Video Review: Alienware Area 51 (2015) Gaming PC, An Equilateral Beast
Alienware's new Area 51 gaming desktop PC arrived late last year and it certainly turned heads, including ours, due to its somewhat radical design. Sure, we've seen some wild chassis designs out of Dell's Alienware gaming PC division in the past, but their new, redesigned Area 51 machine really broke the mold. In fact, if you're stuck on the old gray or black box design of most legacy systems, the "Triad" chassis of the new Area 51 may be too much of a departure for you to wrap your head around. We think, with a little investigation into the mechanical engineering and simple physics of the design, however, the intrinsic advantages are plain to see.
For starters, the front and rear IO options, optical drive and various features of the system are facing up and angled toward the user, but that's just a simple, novel advantage of its unique case design. However, the new Area 51 also has a thermal trick or two up its sleeve with a natural air gap that exists behind the chassis, directing warm airflow up and away from the system, while cool air is pulled in from the front.
And then of course, there's Alienware's 1500 power supply that supplies juice to a loaded-for-bear configuration of the latest technologies in our test system, like an Intel 6-core Haswell-E Core i7-5930K unlocked processor, three NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Maxwell graphics cards in Tri-SLI, and a nimble 256GB Samsung SSD 850 Pro Solid State Drive, along with 16GB of DDR4 2133MHz memory and a big hard drive for additional storage.
To say this system is decked out to offer a beating in the benchmarks, would be an understatement. However, it's how all those killer components are configured inside this wild-looking chassis, that makes Alienware's new out-of-this-world gaming PC so special. Have a look for yourself in our just-launched video review, right after the break here, and then head on over to the full review for all the benchmark numbers and analysis...
To say this system is decked out to offer a beating in the benchmarks, would be an understatement. However, it's how all those killer components are configured inside this wild-looking chassis, that makes Alienware's new out-of-this-world gaming PC so special. Have a look for yourself in our just-launched video review, right after the break here, and then head on over to the full review for all the benchmark numbers and analysis...
And again, make sure you stop by and check out our full review with all our testing analysis and additional coverage, right here.
