cards). Connectivity is rife, with built-in 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and Killer NIC e2200 game-optimized Gigabit Ethernet.

Despite all the hardcore hardware you'll find in the Area-51, however, it's remarkably quiet while operating at full-bore. You can hear it (especially with the side panel removed), but we never found its noise as distracting as is frequently the case with high-end gaming desktops.

On the front panel you'll find two USB 3.0 ports, headphone and microphone jacks, and an SD card slot. The rear panel sports eight additional USB ports (four 3.0, four 2.0) and the usual assortment of audio ports, plus three DVI, three HDMI, and nine DisplayPort outputs on the three graphics cards.

A one-year warranty covers the Area-51 and the preinstalled operating system is, of course, Windows 8.1. You won't find a ton of bloatware out of the gate, but you will find Alienware's useful Command Center software. This is where you'll go to explore crucial hardware status data such as CPU and GPU temperatures and fan speeds; configure power and game profiles; tinker with overclocking; and more.

While we recommend investigating all the options (particularly the overclocking settings) carefully before doing too much, the Command Center is simple to navigate and use, and a fair amount of help is provided. We found it incredibly easy, for example, to customize the system's lighting scheme by making selections from a color wheel and linking them to the nine LED lighting areas, even instructing them to pulse or morph from one color to another.

Conclusion

We can wholeheartedly recommend the Alienware Area-51 R2 for gaming desktop fans. How can you not love performance that meets—and in a few instances exceeds—that of desktops that cost nearly twice as much? But as our CPU and productivity benchmarks show, it's important that you remember why you're buying a computer like this. If you stray too far from the gaming chores at which it excels, you might find that it doesn't quite live up to its hefty promise, at least at its stock clock speed (which, of course, you can tweak using the Command Center software).

On the bright side, though: When you look at the Area-51's one-of-a-kind case, what in the Milky Way are you going to think of other than gaming? This is a bad ass fucking gaming machine for all you gamers out there like me. Its like a match made in heaven.

Reference

http://www.computershopper.com/desktops/reviews/alienware-area-51-r2/(page)/3#review-body