Alienware Area-51 R5 (2018) Review: Liquid Cooled GPUs, Skylake-X Firepower

Premium gaming is all about that premium eye-candy. It is difficult to find a more immersive experience than what an ultrawide, curved monitor delivers without jumping into VR.


Alienware’s 34” curved gaming monitor features an expansive 21:9 3440x1440 resolution IPS display with a 1900R curve to almost perfectly fill your peripheral vision. All told, some games almost end up feeling too wide at first, but we quickly became accustomed to the panoramic field of view. It’s hard to go back to a traditional 16:9 display at this point.


Performance-wise, the Alienware 34” is no slouch either. Out of the box, it supports a 100Hz refresh rate and NVIDIA’s G-Sync for silky smooth gaming experiences. G-Sync, and AMD’s FreeSync for that matter, is still one of those technologies that everyone needs to sit with for a while to fully appreciate. There’s simply no judder which typically makes framerate drops unbearable.


That’s not all, however, as the panel also has a preset 120Hz overclock for even more responsiveness in fast-action games. We will advise, however, to keep the response time set to Normal. The Fast and Super Fast options introduced an unsightly halo ghosting effect around moving onscreen objects. The response rate is already pretty good at 4ms with Normal so we did not find much reason to adjust it.


Quality-wise, the panel’s color representation is solid without being over-saturated. Running testufo.com’s motion tests did not reveal any concerns apart from the aforementioned ghosting in Fast response time modes. There is some very mild lighting irregularity at the edges of the panel on all sides, but that is being nit-picky and did not bother us in regular use. Uniformity otherwise is excellent. The display was thankfully also free of dead pixels which can be far more irritating.


Truly, the Alienware 34” is a worthy match for our fully liquid-cooled Area-51, so let’s move along and see how it performs…