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Alienware's Triangular Area-51 Re-Design With Tri-SLI GeForce GTX 980, Tested
MojoKid writes Dell's Alienware division recently released a radical redesign of their Area-51 gaming desktop. With 45-degree angled front and rear face plates that are designed to direct control and IO up toward the user, in addition to better directing cool airflow in, while warm airflow is directed up and away from the rear of the chassis, this triangular-shaped machine grabs your attention right away. In testing and benchmarks, the Area-51's new design enables top-end performance with thermal and acoustic profiles that are fairly impressive versus most high-end gaming PC systems. The chassis design is also pretty clean, modular and easily servicable. Base system pricing isn't too bad, starting at $1699 with the ability to dial things way up to an 8-core Haswell-E chip and triple GPU graphics from NVIDIA and AMD. The test system reviewed at HotHardware was powered by a six-core Core i7-5930K chip and three GeForce GTX 980 cards in SLI. As expected, it ripped through the benchmarks, though the price as configured and tested is significantly higher.
I think I had a space heater that looked just like that once.
looks more like a skewed protruded hexagon.
I only read Bennett Haselton posts. What garbage is this? We need a frequent contributor who has solved the ice crisis at burning man to test our PCs
I was missing my MojoKid/HotHarware clickbait.
Thanks!
Trolling is a art,
... when you can't immediately recognize a 60 degree angle by what it is ...
Build your own PC, don't be a clod.
This website continues to feature less and less interesting content and more and more click-bait and advertisements masquerading as articles.
I knew the end was near when Slashdot featured that one-sided Gamergate writeup that shat all over gamers, right around the same time all the other big media-controlled blogs were doing the same thing.
I've been reading and giving you page hits since 2003, but I'll be damned if I'll do it anymore.
Thank God I don't feel any need to buy anything that ugly. I'm not sure who are the most profoundly stupid about aesthetics here - Dell/Alienware or their customers. Buy here's a clue for those of you thinking of buying one - when you're tired of looking like an over-privileged tween who got hold of daddy's credit card, get a real case that's worth that kind of money. Simplicity and elegance win every time over ugly, overpriced bling.
That is all.
Buy a computer because you like the shape of the case. It's how you guarantee quality.
k-ching!
Hazel Benet is a faggot.
Despite the hype they make about the unencumbered airflow front and back, I seriously have my doubts on a system that has a pump-in fan so close to a pump-out fan.
I mean, look at the top triangle tip.
In their defense, there are 2 extra fans below, but some fluid dynamics graph would be nice for prooving good thermals exist there.
Motherboard:
Custom Alienware Area-51
Power Supply:
Custom Alienware 1500 Watt
These "Dell" minimal/cheap profit driven components worry me. As with all Dells, they skimp on quality.
Whatever the warranty is, add a day. Thats how long your PC will last before you need to pay over the top prices for "custom" replacement parts.
The only "good" parts in this package is the GFX cards and CPU. The rest is just cheap profit driven components. I mean, look at the stock ram without heatsinks, look at that "custom" motherboard. How cheap can you go lol.
Monitor is 8ms response time....... On a system marketed at "hardcore gaming". Only Dell!
Review (Advert) also lacks:
- Psu specs (number of 12v rails, efficiently, etc)
This product is such a gimmick. I feel sorry for those who are unable to build their own PC's with higher quality components, whilst saving 50% on the price.
Granted, this $4649 is for a system with three graphics cards, but only one CPU socket! That one CPU is a hex core, but still, if you're making a fantasy computer for the stupid rich that want "the best there is", you should have at least dual Xeons.
this triangular-shaped machine grabs your attention right away.
Looks ugly and boring to me.
Alienware is like paying some guy $1000 to solve a jigsaw puzzle for you, and then giving you the results in a nice presentation box.
Great for over-indulgent parents and lazy rich kids alike.
I liked the part about the triangular PC case.
Wow, there's so much jealous in this thread.
I am curious, for those who have owned Alienware since Dell acquired them - how is tech support? Are you thrown in with the consumer rabble, or so you get priority support like Dell provides with it's Precision workstations?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's the Pyramid, desktop edition!
Curently abouth 80% of components inside are of the shelf.
It is for gaming. approximately 0 games support dual processor setup. And practically most run on maximum 2 cores. Were your processor speed is more important than number of core. Dual processor is as necessary as a build in Ice Maker.
It looks like it was inspired by the ass-end of a 1983 Mercury Capri.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I find this piece of advertisement to be too article-shaped.
The tone is way to sober and objective. If you read carefully you'll find that some of the data are actually facts! I refuse to accept this kind of newsy look-at-me-writing-articles crap in Slashdot.
If we start accepting this kind of posts, soon we'll end up having news for nerds. Or even stuff that matters, god forbid.
