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Alienware's Triangular Area-51 Re-Design With Tri-SLI GeForce GTX 980, Tested

Posted by timothy on from the where-are-you-priorities dept.

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.

1 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Nice Advert, shame about the detail by danknight48 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.