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.

Comments

It's a space heater.

[Patricia]

I think I had a space heater that looked just like that once.

Re:It's a space heater.

[wolrahnaes]

I may be mistaken on my understanding of heat and efficiency, but I believe that if you have electric heat in your home the "waste" heat from a computer costs the same per preferred unit of heat.

If gas is cheaper than electricity for you like it is for me that doesn't really help as much, but if you have electric heat you may as well run Folding/SETI/Bitcoin/whatever during the cold season.

Dumb

[Russ1642]

Buy a computer because you like the shape of the case. It's how you guarantee quality.

Odd thermal dynamics

[cloud.pt]

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.

Re:Odd thermal dynamics

[cloud.pt]

Oh, nevermind, it actually makes sense because the top fans are supposed to heat the fluid circuit, which renders my point of air traveling throughout the case moot.

Nice Advert, shame about the detail

[danknight48]

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.

Re:Nice Advert, shame about the detail

[paysonwelch]

I'm going to disagree with you, on the internet. Let it begin. Dell will actually vary their product quality based on the intended use. I stay away from Inspiron and Latitude lines. I will buy a precision machine (both desktop or mobile) but mostly I use their server hardware and it runs like a workhorse with no issues. I know people who are still running 2950 gen I's with no issues (even though they should upgrade). If a user is paying a premium price it's highly possible that Alienware has quality components but I don't have any info on this. I agree that it's mostly marketing hype (similar to Apple) but to just label everything Dell makes as cheap is incorrect.

$4649 as configured?

[Dr. Spork]

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.

Re:$4649 as configured?

[Overzeetop]

Except that Xeons cost nearly double the money for equivalent processing power. Their only real advantage is the ability to n-gang them. You may as well step up to the 5960 with 8 cores (33% more cores for - you guessed it - double the cost, though an extra $500 wouldn't have busted the bank). The knee in the curve is just too steep.

It is a shame that you can't get a dual i7 board with all the work done in software (binding a process to a particular CPU, so that any given process is limited to the resources of a single CPU, but you can run both simultaneously if you have multiple processes running). But that would cut into Intel's profit margins, so we won't see that ever happening.

Re:Is this a post or an ad?

[cloud.pt]

This is Slashsdot mate, not PhD Comics. Gaming is also geeky, and if you don't know and/or crave Alienware, I have good (bad) news for you... You need to get out of the lab more often :D

Re:Fuck it, I'm out

[u38cg]

Actually, it's about ethics in games journalism.

So much jealous

[Overzeetop]

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?

Re:What a nice ad...

[oodaloop]

Some of us will gladly pay to avoid four hours of frustration, followed by 6 more unplanned hours of troubleshooting. Do you change your own oil in your car? Make your own peanut butter? Bake your own bread? Build your own furniture? Don't you know how much money you could be saving by doing all these things yourself?!?

Too newsy

[Thanshin]

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.