Hardly. Mostly, everyone seems caught up on the price, as if they've never seen what a pre-built high end system costs. They add up the cost of the components, not including the ones they have lying around, and figure that anything that costs more is silly. If you ever become successful enough that you value you time, you'll realize that pre-built is the only way to go. Until then, you'll simply be jealous of those of us who can check the boxes for what we want in 15 minutes and have Dell ship us a working machine, then go spend a couple hours extra consulting to cover the cost of all that integration. We'll be gaming while you guys are still trying to build. So, yes - jealous.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm delighted to learn that a company has taken PC's from the era of the box shape. It's akin to the invention of the metal guitar. Alienware is WAY too expensive for the speeds they offer but this is real innovation and they deserve many kudos.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Link wasn't to Dice.com. Not interested.
Thank you for having the guts to try something new and different.
It's so tiresome to always have Apple be the one that experiments with design, followed by everyone else copying whatever Apple did whether or not it was a good idea. When Apple introduced their gumdrop iMacs, everything else went translucent. Microwaves. Clothes irons. It was absurd.
eg: We recently got a bunch of PCs, and they included mice copied from Apple's absurdly-flat mighty mouse or whatever they call it. Had to throw the damn things out cause they were unusable. Apple should be barred from designing mice.
it's like owning a fake rolex.
You sound like an 11 year old Justin Bieber fan.
Somebody not liking something you like does not make them jealous.
Grow the fuck up and get in the real world.
Don't like my comment? you must be jealous ;)
Looking at those pictures I actually really like that case layout. While it may not offer much over any other high end case it looks different and premium and fits well into the high end case market (Look at the stuff In-Win is doing for non-traditional case designs). I especially like the predone placement of the HDD's on the opposite door for easy access. If it was ATX compatible I would consider buying just the case to put my own gear in. That said it'll be a cold day when Dell starts selling components like that.
That said most gamer's will avoid this since it looks to be a proprietary motherboard design and a questionable white box PSU (If Dell could confirm its OEM for the power supply, such as using a base design from Seasonic that would go a ways for that).
Those are not 45 degree angles.
It will happen.
What sort of BS is that? You can get a 6 core 16GB system for ~$800 on Amazon as a base system. Look a bit further and you can find places that do custom builts (which end up being more expensive than going bare bones and sourcing all the parts yourself) and readily get a much better "base system" for $1699. And let's not forget that the review is for the $4649 customized system, at which point you can readily get a much better custom system for less. Hell, look at Amazon and you see three GTK 980s will cost you $1710, meaning that there's over $1,000 room to spare over even the Alienware's "Base system" to really flex out the system in lots of ways.
Seriously, stuff like this tends to disgust me precisely because it warps the perception of what even a mediocre system should cost. It's little wonder OEMs for ages were selling 512MB systems as "Base" and anything in even the 2GB range cost a thousand more. The one big thing Windows Vista did, regardless of its intention, was to radically increase the "Base" system to something actually decent. To that end, I'm glad that 8 and 16GB systems are finally starting to be more of a "Base" system. Although I'm still mystified why there's such a massive disparage on the graphics card performance between low end and high end systems when it all seems based upon just how many graphical cores there are.
*shrug*
That's why I came in this thread - one of the reasons I like building my own machines is the complete lack of bloatware. How are Alienware machines in that regard, since they're controlled by Dell are they packed with useless shit I don't want or need? Is it finally time for me to order something pre-built, or is the landscape still basically the same?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Shame that the case looks like it's made from the plastic used in $10 cases. Instead of ABS, or metal or something that wont break by looking at it sideways.
(Sits down at new uber-Alienware.)
"Jimmy, why aren't you doing anything?"
"All the current MMOs suck. The only fun ones are ancient and boring, like WoW, or dead, like City of Heroes."
"There will be a CoH clone soon."
"Maybe. In two years. Everything now is a god damned action pew pew MMO with no soul. Ever feel alone in a crowd of a few dozen other players? Somehow these fuckers manage it with trivial soloability."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"With 45-degree angled front and rear face plates, that are designed to direct control and IO up toward the user, in addition to better directing cool airflow in, while backside warm airflow is directed up and away from the rear of the chassis, this machine grabs your attention right away. There's nothing else like it on the market currently. Alienware might call it Triad, but we'd actually call it pretty bad-ass.
I would definently buy this gaming dektop pc, a good a a viable design , and a performance that is really uncomparable with other products.
I know that my league of legends match would work perfectly ,no lags,no screen freezing, it's a good price for a future investment.
Tractari Auto Iasi
Its nice but as far as I can tell, there's literally no game out or coming that will stretch one 980GTX, let alone 3, so why do/buy this?