Alienware Area-51 7500 Gaming System

Interior Design, Layout & Construction Inspect the Alien's Guts

Getting inside the Area-51 7500 is an easy task thanks to its tool-less design. Removing each side panel is as simple as pulling up a release lever and then pulling off the panel. Once we removed the side panel, we were impressed by the clean and simple layout inside the Area-51 7500. What impressed us more, though, was how obvious the level of engineering became when we took a closer look at the side panel. In the first picture below, take a look at the small white box that is below the fan. The fan and AlienFX LEDs on that panel get power once that makes contact with a similar box on the bottom of the case. No cables are directly attached from the panel to the power supply. It's a slick design.

As you can see, cables are tucked away and folded to achieve that tidy, crisp look we've all come to expect from high-end machines. In the first picture below, you can see that the hard drive cage features drive rails, which means you can easily remove those Western Digital Raptors if you need or want to. Additionally, the 5.25" bays boast a custom tool-less installation system that allows for quick removal/installation. The second picture below shows a close-up of the liquid cooling system used to cool the quad core processor. According to Alienware, the "high-performance liquid cooling system uses a high-flow, compact pump to circulate a thermally conductive liquid though a closed-loop system to remove heat from the processor and reject it to the ambient air flowing through a liquid-to-air heat exchanger." This means that you get a quietly cooled processor.

What would a high-end PC be without the latest and greatest video cards? It wouldn't be much to brag about, right? Well, no worries here. The picture below highlights the presence of not one but two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX video cards in SLI mode. It doesn't get much later and greater than that right now. Considering the size of those cards, it's a good thing the Alienware P2 chassis is an extended ATX case. You can see that the cards actually go beyond the motherboard.

All of these top-notch components produce a lot of heat and therefore need to be cooled. This job is handled by the four fans in the case. You've already seen the left side panel's fan and the rear fan that helps dispel the CPU's liquid cooling system's heat. You can see in the picture below that the front of the case also features a 120mm fan that is totally free from obstruction. The fourth fan is found on the right side of the case and helps pull heat away from the hard drives.

Overall, Alienware does a good job on the Area-51 7500's interior layout and construction. We found no major problems to fault Alienware on. Just like the exterior, the quality is top-notch.